Artanis #3: Mixed signals on go-to-market
This month, we hit 4 customers and need your help to connect us to AI-ready startups!
Artanis: helping businesses build AI that actually works
🙋 Ways you can help: save us from doing cold outreach! 🙋
First, a huge thanks to everyone who responded to last month's call on intros (see bottom of this email for shout-outs). We're still looking to schedule more calls to learn about how startups/SMEs approach AI projects, with companies roughly meeting the following profile:
They're already building AI or ML-based features
They haven't got an AI or ML PhD on the founding team
They have some funding or revenue already
Please let us know if you can connect us to companies meeting some of these criteria.
📉 Progress in June - getting to 4 customers 📈
First a reminder that our current focus is market risk: will startups pay for AI / ML without hiring an in-house team? Our next major milestone for de-risking this is 10 paying customers.
Our goal for June was to grow to 4 paying customers. By some miraculous luck, rather than things going to plan, we just about scraped our way there! This may be the only time in Artanis history that we meet our target two months in a row...
Primary metric: 4 paying customers (+2 since May)
Monthly revenue (secondary): £23k (+£9k since May)
Monthly cost (secondary): 121 hours building AI for clients (+20 since May)
Why was this lucky? Our go-to-market plan A hasn't yet yielded any customers. Instead, Sam had a week where he took about 40 calls, none of which led to a deal. However, a new tenant in our workspace overheard and approached to say they've just raised, they're looking to build out their AI, and it sounds like we're obsessed with this. One thing led to another, and we had a deal!
🕵️ Challenges - mixed signals on go-to-market 🕵️
Our go-to-market plan A is taking longer than we'd hoped. We spoke with ~60 "allies", hoping they would connect us with potential customers. These initial calls yielded about 10 relevant leads. Some of these may convert to new customers in July, but we've not yet seen a concrete success story.
Some startups hiring their first AI engineer have a hard red-line that this must be a permanent employee, as they may build a team around this first hire. Building a team seems more important to them than getting their AI built quickly and reliably. They'd rather spend months struggling to find the right person than consider alternatives, such as us!
Our first customer has signed a 6-month extension, which is great news! However, our prior was they'd mostly want us to maintain/improve existing functionality. Instead, their roadmap involves more intense building than expected. We're being fairly compensated, but if other customers want similarly intense long-term deals then we will need to rethink whether we can support 10 customers as a 2-person team.
🎯 Goal for July - grow to 5 customers 🎯
July's goal is growing from 4 to 5 customers. We're hoping to retain our 4 current customers and acquire at least 1 new customer.
We'll keep going with our "allies" GTM for another month. While it's not yet led to a new customer, it's showing promise with several fairly well-qualified leads. We're also having fun talking with people we know about Artanis and, to be honest, we're more likely to succeed with a GTM strategy that we enjoy. We therefore want to fully rule it out before moving onto a more cold outbound strategy.
🔬 How to build AI that actually works: our new playbook 🔬
We've started writing a playbook on building AI that works accurately and reliably. The first post covers how to break a high-level problem down into smaller steps. Most of these steps should be solved with reliable functions, not AI, in order to make the AI problem smaller and easier to solve.
To break the problem down well, you must understand the real-world system (not the computer system) that generates the data. Crucially, this involves spending a lot of time talking to the humans who are close to the data!
Unfortunately, this won't be as concise as "5 sick use cases of ChatGPT!!". Building AI that actually works is hard and can't be boiled down to a 3-minute read. But if you're keen to learn more, then please read on - we're aiming for one new monthly post over the next 6 months.
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Huge list this week, big thanks again for everyone who responded to the last call to arms!
Furkan E - for being this month's top intro hero, and the great shout on using https://spiky.ai
Sophia R - for the enthusiastic referral to other founders and being an A++ customer!
Nathan C - for the shout-out on Fiverr and intro to Greg
Kurt H - for a couple of great intros to Rishab and Richard
Richard L - for flagging Founders Factory to us
Dan N - for connecting us to Sergey, was a very interesting convo!
Patrick M - for firing off quite a few intros for us
Camilla D - for opening us up to your portfolio cos
Jayshan R - for linking us with Pavir
Will H - for the intro to Jack
Andrew J - for another fun catch-up (and some good intros ofc)
Arnaud - for connecting us to Matis
Ruchni V - for connecting us with Stephanie (and giving me a laugh with never taking "no")
Bertie V - for several solid plugs, and having the attention to watch our 3-minute video ;)
Peter M - for the intro to Charles
Ryan ON - for the good craic, always, and the connection to Patrick
Ludivine C - for the solid connections to Talip & Abs
James Stewart - for a very serendipitous lead with John
Thanks,
Sam & Yousef