Aditya's Newsletter Edition #2

In today’s edition:

• Reality Check: The essential step makers forget about and how it hurts your business

• Ideas and Success Stories: Knowledge Management with AI

• Articles: Advice from a millionaire, counterfeit people, and more

• News: Meta Connect, ChatGPT, Pixel 8, and more

• No sponsored or paid content

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Reality Check
The essential step makers forget about and how it hurts your business

You finally have that big idea in mind. You know how you’re going to make it. You know it is going to solve THAT problem. And, you get to work, after weeks of hard work, your product is finally ready. And, you didn’t forget about marketing too. You get those upvotes on Product Hunt and the retweets on X.

But, still, your product falls flat.

Why?

You forgot about the essential step that you had to continually do before, during, and after building your product: talking to your customers.

Wait a minute, I don’t even have a customer, how would I have one without a product? Isn’t this a deadlock situation?

When I say talk to your customers, I mean your potential customers. And, this is a necessary step. You can not build a successful product without this. You can probably delay this to some extent but the earlier, the better.

You can’t be selling something without knowing what your buyer wants.

How do you contact them? I’ve said this before, your product or service must deliver value by solving a problem. Who did you get this problem from? Ask them if your solution would be good enough for them.

Find more people who have this problem through social media; Reddit and X work well according to me.

Have a survey form on your landing page. Give people some reward for taking the time to fill out the form, maybe an extended free trial or maybe a free eBook. It’s your choice.

Listen to your potential customers in every phase of your development. Only then you can have a product worth selling.

Ideas and Success Stories
Knowledge Management with AI

In my previous edition, I wrote about two side hustles and some of you complained about how those won’t be life-changing. Well, here’s a space that will change your life, if you’re able to crack it.

What

If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you know what I’m talking about. In working spaces, knowledge refers to documentation, video lessons, common tips and tricks, organizational paths, emergency points of contact, and many more things. This knowledge needs to be organized, accessible, and trimmed occasionally.

Why

The larger a company gets it becomes more difficult to manage this knowledge. 

Existing solutions to a problem within a company must be immediately accessible.

Documentation tools such as Atlassian’s Confluence have made our lives easier than physical files used a few years back but AI has unlocked completely new grounds in this space.

I’m sure you would have heard about “Talk to PDF” kind of tools and extensions. You upload a PDF document and then you can interact with an AI chatbot to quickly get answers instead of sifting through the entire document. This is just a small example. Let’s look at some big and real success stories.

Success Stories

• Tettra: This tool can take all documents of a company and turn it into a knowledge base. It integrates seamlessly with MS Teams and Slack. It has crossed $800K in revenue and more than 500 customers.

• Bloomfire: Another tool similar to Tettra. It also offers solutions for customer insights and support. Bloomfires’s estimated annual revenue is $11.7M.

• ReadMe: This tool converts API calls into real-time hubs with documentation. It has an estimated annual revenue of $4 million. Could be a game-changer for customer-developer interactions in the future.

• Mem: Marketed as the “ultimate knowledge assistant”, Mem organizes your data on the go. It already has Netflix and Uber as users. Mem has received $29 million in funding.

• Whimsical: This tool brings together visual knowledge organization methods like flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps, and others under the same roof. Whimsical’s estimated annual revenue is $5.8M.

How

The “How” part of this idea is so broad. You can try making a more affordable and faster copy of Tettra and offer more integrations. Pretty much anything in the above list, make it more affordable and faster. Here are some more ideas that pop into my head:

• A tool that takes notes from a call and organizes it into accessible documents.

• A tool that generates meaningful documentation for code.

• A tool that converts confidential and technical company documentation into presentation decks for the customer.

• A tool that integrates with your preferred communication tool like Teams or Slack in a single click and makes your existing documentation accessible via a chatbot

• A highly technical tool that shows the relationship between high-level architecture diagrams to the lowest blocks of code. This would be highly technical but huge for tech companies.

It’s your turn now, reply with your ideas in this field. Maybe we can even work together on one?

Articles
The Stupidly Simple Pieces of Advice That Made Me a Millionaire

Tim Denning

The heading might sound clickbait but this is some genuinely useful advice on how you can get ahead of the average Joe without any sugarcoating. Tim is an active writer on Medium and I like reading his work. The tips in this article are simple but at the same time, things that people generally avoid doing.

Read the complete article

'Counterfeit people': The dangers posed by Meta’s AI celebrity lookalike chatbots

Sébastian Seibt

Meta recently introduced 28 chatbots with personalities aimed at younger users. These chatbots are specialists in a field (like a triathlete or a chef) and look like a famous celebrity (like Paris Hilton or Naomi Osaka). It’s an interesting article that explores why Meta is doing this and the horrible dangers this can bring.

Read the complete article

How These Non-Technical Founders Created A $40K/Month Food Safety Software

Katrin Liivat

I found this article interesting for two things: non-technical startup owners and the food safety niche, a niche that I have never thought about. Their journey has been textbook as far as product development is concerned.

Read the complete article

News
Meta Connect, ChatGPT, Pixel 8, and more

• Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday rolled out new AI products for consumers, including bots that create photo-realistic images and smart glasses that answer questions, as well as an updated virtual-reality headset…read more

• OpenAI announced Wednesday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide users with up-to-date information for their inquiries instead of being limited to data before September 2021…read more

• OpenAI, the research lab behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, is in advanced talks with former Apple designer Jony Ive and SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son to launch a new venture that would create a consumer device powered by artificial intelligence…read more

• Google's annual Made By Google launch event is just around the corner, scheduled for October 4. The tech giant is preparing to reveal its much-anticipated Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones…read more

• Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X (formerly Twitter), revealed in an interview at Code 2023 that the platform has lost 11.6 percent of its daily active users since Elon Musk's takeover, dropping from 254.5 million to 225 million users…read more

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