Artanis #14: Rocketship, or snail?
Helping companies build AI that actually works. Previous updates at https://artanis.ai
🙋 Ways you can help - feedback on our new website! 🙋
We’ve made a big change to our website at https://artanis.ai. Primarily, it now features more information about who we are and what we do, with fewer Starcraft references. We expect visitors to have some referral already, rather than be cold, so it’s designed for info rather than conversion. We’d appreciate any reviewers!
📉 Progress in May - a bit slower 📈
Our metrics from May are…
SaaS customers: 1 (unchanged)
Total customers: 5 (unchanged)
Monthly Revenue: £53.2k (-£18.8k)
Team Size (proxy for cost): 5 (unchanged)
We didn’t hit our growth target in May for two reasons:
We’ve been slower to get through the pilot phase with a couple of customers than we’d hoped. This delays revenue, as we report invoiced rather than contracted revenue.
At our stage, we’re still in “figuring it out” mode, particularly regarding customer profile. Our main strategic goal is to find a scalable business model, rather than grow revenue. While in this phase, it’s important to remain lean & robust to changes. We’ve written about how the pre-PMF startup should not be a rocketship, but a snail.
We’re no longer sure that getting customers onto our SaaS platform is the right metric. We don’t want to do this at the expense of delivering value to customers from AI. At this stage, it’s more important to develop our methodology. Methodology isn’t just technical and we have more to learn about other aspects, like stakeholder alignment.
For example: rushing a customer onto our platform before we have access to their data wouldn’t add any value. Instead, it’s better to focus on getting access to their data first. We’d taken this as a given when working with startups, but it’s harder when working with bigger companies.
🔬 Two Types of Customers 🔬
After some customer discovery work, we’ve found two broad profiles of businesses wanting to do AI projects:
“Product AI”. These are usually startups whose entire business is a new AI product. Getting their AI to work is a top-of-mind problem, because they don’t have a business otherwise! They’re usually venture-backed and don’t yet have product-market fit.
“Operational AI”. These are established businesses wanting AI to improve margins on existing operations. Getting their AI to work is a less pressing problem, as it’s not core to their business. However, they have more stable processes and business models which make for better long-term customers.
Due to our network, most of our customers so far have fallen into the “Product AI” bucket. They enabled us to develop our methodology quickly and were highly engaged. However, we’re starting to work on more “Operational AI” projects, and it could be a big longer-term opportunity.
🤔 Challenges - Enterprise Software Advice 🤔
We’re starting to work with some bigger customers, rather than just startups. While we’re strong on the technical side, we’re finding stakeholder alignment more challenging. It would be great to hear from other founders, or forward-deployed engineers, who’ve integrated new software into enterprise environments for advice.
🏹 Goal for June 🏹
Our current goal is to get another “Operational AI” customer into production. We have one particularly promising customer that’s still in pilot. If we succeed, this will take us from 1 to 2 on Operational AI customers using our methodology.
We’re also doing an offsite in June, which may lead to a change in strategy/metrics. It’ll be our first offsite with a full team, so everything is on the table for that!
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks for May go to:
Dhruv S - for your transparency
Srecko - you know why
Geordie - for the referrals
Anna W - responding to our last call for help
Jonny, Chris & Anna - for being outstanding humans
Lloyd H - for the surprise gift!
En Taro Tassadar,
Artanis Team