Opportunity
Business gifting presents a lucrative yet challenging avenue for companies to nurture client relationships. With a $120 billion market in the US alone, there’s immense potential to leverage AI-driven solutions to streamline the gifting process and enhance client satisfaction on a scalable level.
My Role
As the technical co-founder and CTO I was accountable and responsible for the strategy, planning, delivery and success of the product.
Hard Things
Navigating the complexities of 0-1 company and product building, we encountered formidable challenges in many areas. The most difficult ones were:
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Customer Discovery and Traction: Conducting extensive customer research and outreach to gain traction.
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Building AI Solution with Cold-Start Problem: Overcoming challenges related to data pipelines, quality and, access to various data sources of insufficient data to develop an effective AI solution.
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Balancing Priorities: Juggling fundraising, hiring, product development, research, outreach, and shipping campaigns to ensure progression towards Seed stage.
Approach
Our journey began with rigorous customer discovery, employing design thinking methodologies to discover the core challenges of business gifting. Through iterative improvements based on direct customer feedback, I refined our understanding and validated our assumptions, ultimately acquiring our first 10 paid customers through targeted outreach campaigns.
Overcoming the cold-start problem in AI posed a significant challenge. I engineered a two-fold solution: a robust profiling engine generating recipient attributes and a recommendation engine suggesting personalized gifts.
Leveraging diverse data sources and advanced algorithms, I mitigated the cold start by enriching profiles with third-party data, ensuring real-time recommendations aligned with campaign goals.
With competing demands, prioritizing effectively was crucial. We delineated responsibilities based on individual strengths, with a focus on product development and fundraising. This allowed us to synchronize efforts efficiently, releasing the beta product while concurrently expanding our go-to-market strategy, achieving a balance between product development and business growth.
Impact
The project achieved significant milestones, securing $500k in pre-seed funding and assembling a high-performing engineering team of two engineers and one data scientist. This enabled the successful launch of the beta product, which acquired 20 enterprise clients and generated $50k in revenue within six months.
Here is a brief demonstration of the beta product:
Key Highlights
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Product Vision and Strategy: Demonstrated ability to conceptualize and execute a transformative product vision, leveraging AI to address a significant market need and drive business growth.
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User-Centric Design: Expertise in user research, feedback-driven development, and intuitive UX/UI design, resulting in a seamless and engaging experience for end-users.
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Market Penetration and Growth: Proven track record of penetrating and capturing market share in an emerging industry.