Artanis #7: The drawing board, go back to we must
We're reflecting on our offsite and grappling with Artanis' future while retaining service customers.
Artanis: helping entrepreneurs build AI that actually works
🙋 Ways you can help: tips for running an offsite 🙋
We're doing our first offsite this week, to have a reset and review our longer-term vision for Artanis. There's only two of us, so it'll be very romantic. Anyway, let us know if you've got tips from past experiences with offsites/awaydays.
📉 Progress in October - 📈
In October, we put our nascent product on ice and set a goal to retain 3 service customers.
Primary metric: 4 customers (unchanged since September)
Monthly revenue: £27k (+£15k)
Monthly cost: 150 hours building AI for clients (+23)
We also set aside time to reflect on the six months since we started. We had an initial goal of getting to 10 customers as a service before making a serious effort to productise. We assumed that customers would each start with an initial high-intensity build phase, followed by lower-intensity maintenance deals after that. This would have enabled getting to 10 on a small team, as most customers would be on maintenance contracts.
Things didn't work out this way. Customers who finished the pilot wanted to continue at the same intensity, usually to build new models or features around the existing model. This was good for revenue, but we capped out more quickly than expected on capacity. By July, servicing 4 customers was close to a full-time job, then August tipped us over the edge. Like this one, we're going to write up some more detailed learnings in November.
🎯 Goal for November - retain 3 service customers and come up with a new plan 🎯
We're wrestling with the right vision for Artanis. When we first started the company, we were pretty set on working toward something scalable. However, we've been enjoying the services over the past six months and it's been nice to have a tangible impact this quickly. We also haven't come up with many compelling product ideas yet - we feel we still learn something from each new project.
We've set aside some time for an offsite to come up with a revised vision. That's the main goal for next month, rather than a growth target. If we can end November with 3 happy service customers and a new plan that we've got conviction in, that'll be a good month.
🔬 How to build AI that actually works: final post 🔬
We've written the final post in our playbook for building AI that works reliably. This post covers how to monitor your model after launching, cautioning that your data will "drift" over time away from the data you initially fit the model with. The particular topics we cover are:
Needing to keep labelling a sample of data after launching
Smartly tilting that sample towards likely failure cases, but...
NOT being too smart for your own good with fully automated monitoring
NOT chasing the holy grail of having users monitor for you
This series of posts provides a high-level playbook for those without a deep AI background to build better systems. It's been fun to write, so we're going to keep writing posts on related topics. Do let us know if there are any AI issues you'd like us to write about!
🕵️ Challenges - the risks of "building in public" 🕵️
After we published the last update, we got a call from a potential customer who we'd progressed to drafting a contract with. They were worried about our uncertainty on strategy - they'd previously been burned by a company who built software for them, and then didn't provide longer-term support after changing direction. We had an open conversation, and ended up putting the deal on hold.
This has made us think about the way we write these updates. We've come down on the side of continuing to be transparent. Starting a business is messy and it's more fun to write openly about that. Our take is that telling the truth won't always get us what we want short term, but usually works out best in the long run. (although John Maynard Keynes may disagree...)
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks to the following for helping out in September.
Antoine N - for the intro to Matthew
Ashley HL - for the "firm" advice to prioritise an offsite
Greta A - for putting on a great B2B sales session at Balderton
Benji F - for boosting us to your network
Mehdi B - for the referral
Lorenzo S - for a very similar referral!
Thanks,
Yousef & Sam