From Couch to 8K in revenue under 3 weeks
The building of Kriya AI, your on-demand startup workforce
After coming up with an idea, one of the core responsibilities of a founder is building a team, beta launch and start the company. To get there, one must identify a target market, product market fit, build a team, ship the product and validate hypotheses quickly.
There are different stages to this process. If you are at a very early stage, you need to build a product with less resources and a little money. You hustle, team up with co-founders or take help from others by giving up equity. The other hard way to do is raise funds and hire people.
Due to these above reasons, most startups stop at the idea phase. Like Paul Graham said, “Startups don’t die, they fade away.”
So how do you get from idea to the prototype and the launch? We have a solution. AI powered on-demand workforce for engineering, marketing, sales, design and PR editorial services.
The Minimum Viable Product
After the failure of my first company and analyzing the fallout, I explored a phenomenon that I experienced first hand. You can read the complete story on how we got here.
Few months back, I started validating the need for this solution without building any product. I partnered with my ex-colleague, Gregory Wisenberg, we called up our friends and their friends who are also entrepreneurs. We requested them to offload their office work, manage it and get it done faster for economical costs.
By the end of the first week, they offloaded 30 hrs of work. And by the end of the second week, they offloaded some more.
By the end of 3rd week, we were working day/night using Slack/Email making connections to the right freelance talent and making some money by taking a cut on each task.
Greg and I started observing a few cool things.
We had less friction: The barrier to entry is minimal, assigning a task to the right talent is as simple as texting a friend.
Responsibility is a given: With ownership comes responsibility, we were more responsible towards client’s delegation.
We saved time: We are saving them time spent towards recruiting, vetting and budgeting. Around 50 hrs per task.
We made clients smile: It’s a joy when people get their time back and it reflects in their day. They never leave the service.
By the end of first month, we generated $8,000 in revenue and decided it was time to build the product.
The Product
Our product roadmap was set with our initial customer feedback, design intuition and some native admin tools for the team to scale manually.
- Conversational Interface: A friendly bot that welcome two types of the users, take inputs like a recruiter and facilitates a connection between client and freelancer.
- Messaging: A chat platform for real-time communication between clients and freelancers.
- Machine Learning: A cognitive technology that maps jobs to the skills in real time with an estimate on the budget.
- Integration: Deep integration into people’s favorite workflows, Slack, Email, Messenger and other workflows.
We used our own service to build and launch Kriya AI for under $3000. With a web application, we got six startups to start using our workforce to launch.
We are seeding the supply by partnering with vetted & managed service companies in a number of fields including engineering, design, sales, marketing and editorial PR.
Why Kriya?
Kriya AI was built with the understanding that the majority of founders experience an array of turmoil when starting a company. We are here to alleviate those external factors. Full story here
Let’s look at the key components required to build an MVP.
- Design: This is the most important step, without which, no one should proceed to any of the following. The MVP should be defined and finalized at this stage
- Prototyping: UX flows, playing with the interface and finalizing the look and feel.
- Engineering: Wire up the UX with backend and finish the product.
- Testing: Test different edge cases, squash bugs and get ready to the release.
The average cost of upon completion of the steps mentioned above can range anywhere between $15–25K. Remember, this price only includes the monetary value of hiring contractors, designers, engineers by yourself or an agency that gets everything done. Let’s not forget the amount of time it takes to source and manage the team you’ve hired to put a product out. In my experience, it will take between 2–3 months from hiring to execution.
That’s when it struck to us. A friend of mine, runs a company, Delighterr — an intelligent client management outlook plug-in, helping people to better maintain business relationships. They came to me for help on his MVP. They had designs and most of the product built out, but felt it wasn’t quite ready yet.
They used our service where the bot helped in connecting with the design partners that upgraded their website, helped with front-end engineering and now they are planning to use our platform for getting their back-end work done as well.
This is why we strongly believe in the future of work — is distributed. If you ever need to get your work done in the fields of sales, engineering, marketing, design and writing, use Kriya Workforce to connect with the right talent under 30 minutes.
