Hey there! Welcome to my blog, where I write about my entrepreneurial journey. Last week I spent most of my time meeting (>20) people from my Antler cohort, doing a few more discovery interviews and starting to research the insights coming out of these interviews.

🅰️Preparing for the start of the program

I’ve been meeting more and more potential co-founders last week, and I’m getting more and more excited to build something with one or more of them. Genuinely impressed with the high caliber of people that Antler selected for the program. There’s a wide diversity of demographics (age, origin, but less so gender) and experiences (AI, consulting, product management, research, large corporates). Many of the people I met are passionate about topics such as climate, health (including mental) and of course AI, and a few are serial entrepreneurs.

The topic that speaks loudest to me is helping people improve their mental health, and I think AI-powered solutions can have a huge impact in this space. I’m staying open to other areas, but mental health + AI will probably be top-of-mind.

The chats I’m having with potential co-founders to start out as your typical job interview, where we each share our professional stories, sprinkled with some personal stuff. A big difference however is that there’s much more “real” sharing and vulnerability from the start. It becomes a lot less about trying to make the best impression, and a lot more about authenticity.

Interestingly, I’m getting more attuned to measuring the chemistry and the ease with each we understand each other. I’m also noticing that I’m paying a lot of attention to how specific vs. general people are in their examples and the balance between solid vision and open-mindedness.

Finally, today there’s a kick-off event, where we’ll be meeting in person for the first time🎉

🙋Customer discovery progress

With the focus gradually shifting to antler, it’s becoming difficult to build up momentum in building SquidGPT further beyond doing the customer interviews. I still hope to squeeze in building some features before Antler starts, but time is moving so fast 😅

After a few more discovery chats, I’ve narrowed down the top 4 frameworks frameworks I’ll be adding to SquidGPT next:

• Working backwards - a press release announcing the product’s availability, written with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The audience is the customer.
• User stories - general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user or customer
• Product brief - summarizes the scope, goals, and direction of a product. The audience is engineers, designers, direct product stakeholders
• Go-to-market documents - translates the product brief to other parts of the organization (e.g. sales, support), and adds plans and strategies relevant to those parts

The discussions have fleshed out a few other learnings, that go against the hypotheses I’m basing SquidGPT on:

• PMs may not want to delegate work that’s highly strategic and creative (e.g. product strategy) to AI tools. Instead, high volume and less creative (e.g. synthesizing large amounts of information into a work product, properly tagging and analyzing tickets in Jira) could be a better fit
• People may not really need help with starting to write something, but rather with polishing and covering blind spots
• Users may be reluctant to share strategic or quantitative information due to privacy concerns
• Users may want help with picking the right framework for a problem rather than with filling it in

🗿Personal update: How’s it going, Stefan?

This weekend I went to see a theater play by a Moldovan theater company in Strasbourg. It was a bit too much of an abstract-variety-show-manifesto-type-of-play for me to enjoy it, but it’s cool to see Moldovan artists on Western European scenes. I’ve also stuffed my mouth with as much tarte flambee as I could!

A friend is visiting this weekend. Looking forward to catching up and visiting the Louvre for the second time this month.

➡️Next steps

• Add new frameworks to bot
• Meet more people from my Antler cohort