January 2024 - Present
In the wake of the GPT phenomenon, I explored the possibility of blending LLM generation with design systems. After a series of explosive tweets and demos, I focused heavily on sales and market research to better understand the potential. Initial interest was booming from multiple Fortune 500 design system maintainers looking for a way to drive onboarding and adoption. Within weeks, we had a product we could sell to teams.
Out of the gate, we were met with questions regarding data security and compliance. Noise from the legal side of AI started to spread throughout companies, increasing the friction through our sales process. Finding an interested buyer was just the beginning; surviving the procurement process proved to be a much more formiddable challenge.
While we navigated the sales pipeline, we reached a peak of ten contractors; four engineers, two designers, three sales, and myself. Together we expanded the product to include an API platform and connected dashboard for users to manage their AI assistant connections.
The product was excellent, but unfortunately as time went on, we realized it would be a harder sell than we initially thought. Our AI products were a cherry on top of a larger sundae, and creating evangelists to help us through their procurement process was extremely difficult for a non-essential product.
We continue to hunt for product-market fit.
- Retrieval Augmented Generation
- Vector Databases
- Custom Applications on Large Language Models