Alt Update - 26th June 2023
Alt Update - 26th June 2023
Leaderboard, first IRL event, Creato pivot, and more!
Hey there,
Welcome to the 3rd update of our ‘Building in Public‘ series.
We shared the concept of alt residency in the previous update. We are approaching this like any other startup, ship fast in small increments.
Quick updates from this side:
Launched the v1 of ‘alt leaderboard’. All residency startups will use it to track progress. Check it out here.
All our ventures have started building in public. We will consolidate links in one place and share them in the next update.
We hosted Arib (the guy behind Drake AI music) for our first IRL event, in collaboration with Colabs. We will do it at least once every month.
Fireside Chat: How to build and scale AI products? We hosted Khair for a week at the office, as the first residency (external) startup. Our goal was to give them an environment where they can ship fast and grow. The experience wasn’t close to what we wanted it to be. But we know how we can significantly improve for their next visit.
We’re moving into a new, bigger office from next month. From mid-next month we will be able to invite more builders 🔥
Back to the updates on our active ventures.
Creato - Making technology accessible for Pakistani creators
We made a soft pivot. You can check out the short video demo of the new product.
Based on customer requests, we are now building gated booking slots. Once this feature is released we will IA have our first customer.
Creato is building in public on Twitter. Follow us here to stay updated.
Find - Find the right people faster with AI-powered matching
Our approach was to become the customer ourselves to experience the problem before building the product. Numbers for Phase 1:
Revenue Earned: $850 (vs $250 from the last update)
Revenue in Pipeline: $0 (vs $1000 from the last update)
Companies: 6 (same as the last update)
Applications: ~1K+ (same as the last update)
Interviews: 25+ (same as the last update)
We are now moving to the second phase - building the best recruitment platform on the planet. So far this includes:
Automated resume screening via AI agents (live)
Async video interviews and custom quizzes (live)
Single-click applications via Chrome extension (live, but the candidate side is not the primary focus)
We are working on improving the experience of the product based on feedback from companies. We will share a demo video in the next update and will IA lock the first customer for SaaS by then.
Sprints - ‘No code & AI’ as a service
Revenue (this quarter): $28K (vs $13K from the last update)
Revenue Locked (Q3 23): ~$39K with 3 companies (same as last update)
Our next milestone is $1 million ARR ($84K MRR)
Due to popular demand, we are working on productizing the deployment of customized AI agents. This can help with speed and scale.
We have received our first lead from the Stanford StartX accelerator partnership (shared in the first update). Next, we are listing Sprints as a potential partner for founders at Harvard Innovation Lab.
AI Experiments
Experiment 2 - Custom AI agents
Trained on internal policies of a consulting company. Still waiting for company-wide adoption, big companies are slow to adopt.
We are integrating it with databases and knowledge bases. Working on Linear, SQL database (BigQuery), Google Sheets, Notion, etc.
We are testing internally to ensure that it actually helps in increasing productivity before onboarding external users.
Experiment 3 - Tasveer (b2b), AI partner for brands
T-shirt try-on. We are helping a local brand generate product pictures of their clothes on AI-generated models. You can check the output here. If they end up using our service, we will make ~$1500 from this customer.
Shalwar kameez try-on. Like most AI models, generating high-quality local output is hard. We have not been able to generate good shalwar kameez try-ons yet but we will continue working on them.
Product photography. We experimented with 2 companies, cosmetics, and interior design. The ticket size was too small ($10 per product) for the effort required so we decided to close it.
Food photography. We are exploring ways to generate high-quality, yet personalized food photos for famous restaurants and cafes. We are in talks with a Chinese food restaurant about a potential partnership.
Experiment 4 - Deep fakes (voice cloning and lip sync). Something crazy coming before the next update!
How can you help?
There is no obligation but we will be grateful if you can do one of these things to help us move forward:
Connect us with anyone who will resonate with our vision of building a YC alternative accessible for Pakistani builders (alt residency).
Connect us with any brand interested in experimenting with AI-generated content, models, or try-on.
You will hear from me again in a couple of weeks.
Best,
Muhammad.
P.S. If you missed the last update, you can view it here.