The Startup Velocity Question: Innovator’s Dilemma Kills Fundability

Say, you have a non-AI SaaS product with a $5M ARR. 

A competitor has come into the market with a new AI SaaS product addressing the same target customer.

You have to defend your turf and refurbish your SaaS product with AI to get the renewals. 

The Startup Velocity Question: Positioning Drives Exit

There is a commonly held misconception among operators who do not understand positioning: We don’t want to invest in Positioning. We will be selling the company.

The Startup Velocity Question: Repeatability Drives Exit

Perhaps you have come to the conclusion that you will not seek further funding.

Instead, you will look for an Exit. 

The Startup Velocity Question: Repeatability Drives Fundability

Founder-led sales is acceptable for the Seed round.

It is NOT acceptable for Series A or beyond.

At the minimum, you need a Repeatability Hypothesis to raise a sizable venture round.

The Startup Velocity Question: Positioning Drives Repeatability

There’s a common problem with Founder-led Sales: Positioning changes on the fly on a daily basis.

The Startup Velocity Question: Positioning Drives Segmentation

What problem does your product solve with a unique unfair advantage?

What ideal customer has that problem?

These questions are at the heart of Positioning.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Power story is a very complex story. As you were talking about your training, I was thinking about my engineering training and one of my favorite courses at MIT was Anant Agarwal’s VLSI design course. That is actually very automatable, right? Now you train AI to do chip design, and AI can design great chips. This is a highly automatable problem.

Ashmeet Sidana: It’s ironic that one of the first applications for AI has been software development. Software is being developed using AI, which is wonderful.

The Startup Velocity Question: Segmentation Drives TAM

I see segmentation errors left, right and center.

As such, I see sloppy TAM models left, right and center too.

Segmentation requires a precise profiling of your ideal customer with a host of parameters each of which can individually slash your TAM down by 10%.