2 years, 2 Pivots. How we built an Open Source Data Framework? : Part 1
Akshaya Aron and I (Linkedin) have been friends since we were in school. Both of us became CS engineers. We banded three years ago. We built things for the web and mobile.
- Mobile site compression middleware. We nearly cracked YC!
- O2O (Offline to online) box for physical PoS systems.
Sold O2O to Smartwards
Smartwards bought our technology stack. We sold it. We had already identified our next adventure. It had to be chatting.
Chatting As An User Interface
My wife (Maitrayee) is fond of buying ethnic artifacts. She used OLX, a classified site to hunt for a product. And, then she used Whatsapp to seal the deal.
Bingo!
There was an opportunity. People have always messaged each other. It’s easier than learning to navigate through websites and apps.
AAHIT: An AI Powered Chat Bot
It’s an acronym for ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL HUMAN INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGY :)
Think of it as another Whatsapp contact, with knowledge superpowers.
It answered all the queries about tickets, food, weather etc.
The more our assistants answered the queries, the more intelligent bot became. We used NLP, XMPP and a host of other technologies to build AAHIT.
Early Traction: 100000 Users
At its peak we had twenty thousand users. They exchanged millions of edits. Users compared prices, downloaded desired audio and videos. We could go to the investors!
A Seed Round
Rohan and Arjun of Investopad led the round. We raised money and had access to good investors.
We did campaigns to gain more users.
Feedback Loop
Two things changed our approach. One, Whatsapp is closed.
Two, we would need to build a separate app, similar to Helpchat or Haptik.
Small Runway, Big Competitors
Other competitors had raised big rounds. We had way less money. We did a rethink.
We pivoted. We took Thiel’s advice and left the competition.
