A system for adding new initiatives
Recently, I started watching the Outdoor Boys Youtube Channel, and, after watching 1 episode per day for like 2 months straight, I got to one where Luke said something to the effect of:
“I’m willing to sleep on the ground, I’m willing to be hungry, and I’m willing to be cold, but I only do one at a time.”
This struck me as super, super wise.
Since AI is the hot thing, I get approached several times per month with the idea of a collaboration. Each idea is essentially the same.
Someone who works in a non-tech industry knows about a process / task in their industry that sucks.
Then, they ask us “Can we automate it?”
After a review, usually the answer is “Yes.”
And then they say “You know, everyone else in our industry has this same problem. Could we sell the solution to everyone else in my industry?”
** usually ** “Yes.”
Then, they add something like “Instead of your being a vendor, you become a collaborator with us, so we split the investment but then we share the upside.”
Before recently, I didn’t have a good way of filtering out ideas or knowing which collaborations to pursue and which to not purse outside of a gut reaction. But, recently, the number of requests has increased sizably, so I needed a way to objectively determine which ideas to take on and which to drop.
Which took me back to Outdoor Boys.
Below is an email I recently sent which outlines Teammate AI’s approach to collaborations from here forward.
The email has been slightly modified for clarity.
I’m totally cool with exploring the collaborations further, but I’m instituting a few requirements for Teammate AI.
We will only be in pre-release, active development with one at a time. I love collaborations, but too many at a time and none will work.
We start by building a scaled-down version of the solution first where Teammate AI serves as a vendor. I am totally with you on the idea that collaborators are better than vendors (I agree!), but the version-1 solution needs to be a solution developed as a vendor. The reasoning for this is simple: it focuses us on solving the problem and making a difference for customer #1 (our client). After that, we can scale it up to work with more than 1 client and, ultimately, generate revenue.
The total market size for Year 1 revenue is > $1MM / $83k/mo. It doesn’t mean that we hit it, but it means we know enough people facing the same problem to be able to achieve that metric. This does, admittedly, slow us down a bit because it means we need to have a financial model in place before starting, but I think it’s worthwhile to keep the process a bit slower up front so that we don’t waste 3-6 months getting a bunch of stuff together before realizing it’s not viable.