From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: David Moss, Co-Founder, President and CTO of People Power Company (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: All these things that you talked about fit under positioning. Product positioning makes or breaks the business. You have to hit the right pain points, the right go-to-market strategy,and the right segmentation.

The next question I want to ask you is, you were tinkering with certain ideas in 2009, but the real idea around which you started building People Power took several years. Something like four years?

David Moss: At least. We are one of the most advanced platforms for in-home care of the elderly population. It wasn’t until 2018 that we received a very large government grant to commercialize this technology.

We had a mission in mind that we were here to help people. We’re doing that by bridging the physical world into a digital world. Yes, it did take many years. It’s not a narrow, straight path. Having a mission in mind and an overall goal, you’ll eventually get to that.

Sramana Mitra: How did you sustain yourself during those years? Was there revenue coming in?

David Moss: A couple of ways. We did have revenue coming in. We’re a B2B company. Some of these customers would even fund our roadmap. That was really helpful because we were bringing revenue in and we had a whole backlog of things to choose from. They would help prioritize our backlogs. That was important.

Sramana Mitra: Were those contracts structured as services contracts?

David Moss: We were able to keep our intellectual property.

Sramana Mitra: Services contracts with intellectual property.

David Moss: Right. We avoid non-recurring engineering fees. We’re ultimately a SaaS company. It also was helpful to have a network of investors who believed in our mission and supported us. Part of that is because my co-founder is well-connected.

Sramana Mitra: He was full-time CEO of the company?

David Moss: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You had some amount of money coming in. In the true sense of the world, you didn’t have a product-market fit. You were able to satisfy customers, but you were still looking for something else.

David Moss: Yes. Back to the camera concept, that did have product-market fit. The problem was, it’s still not a venture-scale business.

Sramana Mitra: In addition to your B2B business, there was a B2C app.

David Moss: Right. By proving that out, we’re enabling our business channel partners to have a service that they themselves can launch and explore. Many were interested in that. It also proved our technology. We really have a robust platform that you can depend your life on. We did get a lot of press. It helped our conversations with businesses who want to take this in-home technology to market.

Sramana Mitra: How much revenue was that app generating?

David Moss: It generated over a million dollars easily, but we needed more to build a venture-scale business. User research is critical to any startup. In fact, my wife is a user experience researcher herself. That’s one resource I’m able to tap into.

We also have some other user researchers onboard. Researching these people and what motivates them, you end up finding things that other people miss. Here, we had an app that was in millions of people’s homes. We’re in the private homes of these families.

We go out and interview over a thousand of them. The results were pretty predictable for the most part. About 94% said they were using it how we thought they would be using it. They were using it for security. They’re using it to watch over their pets. 6% of that population said that they’re using this to watch over a loved one with Dementia or Alzheimer’s.

From a quantitative perspective, that’s not very impressive. The qualitative feedback we received was the most passionate feedback I had ever seen. One woman said, “It was because of this app that she was able to keep her job at work.” Her mother had to stay at home. She’s able to watch over her mom remotely. We knew there was something there.

That’s what got us oriented towards the senior care market. Today, we have published scientific evidence that our solutions help decrease the anxiety of caregivers of people with Dementia and Alzheimer’s. We have evidence around increasing the sleep quality of these caregivers. We feel that we’re making a difference in people’s lives here.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: David Moss, Co-Founder, President and CTO of People Power Company
1 2 3 4 5 6