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Moment to drive momentum

Moment to drive momentum
Photo by Sunder Muthukumaran / Unsplash

I've stepped back this weekend to map where we really stand and what we must do, fast, to turn our deep R&D into a live product and fresh cash.

I know we have R&D overhang that we still need to do, but I will suggest strongly we delay some items (or work on the R&D part time) in order to get momentum going on other areas we have side-lined for the past few months. I believe R&D will never actually end and we ARE perfectionists, so we need to take drastic action to make sure we do work on product, marketing, sales, fundraising, hiring, and other key areas as a shock to our system.

Below is a hyper concise plan, please read, tweak if needed, and reply "go" or add suggestions by tonight so we can start tomorrow morning .

Current Facts (no spin)

  • Product: Six months of strong component work (custom retrieval system, multiple agent workflows, 10+ UI mock ups) but no end-to-end demo, no customer LOIs, no formal evaluation of R&D.
  • Data: junior scraping team filling in backlog; live feeds not yet in place and no timeline for when we will have live running data for the equities we need
  • Funding: two months of runway left; angels ready to bridge another 3-4 months once SAFE and Companies Houses work in place
  • Market: design partners list from earlier customer interviews and development work is still warm but is rapidly going cold

Back on track Sprint (Until you go to Malaysia)

Day 0 (tonight): Agree on this plan [Owner: Both]

72 hours:

  • First evaluation results to validate retrieval work and a piece written on why 6 months of our time has been spent on retrieval and what it unlocks downstream. We implicitly believe this firmly as a bet, let's make explicit and now mark to market. [Owner: King]
  • Working demo of Wissen Agentic QA with a write-up on how we will approach evaluation and improvement [Owner: Hamza]

Day 4:

  • Financial Stability - how we are going to fund ourselves over the next 3/4 months and how we are going to approach business and personal finances to maximise likelihood of success. Get all legal work we need to do done and phase out Ollie, King to work with Hamza to keep Hamza in check - Hamza has a tendency to delay non-essential items indefinitely until they become a problem. [Owner: Hamza]

Day 5-7:

  • "@King to insert big 3 day sprint to be completed by Monday next week on his end which is focussed on product not just R&D [Owner: King]
  • Finalise 3 key agentic workflows showcasing declarative agent building capabilities to reach output quality in discrete tasks not possible by Wissen Agentic QA. Create a working demo with UI and send over results to at least 5 design partners to get feedback. [Owner: Hamza]

Day 8:

  • Spend the entire day planning in detail GTM for the consultancy route and setting in place processes to get customer development [owner: Hamza] and consistent product shipping [owner: King] back into the forefront of business interest

Why this shift?

R&D doesn't fund customers. Customers should fund R&D. We have the wealthiest customers in the world.

  1. Demo first: validate real demand and focus our R&D and feature build. Helps us get our first paying customer ASAP.
  2. Cash second: extend runway by >4 months, buy us hiring and data options, ease our stress, increase our salary so we aren't hand-to-mouth as founders.
  3. Everything else (mass scraping, revolutionary HCI, additional complex agents, data science work, etc) returns to a backlog until a paying pilot exists for the work we have ALREADY done over the past year.

Asks & Next Steps:

  • Let me know by 22:00 tonight whether you're happy with the plan, the deliverables, and any edits and owners etc. It obviously has missed a lot of nuance and is disruptive by design so think of how to minimise the damage.
  • I know you have overhang R&D timelines on your end - but I need us whilst we're together before you go to Malaysia to get some concrete results written up, get some working demos together (limited in scope and ambition but working), and get our finances and near term strategy together.
  • When you are in Malaysia it makes a lot more sense to have asynchronous R&D efforts from your end etc. It also opens me up to spend that time doing aggressive customer development, marketing, and get our first paying pilot in place by the end of May.
  • Think of what I have missed out. And really think about how we can make the most of our time together before we work async, and also how we can make the most of our async time. Being alone as founders can be positively reframed to help us harness those parts of ourselves that need space and time to flourish.