I had a great talk with Nirman Dave from Obviously.ai. He is building a No-code AI startup that just raised $3.9M in funding. They have a very inspiring story, starting their business in an Airbnb garage. They went door to door asking data professionals for feedback to finally get a product that truly makes the creation AI models very easy.
Highlights of the discussion:
- Nirman is from India and during a gap year in Bay Area he started his first startup: a Lego kit for developers that got him to collaborate with Intel and Arduino
- He studied Machine Learning and Behavioral Economics
- He started working as a Data Scientist in San Francisco, and as the only Data Scientist in the company and he kept getting requests to help on simpler tasks such as building regression or basic prediction models for Business users. Sounds familiar? 😂
- That's how the idea triggered: build a tool to build those simple AI models for business users - and the idea of Obvisouly.ai was born! 🎉
- Right now they are 12 people working in the startup and moving to grow to close to 25 in the next couple of months
- Right now they are 12 people and growing to close to25 in the next couple of months
- Both co-founders use to live in an Airbnb house, they quit their jobs, ask the landlord if they could stay and she accepted, placing them in the basement. In exchange they provided help with Airbnb chores around the house...and that's how they've got free housing in San Francisco! 🤩
- The goal was to build a product usable for business users, that was not just a little different from everything out there...but something dramatically different. Design and UX was key
- They went door to door meeting customers and users to get feedback to get the product right
- Mission: Make Data Science effortless but not so simple that is useless
- They have 3,000+ users that built 82,000+ models trained in their product and they estimate that it saved 10-12 million hours of regular data science work time
- AI is going to be so commoditized. Good analogy is Canva, they commoditize Graphic Design. Zapier commoditize the need to develop  python scripts to connect apps and systems. They are doing the same for AI.
- Data Science is not going to be redundant with these AutoML tools, data scientists will  will focus on harder problems
- Nirman's two personal favorite use cases are lead conversion prediction and dynamic pricing
- Their target customer is any small team with no access to data scientists
- Their lunch on ProductHunt was a big moment to open up the product to all the Internet
We even got a LIVE DEMO during the interview!Check out their product here: https://www.obviously.ai/
