Why Your Initial Target Market Shouldn’t Be Your Only Target
Thank you for waiting; the computer will see you now. As in, actually see you. The fields of deep learning, AI, and, yes, computer vision are coalescing to open up new pathways for tech that seem straight out of a sci-fi movie. One of the people on the front lines of the action is Dr. Paul Kruszewski. Having founded, worked in and sold companies in the AI/Machine learning tech space for the last 20+ years, his new company, wrnch, is making all of that accessible to anyone who wants to use it, and aiming to fit it all in to your pocket.
Paul is serial entrepreneur and self-described “tiny nerd.” He deals with the kind of tech that people have been buzzing about in recent years. Things like AI, deep learning, and machine learning — Paul’s been thinking about those kinds of things since he was old enough to buy his first computer. And yet, even for a technologist as savvy as Dr. Paul, when it comes to tech, sometimes the market knows better than the founder.
Paul’s made a career building things like AI-based crowd generation software and computer-vision body tracking platforms. That’s to say, a little more complicated than something like Flappy Bird, TikTok, or whatever new app is blazing across the app store. The big difference between what Paul does with his companies, and something like an app is this: Paul doesn’t create products, he builds the tools that let other people create products.
For example, Paul’s first company, the one that developed a CGI crowd generation tool, initially had its sights set on breaking in to the TV and film industry. Before his software, creating crowds of CGI characters was intensely time consuming, and you can see how being able to just click some buttons and have an entire army ready to go running down the side of a hill and crashing in to an opposing force would be highly useful if, say, you wanted to wage battles on an intergalactic scale… like some kind of WAR. Among the STARS, so to speak.
And Paul and his team did get to work on a number of film and TV projects initially, but not long after, they moved in to video games so they could generate crowds in real-time. Not a huge jump, one could argue, going from cinematic CGI battles to 3D video games. But the company really got its biggest boost when they got a call asking if that same software could be used to run military simulations. Why, yes it could, as a matter of fact.
Software started flying off the shelves to large training simulation integrators like L3 and Lockheed Martin. 12 months later, they’d been acquired by the largest military simulation company in the world.
Point being, sometimes, tech and software really is as straightforward as something like Flappy Bird, (though I don’t see Lockheed trying to buy that up anytime soon.) And while it’s important to have an initial vision for how people will use the platform or tool you’re building, there’s a benefit to maintaining some level of market agnosticism. That’s how Paul’s first company went from movies to video games to military simulation, and how his current company, wrnch, is being used for everything from augmented reality Samsung ads to body tracking at the 2020 Olympics. Software isn’t a round peg that has to fit in to a round hole; how it’s used is as creative as the mind that’s using it.
To learn more about Paul and how he’s become a serial entrepreneur in the tech space, check out his episode of Mark Cuban’s Founder Focused on YouTube and subscribe to catch new episodes and great tips for budding startups.
