Fundraising pre-round! Stretching before the run… Mar ’22 Company Update

I recently started writing public company status updates. You can read more about why here.

Ask: We are still accepting cheques (min. USD$25k) in the first phase of our fundraising. Please let me know if you’re interested or know anyone who might be interested to know more!

Previously at Aggregate Intellect…

In February ’22 …

• We started organizing our thoughts around Growth Flywheel
• We looked into product analytics tools (beyond GA) and picked / integrated Mixpanel
• We got a lot of pitch feedback from friendly investors and fellow founders

See also: December ’21 | January ‘22

Here is what happened in March 2022:

Well, we started talking to investors! We had made a decision to go with a Post-money Rolling SAFE for this round. Of course a future lead investor might negotiate to use a different type of agreement, but we thought that this was a fairly defensible place to start. We decided to structure the raise in 3 phases:

• Pre-round, where we aim to raise a few hundred thousand dollars (objective of this round was to get our story sharper as get challenged by the investors, get more people — literally — invested in the success of our fundraising, and of course, extend our runway)
• As soon as we hit our target, we hard pivot our focus to finding a lead investor. This is a big one and will take many many many meetings with many many investors. We are going about qualifying investors we want to talk to more carefully to ensure we go about this more rigorously (check out my update for next month to hear about this)
• Then finish up the round with follower investors which shouldn’t be too hard given the collective network that we have and the conversations that we have started

We originally thought this could be wrapped up in 2 month! yes, go on, laugh! whatever! but…

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

however…

The miscalculation of time required for achievement enables the undertaking of endeavors far larger than we would knowingly attempt to achieve. — Mayfer’s Law

yup!

Anyway, we’ve made some good friends along the way, and have learned some valuable lessons. We are 50% committed at the moment and importantly have some investors who know what they’re talking about in our corner!

We’ve made a lot of headway over the past month! We’ve spent many hours updating our materials & sharpening our story, and we have already closed half of our 1st tranche (of 3) in less than 2 weeks! — Maryam

Based on some of the feedback we’ve gotten, we’ve decided to revisit our material and timelines and budget to tighten up everything. Think about this as preparing for an exam, or a job interview, or whatever else like that. We anticipate having 4–5 investor meetings a day for an extended period of time and that leaves no room for significant prep, so we have to anticipate what’s going to happen and be on top of it. And we’re fortunate to have investors and friends who have done it and are helping us through this!

go community, go! — Amir :)

What were the highlights of the month for the team?

Community

On the community side we’re working on some interesting partnerships

We are finalizing partnerships with both the <famous podcast name> podcast & <famous conference name> conference series — we’ll be indexing and turning their content into RECIPEs! — Maryam

and our annual women in AI event (WinAI) went pretty well

Women in AI Week 2022 was a success! We had hundreds of attendees across the events & will be publishing those RECIPEs next month — Maryam

We’ve been busy figuring out how to abstract ourselves out of the equation in our community so that we can have more self-organizing activities:

We have launched our streamlined processes that have increased our community groups from 5 to 15; and this infrastructure has enabled our discussion and working groups to produce RECIPEs without hand holding — Ammar

We also started an Environmental Data Science workshop and project series in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada that aims to educate data scientists about using geological and environmental datasets, and climate scientists about using ML in their stack.

See all the ongoing groups and projects here.

Dev

We are getting much closer to building the solution we set out to do a few years ago: a much better way to discover knowledge. Of course, a much better search experience is a big component of this and we’ve been testing some ideas and prototypes with our users and have been getting good feedback. The first portion of this new search experience has started being deployed in March

The search engine is finally in working shape! Now it can search for resources and related concepts. Many improvements are going to happen to the search service, but at least the starting point is here — Percy

and some much needed UI improvements

My proudest contribution this month is the new search screen. I implemented a complete custom query suggestion bar from bottoms up. — Eyob

And of course won’t be complete without our new shiny “graphical tag navigator” that acts like an R&D assistant by suggesting ways to narrow down the search that the user does

My contribution this month has been on the graph visualization and allowing users to interact with it — Bereket

In a lot of our user interviews we heard that people wanted a better way to be notified about actions necessary for their REICPEs. So, we finally sat down and came up with a good logic for how to provide email notifications without being annoying.

Other than wrapping up the Notion integration, I implemented the new email notification logic that should be released soon — Samuel

We’ve been also getting feedback about other parts that can be improved

My proudest contribution of this month is making resource and recipe editing and previewing smooth — Muluwork

As I said last month, figuring out how to collect event level data about users’ interaction with our product is very important and we did some research and ended up using Mixpanel for that purpose. It needed some dev to set things up and start collecting data

Setting the integrations with mixpanel is my proudest contribution for this month as it will allow us to collect accurate data to make better decisions in the future — Hamid

Speaking of data, we’ve been busy figuring out our data strategy for the rest of the year and 2023 to make sure we are collecting the data we need and are in talks with other data provider that we need to integrate into

I finally has a decent list of scholar datasets — Alice

Parting thoughts…

The big lesson of the month for me was that there is so much work to do to build a business and although my understanding of that has been improving every month for the past 3 years, there is still so much to learn. It is quite humbling to experience firsthand what needs to be done (probably) for all the products and brands that we use, respect, and take for granted!

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