How I Started Selling the Future

You know that infamous question you got asked when you are young: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. Did any of you actually end up doing what you claimed? Yeah, me neither. I said I wanted to be a singer, and here I am trying to sell people the future instead.

As my friends know, words were never my forte. Writing, in general, has never felt natural - I prefer numbers. However, as our company’s 1-year “idea-versary” is coming, and 2021 wrapped up, I felt a natural inclination to sit down and reflect upon the craziest year of my life. A year where I decided to start a company in two of the most futuristic industries while simultaneously studying at university.

Everyone has heard the “buzzwords” of AI & Blockchain but many don’t know how it could help them or don’t have the technical skills to develop their ideas on their own. This is where I come in, my name is Daniyal, and I’m the Co-founder and CTO of Codepace.

Codepace is an AI & Blockchain focused software house, that supports start-ups and enterprises in developing their futuristic products.

Background

Before I can even get into the details of how I started, I think it makes sense to explain a little bit of who I am. Throughout my schooling, I was in love with maths. But the conventional career paths like research or investment banking never appealed to me. I wanted to use maths as a tool for creation. So I really had no clue what I wanted to do, all I knew was that it would be something with numbers, and something exciting.

Diving further into the thoughts of a potential career, I came across the term AI — a popular concept being mentioned all around me. Since my curiosity inclined me to (and I was supposed to do french homework which wasn’t very fun), I decided to look into it. I don’t think I slept that night.

The concepts blew my mind, imagine having a computer that can think for you. If I could have my own AI assistant like Jarvis, I’d never have to do my french homework again.

That one night turned into many, where I would sit on my desk and read and watch everything that I could, even if remotely relevant. A few courses and books later, I was getting the hand of it. All I did in my free time was try and figure out how far can we push AI. I built offensive chatbots, music recommenders, and attempted to build a homework helper too (wasn’t good enough for french, unfortunately).

By the time I got into uni, I was joining accelerators as an AI developer and supporting startups in developing their AI products. All around me developers were working in small teams to tackle a big problem. This made me fall in love with startup culture and I realised that I had finally found my calling. Hence, I began my start-up journey

Idea Creation

An important factor in my journey to Codepace was my work at Skillsbite — here’s where I met Max. From the very beginning, we shared a natural bond. We shared a similar perspective on how start-up culture should be and what the future holds.

We knew we were in the era of AI and Blockchain. Where millions of ideas will be developing all around us, all with the hope to be the next big thing. It would be smart to try to develop our own product in the field and try to make it grow, but what was smarter was to support all the other start-ups in their growth.

A lot of start-up founders don’t have the technical skills or time to develop their ideas. Even if they decide to develop their project, they lose focus on other aspects which make start-ups successful. Why don’t we help them out with that? Why don’t we handle the technical sides of their products, and they can focus on other aspects such as marketing, business strategy, etc?

Max and I studied this market gap and created Codepace. We help businesses and people create and execute their visions by taking care of the technical side.

Building a Team

One of the primary factors behind our growth was creating a balanced team with individuals who had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and growth. Max and I as co-founders also brought different skills to the table. Max’s experience in start-up culture helped with the business aspect of the company while my computer-science background allowed me to handle the technical side.

Most importantly, we shared a common philosophy on how a company should be run and what our plans for the future were. We needed two main parts in our team: a development team and a marketing team.

The development team was relatively straightforward. We needed a technical team that had a strong foundation but were able to adapt to progressions in the technology. After extensive hunting and networking, we found the ideal development team that we decided to partner with.

Our hiring process for marketing was extremely different from most. We preferred attitude over experience. Being a small company in a vast ever-changing and innovating industry, we knew we could not resort to traditional marketing strategies. Our philosophy was simple: we were a new company that would probably experiment in many different ways and change strategies dozens of times. Therefore we needed a team that could reflect this philosophy- that could adapt, be agile and had the attitude and ability to continuously learn, change and grow.

This was honestly the best decision we made. I think in the last year we have shifted our strategy at least 15 times, and each time we do, they have been willing to adapt. More importantly each time we did, the company and our team got better. We had a team that didn’t just work for Codepace, but grew with Codepace as well.

Initial Failures

The road has not been easy. Of course, a new company has its difficulties, but imagine balancing that with assignments. On top of this, imagine attempting to maintain a social life too (keyword : attempting).

From the very beginning, we struggled with convincing clients to go with us. How do we convince them that we were the right people for the job when we had done no jobs so far?

We thought that we had to make up for the fact that we were university students, and look a lot more professional and corporate. Everyone in the IT industry seemed extremely serious, and we believed that was the factor we were lacking. So we changed how we approached and talked to clients, trying to be more serious, more professional. Even with that, several meetings passed, and we were still on step 0.

Instead of remaining serious the entire meeting, I decided to be a bit more relaxed and enjoy the conversation. Make a few jokes, have some laughs, while simultaneously being able to talk business in a professional manner to see what happens.

Worked like a charm.

We had a potential client who was a massive Manchester United fan. And as a loyal Arsenal fan myself, I had to let him know how his club sucked. I think for the first 30 minutes, no business was being talked about. It became a friendly argument on who was doing the worst.

From the very first meeting they liked us, they liked how natural we were. They wanted to continue the conversation further and figure out in what aspect we could support them. Even an AI and tech start-up is just a normal business at the end of the day. Which reminds me of this quote- “business is a party of people, not computers”. It’s a people-run world, and no one likes you more than when you are just being yourself.

I made that our strategy. Be yourself. Gradually, we started picking up the pace. More people wanted to talk, more projects were being secured. So for all start ups out there struggling with marketing, key tip : be yourselves.

We had many other failures too, but we took them as lessons. If a mistake was made, that was alright, as long as we ensured that it wasn’t made again. We would sit down, figure the root of the problem, and kill it from its core. Throughout this year, my team and I had a hands-on learning approach on how to run a company.

Where We’re At

Finishing off 2021, we managed to secure some big projects (including NFT projects, NLP, Predictive analytics, and tokenization) and finish them off in a timely fashion. We have set up our foundation to really allow us to exponentially grow in the future.

Coming into 2022, we have big plans. However with big plans, comes big failures too. Big failures, further come with a lot of lessons. But that’s fine, we’re prepared for it. Not only are we looking to grow our team and secure more projects, being in this field for now, we have a ton of ideas of our own.

I’m new to sharing my journey, and want to continue most of it on twitter. If you want to learn to front the mistakes I made, and will continue to make, you can follow my Twitter here.