Friends+Family DirectAI Monthly Update (January 2024)
Hey all!
Keeping you up to date with what’s new at DirectAI. To reiterate, we’re enabling anyone to build computer vision models that classify, detect, and track objects in images & videos, without training data. If you missed last month’s update, check it out here!
Last Month’s Rundown
We failed to get a contract signed with the industrial camera client this month. The contract is still in the pipeline, just moving slowly.
We revamped our credential generation flow and open-sourced 3 partner integrations! Check out the demo we built with Livekit, our Ant Media plugin, and our Viam module! We're particularly excited about the Livekit announcement. They built a first-class integration with DirectAI, featuring us as the only vision analytics plugin alongside Google & OpenAI. You can run it live here! We said we’d do four unique releases in January but credential work took longer than anticipated 🥲
What We Learned
On Releases & Partnerships:
Public releases get us lots of inbound and free-tier usage which feels great! There’s lots to learn, and potential revenue to be earned, from those prospective customer conversations. That said, we haven’t yet closed any customers from partnership announcements. It’s important for us to stay grounded in solving specific problems for customers. Making it easy to pipe data into DirectAI with a partner tool is certainly helpful, but we have to make sure we’re offering a whole solution to a business need.
On Contract Negotiations:
Our learnings from June were reinforced this month. For an early stage startup, the risk (to the company) of a deal dying is almost always bigger than that of any individual concession made to close a deal. Tangentially, we’ve learned a lot about protecting intellectual property, both in contract law and in practice, for software that’s deployed on customer hardware. You should always obfuscate your code, even with contract protections in place 😀
On Evaluating Growth Strategies:
More on our concrete approach in the next section but I found the following resources helpful in my initial research. YC’s How To Get Your First Customers, Founding Sales by Pete Kazanjy (particularly the prospecting chapter), PG’s Startup = Growth, and Michael Seibel’s How To Get Your First Ten Customers. As of yesterday, I am an apollo.io & LinkedIn Premium customer.
What’s Up Next
We’ve put near-complete focus on camera/video management companies without AI analytics systems. We’re doing a time-bound outbound sales motion to validate whether our existing client’s need is faced by other companies in their market. If we don’t see near term growth (i.e. prospects showing interest and scheduling demos), then we’ll pivot to a new problem space and market. This is a distinct departure from the breadth-first search we’ve been doing the past few months - we’ve built vastly differentiated demos for bespoke markets without high growth in any specific area.
Asks
Please star our Github repos (ant media, livekit, viam) and give us your feedback! We’d also appreciate follows on our newly active DirectAI Linkedin & Twitter.
Kindly,
Ben
P.S. It’s been a full year since I sent out my first monthly update for my carbon allowance purchasing startup! For those that have been tuning in since then, thanks for your support!