Building businesses - The initial use case strategy

Background

As we discussed last week, I want to provide an in-depth guide for strategy to get a company off the ground against a specific use case.

This is leveraging a business idea I had which is now largely irrelevant with the introduction of Devin & Devika, but that is ok.

Part of getting started is knowing your space well and understanding when you’ve been unduly outcompeted.

For the purposes of this article, though, I need to break down what the idea was.

Business idea

Using LLMs, existing Infrastructure as Code, and IT Security Strategies, we would generate SOC, GDPR, HIPPA etc compliant Infrastructure as Code and keep the overall environment deployment updated through natural language interactions instead of ever having to do system updates by hand or through less automated means.

This was made by possible by Retrieval Augmented Generation and Agentic workflows, which would allow me to refine the code to an incredible degree before it was ever passed back to the SRE.

Broken down differently, this would be:

This is a very high level architecture since we were only going through technical due-diligence, but is all that’s needed to ensure we have a good enough idea of what we’re building before digging into the extreme details.

Another thing to remember as well, the strategist operates at the visionary level to guide a company so they might not be digging down into the weeds on every idea.

This was never implemented, but I’d define it down to the solution-level architecture before handing it over to outsourced or hired engineers.

Coming up with the idea

Very naturally, I scratched my own itch with this idea after a long time of updating systems through a sysadmin frame and getting sick of weekend calls because we crashed the test instance again.

This would take all system updates and ensure infrastructure always remained in compliance instead of trying to keep multiple environments updated manually which is just a mess.

From my own experience, I call this operational drag since we’re moving slower than necessary and I noticed how many others handled, so I wasn’t the only one experiencing the problem.

Formalizing in a pitch deck

Even if I’m not looking for funding, a pitch deck is just a very succinct way to communicate with business partners and refine the idea to a point we know how to enter the market.

That’s mainly the point about this article though is to go through all the needs of the business relative to what we talked about last week and get a sense of how we address them when pitching an idea to potential business partners and investors as needed.

Providing a concise problem statement

For this idea, I was mainly concerned about the lack of adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in the wider ecosystem and where that left sysadmins to manage the environment manually instead of having proper tools to do the job.

I considered the problem from both a macroeconomic and microeconomic perspective to provide proper feedback into the business problem and pricing strategy as appropriate.

From a macroeconomic perspective, research and proxy estimates showed that firms would spend about $9.55B yearly on maintaining software environments as part of their yearly spend, including keeping compliance up to standard, which is a huge cost.

Furthermore, diving into Dynatrace State of Site Reliability Engineering Report 2022 showed 80% of first were maturing or developing their SRE profession, which honed in the need for this even more for me.

Thus, from my perspective, most firms didn’t have a robust SRE profession, let alone something allowing their SREs to work at high efficiency.

Providing a concise solution statement

This is all about building your idea to be something that non-technical audiences can understand and do their jobs from.

A CFO will be keeping track of revenue, assets & liabilities, and more according to this idea.

A CMO and CSO will each be talking about these with potential audiences and need to understand how to talk about these appropriately.

If we don’t get the messaging correct at the beginning, we won’t be able to attract the right people.

For this idea, I kept a simple number of understandable, explainable statements:

1. Bigger enterprises strongly benefit from IaC tools to keep production deployments active and automatically compliant with newest industry trends.
2. Production can be semi-auto refreshed with the latest compliance standards trending in industry.
3. Rely on natural language to keep all environments up to date.
4. Resolve competing standards between competing bodies and stay to the strictest interpretation of standards possible.
5. AIOps is a tangential practice that also hasn’t been well-adopted yet.

Breaking down the initial idea

Through this, we've broken down the initial idea, explored a high-level architecture of what the problem would look like, and gotten into defining the problem and solution statements.

Given the length of the overall process, we'll be breaking this down into 2-3 full articles and giving folks a more thorough description of each leveraging that.

We'll continue with the next article on Friday!

Plugs

1. This article is part of "The AI Strategist" and is published as a LinkedIn Newsletter.?

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1. Structure AI is an AI strategy & consulting company focused on big improvements for all businesses. We bring worldwide expertise and can be contacted through the LinkedIn company page or by scheduling directly with Brad Messer on his profile.
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