Artanis #5: First SaaS customer, but we're overstretched
We're launching our new SaaS product and signed our first customer, but we're feeling overstretched!
Artanis: helping businesses build AI that actually works
🔬 New SaaS product - explainer video 🔬
We've put together a 3-minute explainer video for our new SaaS product. It's a bit rough, but hopefully gets the point across. Let us know what you think!
🙋 Ways you can help: connecting with non-technical founders 🙋
We're looking to meet more people that match the following profile:
Non-technical founder building an AI product using their domain expertise e.g. in health, education, finance
Their startup is small, 1-5 people
They've raised little or no funding, so hiring more engineers is a big risk
Please get in touch if you know anyone who may meet these criteria
📉 Progress in July - first SaaS customer 📈
We signed up customer #1 for our SaaS product! They've asked to remain anonymous, so we'll refer to them as "#1".
#1 has commercial experience in the football sector. They've found an opportunity to use AI to automatically highlight clips from videos of lower-league games. However, they haven't raised funding and don't have a technical co-founder. They tried using ChatGPT and other no-code tools, but none could analyse video accurately. After much trying, they felt out of options to build their AI. When we told them Artanis would be just £1k/month, they were keen to sign up so we launched early for them!
We should also report on our usual metrics. It's getting messy between service work and the nascent SaaS product, so we need to think about how to report going forward...
Primary metric: 6 customers (+1 since July)
-> of which SaaS: 1 customer
Monthly revenue (secondary): £22k (+£1.5k)
-> of which SaaS: £1k
Monthly cost (secondary): 163 hours building AI for clients (+27)
-> less relevant for SaaS
🕵️ Challenges - we're overstretched 🕵️
August was an intense month. We delivered for 5 service customers, alongside building for our first SaaS customer. We needed to work late shifts/weekends to ensure we didn't drop the ball, which didn't feel sustainable. We got several warnings that we wouldn't be able to reach 10 customers, on a team of 2, while going to market as a service. For those who tried to warn us: we were wrong and you were right!
Relatedly, another challenge was losing a customer for the first time. It wasn't dramatic - they just repeatedly didn't pay their first invoice in time. We decided to cancel the project which wasn't nice, but made a bit easier by feeling overstretched.
🎯 Goal for September - stay at 1 SaaS customer 🎯
Hang on, aren't startups meant to grow? Aren't we meant to be a rocketship?!
We take burnout risk seriously. Startups are a long game, so sustainable working is important and we don't want a repeat of August. We're going to take our foot off the gas in September, and prioritise doing a good job for existing customers.
We have two routes for staying at 1 SaaS customer. We can either retain #1 by making the product work well for them, or sign up a second customer. We'd grow if we managed to do both, but don't want to hold ourselves to that.
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks again to everyone below.
Sivesh S - for taking us onto the Balderton program
Rod F - a very overdue shout-out for several intros!
Mounir M & Emma B - for a very interesting technical project
Andy R & Matt C - for scouting a nice deal for us this month
Adam D - for the intro to Jason, despite some blunt feedback from us...
Alex H & Kieran - for warning us, it eventually got through!
Thanks,
Sam & Yousef