Building an AI consulting and product company, kickoff
Goals, Thoughts, and Detailed Statistics
I am building a AI consulting and product development company called 255labs. My cofounder and I want to create a R&D technology startup while helping other people prepare for the AI age.
One month ago we decided to build this out. This is the first week we felt like the inbound links were in a good enough place to start officially onboarding clients.
As part of this we’ve decided to document this journey so that others may see the issues that we come across.
Targets and Goals
There are two weeks left in this quarter and we are on track to meet our goals. We were able to launch several new sites and projects. The current issues we’re encountering are:
- Building initial consulting clients: we are two senior software engineers skilled in AI and we have availability.
- Building an audience for new products: we have a lot of project ideas that we want to create. We wish to release fast to test for audience and the ability to monetize.
- Funding: we are bootstrapping this company and finding consulting work is key. Other funding options include grants and VC funding, but neither seem right for us at this time.
- Open source/open data: we are passionate about being able to share what we know with the broader public through open source and writings. This is an important piece of our work that relates to our decision to bootstrap instead of finding funding.
Discovery and Project Metrics
In the past we’ve built in silos. To avoid this I’m going to publish all the metrics I find interesting that might help others in their journeys.
255labs.xyz
This site serves as a place for clients to learn more about our AI and engineering services. Also to index our works and describe our team.
ntcai.xyz
An AI showcase site. A site that is built for sharing LoRas built with our open source ConceptMod project which uses custom research to finetune text-to-image models without a dataset.
echorealms.xyz
Launched days ago this creates a new form of CYOA story telling. My first AI-powered short story, “The Obsidian Door”, is longer than all the Harry Potter books combined. So far I have not marketed this at all.
nftcardx.com
A site for NFT collectors on the game Warsaken and others. There is huge potential in gaming NFTs as they solve a lot of issues that physical game collectibles have to deal with currently, such as efficient markets, safe usage, and preventing counterfeits. Note we are not related to the Warsaken team and this is a highly speculative space, please do your own due diligence as we are not financial advisors.
Social Media Metrics
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martyngarcia/
I’ve written a collection of LinkedIn articles this month focused on trying to help people prepare for AI but so far discovery has been limited. I was hoping for long tail discovery but this does not seem to be the case. Not pictured is a 4x improvement in profile views, however.
https://medium.com/@martyn.garcia
I’ve only written one article on Medium so far, and it was a synopsis of my LinkedIn work. Nonetheless discovery here is currently lacking as well.
https://twitter.com/martyngarcia_
Creating a new twitter account and sharing my LinkedIn articles has led to some decent statistics. I will purchase the $8 version to see if it helps reach.
Challenges and Conclusion
The first challenge to overcome was visibility. Searching Google for my name corrects with a misspelling of it, and even when searching beyond that my profile was hidden. Our company and projects were similarly not visible in search results.
The second challenge was funding. We investigated a lot of different sources of funding but it came down to bootstrapping which gives us freedom to try many things.
The third challenge is building the initial consulting client(s). We believe we have a lot of in-demand skills. Finding the right fit takes time however.
Writing out the solution to each of these challenges could be an article in itself. The common theme is that each challenge is being solved with AIs such as GPT4 and by communicating with my cofounder, who is skilled at scaling startups. By defining and creatively approaching these problems solutions become apparent.
Thanks for reading this far, and if you liked it give me a follow or a reaction. If you are interested in learning more about our consulting services feel free to reach out — here or on any social media/email. Our contact information can be found at 255labs.xyz/about.
