Helping companies build AI that actually works.

🙋 Ways you can help - intros to operational leaders 🙋
We’d like to speak with people with the following profile:

1/ Operational role in their business e.g. COO, Director of Operations
2/ The business has >£10m annual revenue
3/ They’re looking to use AI to improve the efficiency of manual processes

Please get in touch if you know anyone who fits the bill!

📉 Progress in August - slowing down 📈
Our metrics from August are…

Method customers: 2 (-)
Total customers: 3 (-1)
Monthly Revenue: £27k (-£29k)
Team Size: 5 (-)

The highlight was signing a new customer. They’re a strong fit for our thesis around using AI to improve operational efficiency, and we’ve made a good start to our pilot.

However, we missed our growth target. This was partly due to churn from a long-term customer, for reasons outside our control. However, we also failed to convert one of our pilots into a continuation deal. The AI we developed wasn’t critical enough to their business to make it worth further investment.

We set targets each month to force ourselves to evaluate strategy if we miss them. This is the third month in a row that we’ve not met our targets. While August is usually slow, there are underlying problems we need to address. We’re now going to change direction more quickly.

🧐 Why are we revising our strategy? 🧐
It’s been nearly six months since we raised. In some ways, it’s been a great six months! We’ve built a strong founding team that’s working well together and learned a lot about delivering AI projects. Unusually, we’ve done this without spending any of our capital due to high revenue.

However, we’ve been too cautious. We’ve been unwilling to let go of consulting revenues and have avoided taking the risk of productising. While being cash generative is nice, we raised VC funding so that we could take risks instead. We need to do so more aggressively going forward.

We’ve also had three months of missed targets in a row. Our strategy of i) acquiring customers for AI consulting projects, then ii) converting them to longer-term partnerships, hasn’t been leading to growth.

The main issue has been post-pilot churn. This was partly expectation misalignment: some customers were only looking for a one-off project, followed by a handover. Also, our initial consulting customers were largely startups whose business models weren’t yet stable.

Another issue has been slow distribution. We positioned ourselves as a service, which was hard to sell outbound. Service buying decisions are usually made via referral or, for bigger companies, from a whitelist of known providers.

🏹 Goal for September - confirm new strategy & relaunch 🏹
Our top priority is setting a new strategy to address the problems above. We know that it will broadly involve focusing more on our AI platform and longer term deals, rather than one-off projects. But we’re in the process of ironing out the details, so it’s too soon to set target metrics. We’ll do that in the next update!

🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks for August go to:

Katie - for some great sessions
Finn W - for being proactive with intros
Rod F - for a very thoughtful response
Helene - for the team photos
Andy F - a strong start and complementary beer

En Taro Tassadar,
Artanis Team