Artanis #15: Method(ology) to the madness
Helping companies build AI that actually works. Previous updates at https://artanis.ai
🙋 Ways you can help - operational directors 🙋
We’re doing another round of market research. We’d like to meet with COOs/Ops Directors at scaling businesses who’re tasked with resolving operational bottlenecks. Please get in touch if you know anyone who fits this profile!
🔬 Focusing on Methodology 🔬
June was the first month with the full-time team in place, so we had our first offsite!
The main outcome was defining our “product” as our methodology for delivering AI projects, rather than just software. We currently spend a lot of our time ensuring customer success by being forward-deployed. We’ve already identified one area that can be productised - labelling - but there are also other points in the development process to productise.
Continuing to be forward-deployed enables us to learn as much as we can about what matters: building a repeatable methodology for delivering AI projects - and with each project, we’re able to deliver that more effectively.
The market norm is still that money goes into flashy AI demos that make it into a press release, but not into production. We have lots of experience getting AI projects into production, and this methodology is a major market need. Going forward, we’ll put more time into documenting our methodology internally and publishing more content externally.
📉 Progress in June - evening out 📈
Our metrics from June are…
Method customers: 1 (-)
Total customers: 5 (-)
Monthly Revenue: £76.1k (+£22.9k)
Team Size (proxy for cost): 5 (-)
We changed our primary metric during the offsite, when we decided “SaaS” customers wasn’t the right focus. Instead, we wanted to focus on customers who are following our methodology to monitor their AI in production. We now define “Method customers” as those with AI deployed in production and following our methodology to maintain it.
This is quite a harsh metric. At this stage, we’d rather err on the side of being too harsh with our metrics, as it’s important to get the fundamentals right before scaling.
Getting through some pilots has still been slower than we’d hoped. However, we made good progress on one that we’re optimistic will become a great case study for us.
🏹 Goal for July 🏹
We’re rolling over our goal from June, to grow from 1 to 2 “Method Customers”. We feel very close with a couple of pilots, but are aware it’s now two months running, having missed a similar target. We’re going to give it another month before re-evaluating whether we’re doing something wrong.
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks for June go to:
Laura R - for pulling together a great offsite
Zach / Aash / Maurice - for providing website feedback
Cait C - for the intro, or at least the attempt!
Dom S - for being a class act
Rawan A and Adam D - for the intros
Alamin S - for hosting our lightning talk
Hannah G + Kassi R - for the heroic data labelling efforts
Andrew M - for bringing great energy in your first month
En Taro Tassadar,
Artanis Team