Artanis #2: First revenue
We're seeking connections with startups in AI/ML as we aim to grow our customer base and tackle challenges!
Artanis: helping businesses build AI that actually works
🙋 Ways you can help: meeting companies building in AI / ML 🙋
We want to improve our understanding of how startups/SMEs approach AI and ML projects. We've got a lot more to learn about the market; setting up conversations is the fastest way. Our ideal profile is:
They're already building AI or ML features
Their founding team may include software engineers, but aren't AI experts
They haven't yet hired an ML team in-house
They have some revenue or funding already
Please get in touch if you know any companies meeting some of these criteria.
🔬 How will an automated ML engineer work?🔬
We got this question a lot in May, so we've put together a 3-minute vision video for our eventual product. If that doesn't sell it, it also features AI, bad jokes and our semi-professional voice acting! Please give it a watch and let us know what you think.
📉 Progress in May 📈
Our current focus is market risk: will companies pay to outsource their AI/ML? In May, we went to market as a service. If customers signed up, we built their AI ourselves i.e. as consultants.
Our main goal was 2 paying customers. Pleased to say we managed that, so we don't have to chalk up a failed target in our first month as a company!
Primary metric: 2 paying customers ✅ (+1 on paid waitlist)
Revenue (secondary): £14k on a cash-flow basis
Cost (secondary): 101 hours building AI for customers (we want to keep this below 160)
🕵️ Challenges 🕵️
May wasn't all plain sailing - we faced some challenges with going to market:
Many people believe software engineers and ML engineers are fungible. It's a very different skillset, which seems similar because they both write code. We haven't yet found a concise way to communicate the risks of software engineers trying to implement ML projects.
We haven't found a repeatable channel for getting in front of our target customer, both of May's customers came inbound. While this shortens the sales cycle, inbound is not repeatable.
A previous (pre-Artanis) client didn't convert to a longer-term deal, as they still hadn't launched the AI we built. We need to be mindful that building AI that isn't core to a company's value prop is more likely to lead to churn.
🎯 Goals for June 🎯
June's goal is to grow from 2 to 4 customers - we're still concerned about market risk and our milestone for de-risking is 10 customers.
Plan A is outbound warm via our networks (see above: ways you can help). We want to set up calls with people who know/trust us ("allies"), so we can i) collect feedback on Artanis and ii) get referrals to potential customers. We're first aiming for ~50 calls with "allies" and if we can't get 10 decent referrals, we'll change to a different strategy such as cold outbound.
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Sophia R - for being a great first customer
Ashley H & Callum N - for a quick process
Tom H - for being May's intro GOAT (and the best commercial data scientist in the UK)
Samatha W - for the inspirational source material for our demo video
Antoine N - for connecting us to Dr. Vivie
Thanks,
Yousef & Sam