Focusing on the money! some random thoughts about markets, startups, and businesses - May '22 Company Update

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Previously at Aggregate Intellect...

In?April '22?...

• We worked with some designers to make our investment pitch material look more professional
• We started getting more serious about tracking our various types of relationships (aka CRM - but for users, customers, investors, partners, etc)
• We started following our rigorous validation framework even for community activities

See also:?February '22 | March '22

Here is what happened in May 2022:

Last month, as I wrote, we were going through a bit of re-evaluation of where we were putting our focus. Part of that was motivated by the trend happening on twitter about the market with investors and founders and everyone getting overly emotional about what was about to happen: a major recession!

There is so much contradicting advice out there and it becomes confusing very quickly. Some people think that we have talked ourselves into a recession (or this) so it's not going to last for too long. Others think we're doomed and headed to a very tough situation.

Regardless of what you and I think of this mass hysteria we call markets, the most sane advice seems to be focusing on the business bottomline and revenue.

This was largely what we started feeling in April where some investors were asking more tough questions around revenue and monetization, and partly why we slowed down to have better answers for those questions. Now throughout May, it looks like regardless of this downturn being real or not, or even long lasting or not, the most urgent activity is focusing on unit economy.

I often think of the Covid pandemic lockdowns as an opportunity we were given to think more critically about scale. And to be honest, as tough as it was, it ended up helping us stress test what we have been doing, and arguably pushed us to a more-no-bs territory. Now with this new challenge thrown at us, and assuming that it wouldn't kill us, I think we'll be at a better place at the other end of this market uncertainty.

I admit I dont understand market dynamics as well as i should, and my understanding of what we should focus on has evolved:

1. At first I was hyper focused on product and hadn't really appreciated the importance of building the business side
2. Very quickly (and probably after someone told me "do yourself a favor and find a business partner"), I shifted focus to figuring out the business model and kinda completely ignored proper product dev: content subscription based EdTech (but there was so much opportunity left on the table) ---> Innovation Marketplace (but would a marketplace without network effect scale?) ---> SaaS (to build the demand side of the marketplace and mechanics of the network effect) ... you get the idea
3. Having decided on a more tried and true (product-led SaaS) model for now, I focused heavily on product again

Now, this market downturn seems like a good time for us to circle back again to the distribution and business side of things and bring it all together. This is going to be far from trivial, but we are here and committed to figure it out!

What were the highlights of the month for the team?

Enough of doomsday talking; now to the good parts: our progress!

Community

In May we started leveraging our rigorous validation framework for our community initiatives. This has created a significantly more constructive way for us to debate what needs to be done and executed.

Weekly experiments, that are now picking up momentum, pushed us to regularly refine our assumptions. Concrete pilots for improved continuous knowledge sharing coming up soon based on what we've learnt so far - Ammar

The even more remarkable thing about this part for me (and the team) is that this is now a collaboration between our dev and marketing teams and has proven to be very engaging and fruitful.

On the staffing side, we finalized hiring for our MITACS collaboration with McGill and Metropolitan Universities, but also have finalized paperwork to bring a marketing innovation specialist.

I'm very excited to have an experienced right-hand woman who will be helping us with things ranging from distribution to business development. This will help our users find out about the interesting Recipes we've already developed & all our platform features - Maryam

We also have brought in a new Sr. FE Dev

I ?have joined Aggregate Intellect the past month. and after some onboarding and welcoming sessions with different team members, I'm excited to contribute to the product in the future. - Rehana

Development

The biggest story of the month on this front has been what we call "project mind-maps". Imagine you've been researching a topic to use for your product. You've been hoarding resources, notes, designs, ... for a few days and it's starting to get out of hand. What do you do? create folders? add tags? you primitive people!!! instead let our AI read all that, extract important info, visualize it for you, and let you navigate to what you need in a graphical way! like a proper modern person!

This month I worked on implementing a better layout for our graph visualization for both search and project mindmap to help our users find what they need faster - Bereket

On the backend side, we have deployed some models that do the reading and knowledge extraction.

My proudest contribution of this month is deploying a service to feed resources to the concept extraction model and store the results in a database - Muluwork

Of course the extracted graphs need to be augmented and pruned!

I started in research on improving the current recipe concept graph. We are now able to extract concepts and their relations from the recipe and incorporate these concepts with a reference knowledge graph to make the result more comprehensive and contextual - Percy

On the other hand, we got some user feedback that they wanted to be able to group resources they add to recipes, but also to see some kind of grouping of related results when they search. We did exactly those.

I was working on the?search grouping as well as asset grouping. It is my proudest contribution not only because it is essential for our system but also because it pushed me to think more deeply about our implementation - Eyob

Finally, since our GTM is largely focused on integrations, we spent some time researching the most commonly used tool in our community: Slack!

I have been researching how to implement a slack app to make it much easier for our users to track their resource from slack - Samuel

Parting thoughts...

There is a lot of market uncertainty, and the weight of unknown unknowns is heavier than ever. Would we survive this market downturn? I dont know! Would we give it all we can? 100%. There are a lot of unknowns, but one thing that I know for sure is that I have collected a team that is here to fight. We are all here to build, learn, adapt, repeat! Enough whining, back to building (oh and selling); see you!

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