13) Self-Awareness

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to unlock the truth in human conversation. Please pardon the stream-of-consciousness style. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

(typos are to make sure you’re paying attention)

Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, Worldbuilding, I explored the importance of building an immersive reality into which you can bring customers, employees, supporters, and investors as part of starting any company. I think the exciting part of the process is being open about where things might go and then fearlessly following those threads of inspiration as they arise naturally throughout lived experience. But this is definitely one of my favorite areas of business-building that I’ll continue to cultivate as the journey unfolds.

Self-Awareness

Newsletter Length

In talking about the newsletter with friends and loved ones, there has been one piece of unanimous feedback and that is: the newsletter is too long. Words can’t describe how devastating this development is / was to me, but we must persevere. So I’m now presented with two options: (1) continue waxing loquacious despite the well-intentioned feedback of people I love and trust, or (2) acknowledge my tendency to over-write and modify in an uncomfortable direction. And, perhaps surprisingly, I am going to go with option (2)! We will see what that actually means, but those of you that have told me I write too much, I see you, I hear you, and I will adjust.

Soft Pivot

In the spirit of a more streamlined newsletter, I’ll just touch briefly on a recent soft pivot of the business. The original focus area was around centralized storage and synthesis for customer feedback, targeting software companies. I came to the difficult realization that general-purpose LLMs are pretty good at this, and so I do think there’s utility a dedicated platform that can process hundreds of interviews at scale and then eventually get agentic with customer-rooted work products and stuff—but I’m not sure that that’s really my main quest.

So, in thinking about how to synthesize the experiences that I’ve had throughout my career and then more recently as a builder, I realized that really the most challenging part of the customer feedback value chain is finding people to talk to and scheduling those conversations. That inspired me to think about a different approach here whereby I’d help recruit feedback participants for companies and then schedule those calls for the companies. And then that took me to thinking about more of a marketplace model for consumer brands to speak with consumers. And then that took me to maybe exploring other possibilities around a marketplace model for brand product seeding or community building or something like that—and so things are still very much in flux there.

But I do think my main problem-area of interest is strengthening and/or disrupting how brands interact with consumers, how consumers interact with brands, and figuring out if there are any value arbitrages in and around turning “normal” consumers into UGC-creators and then allowing brands to publish seeding campaigns on the marketplace or something and having consumers see those opportunities and sign-up or something. I don’t know exactly how to crack it, but I think there’s something there.

More to come as I ideate and iterate but that’s the general direction we’re going. It’s been several months of intense and uncomfortable learning, and there will be many many more months to come. Please check out the revamped website below, and let me know what you think!

Vambrace AI

[Also, consistent with focused self-awareness, I’m terrified by the possibility of having to rename the company, because I’m not sure that “Vambrace” screams consumer feedback marketplace—but that’s a bridge I’m not ready to cross just yet.]

Looking Forward

I’ve started to gain a lot more appreciation for just how difficult things can be on the entrepreneurial journey and I know there’s a lot more difficulty ahead. But it’s also exciting to keep putting one foot in front of the other and sort of following the market and letting conversations drive direction.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Sincerely,

Luke