Resolutions, Business development, AI product hackathon

[Nicholas Morley]

Hi everyone,
 
As we come into the new year, I wanted to share with you some reflections about my approach to business so far and, dare I say, a resolution that I've come to.

My approach so far has been one dominated by product vision and technical focus, with a lack of business development focus. While my group has had several promising customer relationships (such as one I presented at Office Hours many months ago, which we're still nurturing), I've used them to become complacent and focus on product, while the bottom line remains at zero.
 
My resolution is to shift my focus from technical to sales. I.e., prioritise finding people with problems (and money) and solve them. I realise this is business 101, but I feel the urgency and hunger to own it in a way I haven't before.  
 
By the way, in keeping with my technical/product inclination, I competed in a hackathon over the Christmas period and produced something along the lines of the AI-powered research assistant that has long been the theme of my work. The video is online and I'd love for you to take a look if you're interested: Summit - AI-Powered Research Tool.

Please do follow up with any comments, ideas or if you want to chat. In any case I look forward to seeing you 2023.
 
All the best,  
Nick Morley  
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmorley111

[Dan Hagon]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for sharing these reflections and the results of your hackathon. I'm impressed and inspired by the presentation that you've put together as I've also been spending a large part of the holidays working on turning a prototype I have for Floohm into something I can put in front of live users and start the process of iterating on product development. Initial feedback from the prototype I pulled together was very positive but I know that the real test is if that enthusiasm translates into sales, as you have identified.

The aim of this latest sprint was to to get something production-ready which means a focus on integrating payment processing via Stripe to get paying customers from day one, hardening security on the frontend (e.g. reCaptcha for sign-ups , 2-factor auth for sign-ins, ...) so that user know I'm serious about making Floohm be the place they can trust to do their most important software development work, and just as importantly extensive manual and automated testing. There is still some work to do to get this production-ready MVP over the line but the ambitious goal is to have something ready as early as next week.

I'd certainly be keen to chat more about your own approach to building sales through focusing hard on the problems users need solving so feel free to reach out.

Best,

Dan.

[Nick Morley]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your comments. Excited to learn more about your product and journey and to explore ideas so I will be reaching out.

Cheers,

Nick

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[Mark R]

Hi Nick, 

I enjoyed your video demo a great deal.  Very interesting work.  I have been doing work in adjoining areas and would love to chat about use cases.  I will ping you on LinkedIn,

Mark