Friends+Family DirectAI Monthly Update (October 2023)
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 signed a new customer - we’re helping a client calculate forestry carbon stock by counting trees in overhead drone footage. That said, it looks like we mispriced our product and, without near-term technology improvements, it may not make sense for us to be serving them long term. More details in the "Learnings" section.
We shook hands on pricing with a prospective customer - we’re building an on-prem analytics system for a company that deploys cameras in an industrial context (e.g. oil rigs, chemical plants, manufacturing lines, warehouses, etc.). Shoutout to Pat Harp, a subscriber, for setting up an introduction to this team!
We met with a number of Ant Media customers to give demos. More details in the “Learnings” section but use cases included monitoring public infrastructure, counting shoppers in retail shops, tracking people & vehicles in drone footage, measuring vehicle speed, tracking littering in public squares, and tracking bicyclists & horses in competitive races.
We had our largest outage to date (2 hours & 10 minutes) and our uptime dropped to 99.7%.
What We Learned
On Pricing
We messed up when agreeing on initial terms with our third customer. In an effort to win the deal, we quoted a unit price that we were happy with under assumed volume conditions. That volume didn’t materialize and we ended up having to do more work per requested video than expected. We should have asked about expected usage patterns far earlier in the customer-vendor relationship so we wouldn’t feel the need to initiate a second pricing negotiation.
On Outages
We’re starting to reach scaling limits on our infrastructure. As of the beginning of October, we used one Redis instance for development & production. While testing a caching change, we brought down our Redis instance (and our production API with it) for over two hours. Not only did we lack a backup Redis instance, we also hadn’t set up a playbook for bringing up a new one. Lessons learned: Have 1) a development AND a production environment for every part of your infrastructure, 2) a deployment handbook, 3) persistent storage for your database volumes.
Building On-Prem Software
We briefly touched on this last month, but we’re starting to develop hypotheses around problems solved by an on-premise computer vision system. Now that we’ve agreed on pricing with an industrial video camera team and received a number of explicit requests for self-hosted computer vision software through Ant Media, we see a potentially interesting path forward in allowing people to build custom models on their own hardware. The on-prem path is littered with failed startups - deployment, support, and scaling is significantly harder - but we also see a distinct moat & a series of problems that are under-addressed in this space.
What’s Up Next
We’re doubling down on solutions for company profiles where we’ve seen traction, primarily teams that struggle to derive structured information from their live-video product. We’re loading up on conversations with prospective & existing customers to hone in on shared problems & make informed prioritization decisions.
There’s little to do besides talking to customers and solving their problems!
Asks
Do you know anyone at the following companies? Please help me get in touch with them! (I know I’m repeating a couple from last month):
I’ll pass along a forwardable blurb if so. As a friendly reminder, our shared calendly is here if you’d ever like to get in touch! And if you have feedback on the update, feel free to reply directly!
Kindly,
Ben
P.S.
Check out this camera that a client shipped to us to run tests with!
Check out this demo Isaac made using DirectAI’s tech on Viam’s platform!
We’re still parsing through all the announcements from OpenAI’s DevDay yesterday. Stay tuned for a DirectAI GPT!