Focusing on Local Problems: The Winning Strategy for AI Startups

As the co-founder and CEO of Kata.ai, Iran shares his entrepreneurial journey, emphasizing the importance of falling in love with problems rather than technology or solutions, and highlighting the opportunities for local AI companies to solve hyper-local problems.

1. An entrepreneur should focus on understanding and solving a problem rather than falling in love with technology or a solution.
2. The key is to focus on customers and their pain points and build a solution around it, putting customers first before technology.
3. Local AI companies have the opportunity to solve hyper-local problems using AI to analyze and understand local data.
4. Iran is the co-founder and CEO of Kata.ai, a conversational artificial intelligence platform that helps businesses improve customer engagement through messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Te
5. Kata.ai's NLP algorithm understands intonation language, including 13 types of ways people express the first-person pronoun in Indonesian texting language.
6. Kata.ai uses an annual subscription model where customers pay a license fee based on traffic size and number of conversations served each year.
7. Kata.ai's key focus industries include telecommunications providers and financial services.
8. Iran has been an entrepreneur since childhood, selling caricatures in elementary school, building bots for online games in middle and high school, and playing bass guitar in a band while pursuing h
9. Iran believes that being in a band helped him learn about digital marketing, coding, and talking to sponsors, all of which have contributed to his success as an entrepreneur today.
10. Kata.ai started as a B2C virtual assistant company called YesBoss before pivoting to B2B and changing its name to Kata.ai.
11. During the transition from B2C to B2B, Iran had to let go of 90 staff members, which was one of the toughest moments of his life.
12. An entrepreneur should look for team members who have a clear mission and vision, a growth mindset, and humility and coachability.
13. When solving a problem, it's important to focus on the algorithm and NLP technology, provide human backup when necessary, and continuously train the AI using knowledge from human agents.
14. Kata.ai operates as a software house but has built relationships with consulting firms to leverage its technology to build AI-powered chatbots for their customers.
15. In B2B sales, it's important to find innovators or early adopters and build relationships that will help establish trust and credibility in the market.
16. The future of conversational commerce lies in enabling human-like conversations on messaging apps to make it easy for consumers to interact with businesses, pay for services, and purchase products
17. Iran's dream is for Kata.ai to create a long-lasting impact by delivering value with AI to people and improving their happiness, productivity, and customer experience.

Source: EO via YouTube

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