Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Coming up with the product idea is one thing, but productizing and building a business is quite a different thing. This is where, I think, you made a choice of going the B2C route. You pivoted to B2B where you found more success. What was your experience of the business side of it? How did you learn what you needed to learn?

Marc Vontobel: First of all, a big mistake a lot of founders do at the beginning is to believe that the first idea is to be proven right. In many cases, the first idea may be the spark. The more you talk to people, you figure out it wasn’t exactly the right thing. You have to listen and open up.

Then there comes a point in time where you see that it’s creating value for the customer. If you want to repeatably grow, you have to stick with something. You can’t go too broad. You can’t go into the market with lots of different ideas and say yes to everything.

Starmind is a technology where that mistake can happen easily. Almost everyone can think of a use case on how to use it. My mom used to be a teacher. When I explained to her what we are doing, she said, “We need that in our school as well.” There are opportunities everywhere. You’ve to learn how to say no but, at the same time, to listen to the market and customer.

Sramana Mitra: One of the things that we teach very extensively is positioning – this process of saying no to things, figuring out what segment you want to go after, how you are going to package and price, what is the competition. My conclusion is that you have to learn to position. Otherwise, you can never flesh out a product idea in a meaningful way.

Marc Vontobel: I couldn’t agree more. If you can learn that upfront, that’s even better than learning it the hard way.

Sramana Mitra: You and I learned it the hard way. The market was so new and the internet was just coming. We were figuring things out on the job. Today, there is no excuse for not learning it upfront. This is where case studies really help. You figured out you were going to do the B2B route. What use cases were coming up? Where in the enterprise did you penetrate the market and where did you find your early validation?

Marc Vontobel: I’d just like to come back to something you said before. We were very lucky that the moment we pivoted into the B2B space, there was a big buzz around AI. There were lots of CIOs of large organizations trying to figure out how we can induce AI into our company. It doesn’t really matter what the output is. It doesn’t matter what the value is. We now need AI to be modern. That helped us a lot because we haven’t had our positioning clear yet.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel
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