Artanis #8: 50% team growth!!!
Exciting update: we've welcomed a new cofounder and are honing our focus on AI labelling solutions!
Artanis: Helping companies build AI that they can control
🔬 Artanis: the story so far 🔬
For new readers, we've started publishing all previous updates online. If this is hitting you fresh and you'd like more context, go to https://artanis.ai.
📣 Big news: we've found a third cofounder! 📣
Very pleased to announce that Jerome Minney has joined as a third cofounder! We first met Jerome at a house party in October, where he mentioned his idea for a product to help people label data where domain expertise was needed. This aligned very strongly with our own experience of the biggest problem in the applied AI market, so after a few weeks of discussions we decided to start working together.
Jerome brings complementary expertise in growth (i.e. he's much better at talking to customers than Yousef or myself). He's worked as a growth consultant for ~10 startups, and ran his own software consultancy for 5 years before that. He's already accelerated our go-to-market and we're excited to see how the next few months shake out!
🙋 Ways you can help: people working in data labelling 🙋
We're looking to speak with people who are trying to improve AI model quality. We'd love to connect with anyone fitting the following profiles:
- Working in an internal modelling team at a company building in AI
- Working in an internal data / evals team at a company building in AI
- Working in a team buying labelled data from other companies
- Working in a team selling labelled data to other companies
Please get in touch if you know anyone fitting those profiles.
📉 Progress in November - steadying the ship 📈
Our goals were to i) retain 3 service customers and ii) come up with a new plan during our offsite. We feel good about progress on both fronts.
Primary metric: 3 customers (-1)
Secondary metric: £35.5k monthly revenue (+£8.5k)
Secondary metric: 2.25 team size (Jerome was here for 1/4 of the month)
-> This is replacing delivery hours as our "cost metric", so higher is worse
Yousef and I had a romantic few days at our offsite in Hampshire. We felt strongly aligned that labelling data accurately was the biggest problem across our past AI projects and that we'd like to work toward a scalable solution for it. We came up with some ideas, ranging from building an internal tool for our consulting clients to selling a standalone labelling product. We're looking forward to working through these (and other) ideas with Jerome.
🎯 Goal for December - validate at least one customer segment. 🎯
Now that our team is 50% larger, we've got more capacity to work on longer-term projects. Right now, our best guess is in the labelling tooling space. Our first target for validation is going to be:
- Similar pain points confirmed across at least three customers in the segment.
If we can achieve that, we'll aim for a first signed customer the following month. We'll continue to report consulting metrics too, but are not aiming for growth there.
🕵️ Challenges - relationships in three-person founding teams 🕵️
There's a ton of upside potential from bringing in a third co-founder. However, we're aware there are risks too and the relational dynamics are more complicated than a two-person team. If you've been part of a three-person founding team before, we'd love to hear from you about your experience.
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Thanks this month go to:
Sophia - for a glowing testimonial
Haseeb - for an interesting new project requiring domain expertise
Ibrahim - for the invite to speak at the Buildathon
Henry & Tom H - for help with getting out the spam naughty corner
Haz H & Tom H - for hosting the party we met Jerome
Natalie, Rod, Joachim, Mo, Ryo, Ed S - for helpful offsite advice
Sam C - for telling it how it is
Caitlin C - for the nicest surprise call of the month
Anon ex-client - you know why!
Jerome, Yousef & Sam