Jumping on exploding AI trends

In AI we see some MONSTER funding rounds. Two Series A’s were recently announced; Pika and Together AI, $55M and $102.5M, respectively. (disclaimer; I'm an investor in Pika)

Pika is a text-to-video platform that is currently run on Discord (like Midjourney is). 

Fun Fact Midjourney accounts for 13% of ALL Discord invite traffic ~16 Million members (!!), Pika is #2 with just 500k users (+ growing fast).

Together AI is a cloud platform for building and running generative AI. Think API calls, fine-tuning, GPU clusters and custom models. 

Their dataset RedPyjama was downloaded 1.2 Million times last month.

How to think about opportunities here

Well, if we think about big platforms created in the past - let’s use Airbnb as an example - there have been a ton of businesses that have made $Millions off the back of that. One is Airdna - they provide data around the short-term rental market and have made ~$10-30m per year in the last few years. Another business type making multi-millions per year from Airbnb? Property management software. 

This is a perfect ancillary business. Because of Airbnb, these types of ideas make business sense for a subset of hosts (who have money and want to make more).

If we look at something like Stripe Atlas - which provides a business setup in a box - which had 20k customers as of 2021, ~$10M revenue (we can assume around 30k customers as of today - $15M). Firstbase, a similar product has served 22k customers at $399, or roughly $9M (before any add-ons).

These are services that automate a bunch of manual, confusing stuff every business needs to do (filings, documents, bank accounts etc)

They are two very different examples.

But both give us similar ways to think about opportunities around these AI platforms.

Opportunities

Ideas around Pika

A new wave of text-to-video experts will emerge. I’m awful at being creative, I’d happily pay someone to make AI videos for me. You could do this in multiple ways; 

• (reverse) job board for finding a text-to-video creator - ie you pay to access the list of experts and reach out to them (e.g. railsdevs does this for rails developers). Charge $100/mo to access the list.

• Productised service - effectively I pay a monthly subscription to get a number (or unlimited) video requests, an expert on the other side writes the prompt, sends the video, tweaks the prompt based on my feedback and on and on. You could charge up to $5k/mo for this kind of service easily.

Jumping on these things early could mean the platform itself would recommend you as a partner to potential customers, in the early days at least (for example: Shopify themes)

Ideas around Together.ai

If Together’s mission is for all types of companies to have their own AI products, then there’s a gap between available engineering resources at many different businesses and doing it yourself (of which there are plenty of tools also). People like ‘Do-it-for-me’.

Set up a service in the way Stripe Atlas does - get a bunch of information upfront, help companies deploy their own AI chatbots, train on their data and offer support afterwards for a monthly/yearly fee. Large parts of this process could be automated and potentially use outsourced talent for engineering-heavy parts. 

Sell the setup for $500. There are easily 10k businesses out there thinking about having this or wanting it in the near term.

Chatbase lets you set up your own ‘ChatGPT’ using your data, it makes $1M annual recurring revenue, with a solo-founder. The market is there.

The same thinking could be applied to many exploding platforms.

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