Artanis #1: Here we go again!
Artanis helps businesses effortlessly build effective AI features directly in Slack!
Artanis: helping businesses build AI that actually works
🧐 What's this email about? 🧐
This is the first monthly email update for Artanis, our new startup! Artanis is an automated AI engineer. It lives in your Slack channel and builds AI-powered features for you, so you no longer have to spend hundreds of thousands to build AI that actually works. If this doesn't make sense to you, you're not alone - check out our 3-minute explainer video here.
Our mission is to make reliable AI-powered features accessible to all businesses. Imagine being a cafe in the 90s: big tech companies were hiring expensive teams to build websites, but this was way out of your price range. Fast forward to today, and every cafe can now launch a website with Squarespace. We want to make AI just as accessible as websites are today.
🙋 Ways you can help - keep this update relevant 🙋
We've added you because you've expressed interest in the new startup. If that's still the case, then please add sam@artanis.ai and yousef@artanis.ai to your contacts. This will help future updates avoid your spam folder. If you don't want these updates, just let us know and we'll take you off the list. :)
🔬 Who's building this automated AI engineer? 🔬
Artanis has two co-founders: Yousef and Sam. Rather than giving bios, we thought it would be fun to point out some strikingly similar shared experiences:
We both founded "AI for fitness" startups prior to Artanis. Despite raising VC backing, both startups failed. We made the same first-time founder mistakes, most importantly picking a market we didn't understand (fitness) rather than our real expertise (AI). Luckily, we share a masochistic streak that's made having another try irresistible.
Prior to startup life, we both did PhDs - Yousef's PhD was in CS and Sam's was in AI. We both enjoyed the autonomy of research, but wanted to pursue something with more tangible impact. In retrospect, it's pretty crazy that two CS/AI PhDs decided to found fitness startups.
We share common values and ways of working. Most importantly, we focus on telling the truth and doing the right thing, then letting the outcomes sort themselves out. Sometimes easier said than done!
🎯 What's our next major milestone? 🎯
Our next major milestone is 10 paying customers and we're not yet planning beyond that. We don't need a fully scalable self-serve product to get there. Instead we'll be going to market with a service-based approach, where we build a lot of the AI for customers ourselves, and build tools to speed this up behind the scenes.
Each month, we're going to report on:
Primary metric: # of paying customers.
Secondary: Revenue (£). This stops us from cheating by cutting prices too low.
Secondary: Cost (hours building AI for customers). This stops us from cheating by hiring to meet demand - we want to build a product, not a consultancy.
📉 Goals for May 📉
Each update, we'll state a goal for the next month. If we miss this goal, we have to consider pivoting and justify the decision either way. For example: we may miss a monthly sales goal because Sam was sick for 2 weeks. In this case, we wouldn't necessarily need to pivot.
Our goal for May is 2 paying customers. That's it!
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Irfan R - for making a great connection for us, despite Sam voicing some "blunt" views
Ben L & Alister R - for the opportunity to get involved in your new venture
Thanks,
Yousef & Sam
