A Pause at the Junction! To focus or not to focus... Apr '22 Company Update

I recently started writing public company status updates.?You can read more about why here.

Ask:?We are still accepting cheques (min. USD$25k) in the first phase of our fundraising. Please let me know if you're interested or know anyone who might be interested to know more!

Previously at Aggregate Intellect...

In?March '22?...

• We started our fundraising pre-round and collected some cheques
• We got a lot of serious feedback from people who were considering giving us their money (like A LOT)
• We launched a bunch of interesting Environmental Data Science projects in partnership with NRCan

See also:?January '22 | February '22

Here is what happened in April 2022:

Fine! I'll go ahead and admit it! my title was a bit of a click bait. I wanted you to read this and comment on it saying: "you should always focus" and you're absolutely right! But the big question is always, are we focusing on the right thing?

Let me walk through this more slowly:

At the beginning of the month we had good momentum, conversations were going well, small cheques were coming in, everything was flowing well until we started feeling that we didn't have the momentum we were hoping for. We felt like we were doing a good job telling the story about the problem, the solution, why us, our community, and traction, and all that, but a punchline to bring it all home was missing. It felt like we needed to talk way more than necessary to communicate why this is going to be epic! So, what did we decide to do, you ask?

1. Create a one pager explaining everything. We thought if we can force ourselves to communicate everything (like ALL THINGS) in one page, then we really challenge ourselves to focus on what absolutely matters
2. Have a professional designer redo our pitch deck. Based on what ended up remaining in the one pager, we had a designer create a 10ish-pager that we would use to tell our story (according to our advisor it's 5x better than what we had! so yay us!)
3. Have a much more solid answer to the question: "who are your first 100 customers'". So far in answering that question we would wave our hands and explain the process we would follow. But we thought it was time to get as concrete as possible by accelerating our customer development conversations (note: we were so far focused on user interviews, vs customer interviews - aka desirability / usability vs viability and all that). There are quite a bit interesting developments happening here; make sure you subscribe to this newsletter to hear all about it next month!
4. Get way more rigorous with CRM. With all the investor intros and lists we were collecting, and now customer conversatios, keeping things in sheets became too inefficient, so better solution was needed. Again, subscribe to the newsletter to hear what we ended up using! what tool do you use btw? and why?

I'm proud that we've been able to take all the feedback from investor conversations and use that info to help focus our go-to-market strategy even further. We had developed a great structure for gathering user feedback on the product, but it wasn't until we shifted focus to customer development interviews that we were able to identify the target group that would find the most immediate value with our product.?- Maryam

What were the highlights of the month for the team?

Community

Over the past 6 months or so we went from semi-casual product decisions to a very rigorous decision making process. But our community initiatives remained largely as activities that we were doing and we thought we should be doing. This month we sat down for the first time and tried to take a rigorous approach to our community initiatives too. We fired up our validation board and started writing up our hypotheses and assumptions about our community. This was important because growing the community to a 10k took a few years, but we need it to grow to 100k in much much shorter time. Importantly, we wanted to figure out initiatives that are not as event focused as we've been doing, so we needed a much deeper understanding of how and why we are able to mobilize our community.

I'm proud of our transition from on-the-fly experiments to methodically recorded & discussed experiments in our community department. Feels like the forming-of-a-culture moment - Ammar

Dev

Our mission from the beginning was making discovery of technical resources more easy. This month we finally took significant steps by drastically improving our search quality (still ways to go but you know, one step closer).

My proudest contribution this month was my work on search, both design and implementation of UI / UX - Eyob

Some of you who have been exposed to our prototypes know that we are launching our graphical knowledge navigation system. This is a recommendation system that finds the most important parts of a knowledge graph and guides the user through a number of selections to quickly find what they're looking for.

My proudest contribution is working on graph visualization and importantly the adaptive graph layout for search and project mindmaps - Bereket

We needed to deploy our NLP based knowledge extraction pipeline and use it on our documents and resources

My proudest contribution for this month is to deploy the concept/relationship extraction as a separate service - Percy

and of course the integration of the visualization and the backend service

My proudest contribution for this month is the middleware for adding concept to resources using the concept extraction pipeline - Muluwork

As you can see most of the team was focused on building up our new search experience, but of course, we had to spend a lot of time fixing bugs, and improving our users' experience. That included finalizing an email notification system that will go live next week. The trick here was to design, implement, and fine tune a logic where users dont get a zillion emails even if there is a lot of account activity in-app. Spamming active users is a very bad way to keep them around (take note Google Docs).

Other than resolving some user data issues, I worked on the email notification fixes to mimic exactly what our in-app notification works - Samuel

Parting thoughts...

April was a tough month! Other than the 2 full jobs of preparing for fundraising and running a company, both Maryam and I had to deal with a lot of unexpected personal issues. At times the emotional burden of everything that was going on was overwhelming, but hey, dont they say those who tough through these moments are the ones who make it? Lesson of the month for me: doing a startup is a crazy thing we choose to do; if it feels like you're losing control, grab your tea, go sit outside in the sun, and breathe; in 15 minutes you're good as new!

Resources

Get Started with AI.SCIENCE

Follow?this RECIPE?to know more about what you can do on our platform

Deep Random Talks on YouTube

DRT is a weekly show where my co-hosts, guests, and I talk about various topics in ML and Startup.?Check out our videos and content here

Want to talk about any of the above? startups? building products? or about your career in ML?

I do (free) 20 minute calls with people to talk about everything?ML?or?startup; if you know anyone who is trying to get into ML / DS, or figuring out how to build an AI product, or thinking about getting into startup life, AND wants to chat about it with me, please pass this link to them:?https://calendly.com/amirfzpr/20min-ama