- No tools are needed by themselves, so selling them is very difficult. People are much more willing to buy results—which can be achieved using these tools.
- Therefore, those who simply create good tools don’t make money—those who know how to package them correctly do 😉 Here’s a startup that has packaged AI tools for developers inside several nested “matryoshkas”.
- The beauty of it is that the same “matryoshka” concept can be used to repackage your own product from any other sphere.
Project Essence
Today’s startup was founded in August of last year and is currently undergoing acceleration in Techstars, from which it received the allotted accelerator funding of $150,000.
The technological core of the project looks quite ordinary today, but as usual, the devil is in the details 😉
Astronuts wants “good programming teams to become great” with the help of their platform.
To achieve this, the platform has two main tools.
The first tool is an AI assistant for programmers named Neil, which helps reduce the time it takes to write code and the number of errors made during its creation.
The second tool is an AI search engine for program source code and documentation, which helps quickly find answers to questions about the functionality of existing code and reuse already prepared modules and packages, without programming a new one from scratch 😉
These tools integrate with popular developer platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, and Asana.
The cost of using the full version of Astronuts is $19.99 or $39.99 per user per month, depending on the maximum data storage time.
Seems like nothing special, but the startup claims that for teams that start using Astronuts within the first 90 days:
productivity increases by 50%, the number of errors in the code decreases by 30%, the time spent on tasks decreases by 30% (cycle time), and the need for further improvement of the written code (technical debt) decreases by 40%.
But how?
What’s Interesting
The Main Problems of Teams That Cause Release Deadlines to Be Missed Aren’t Even About Code Writing Speed! You can write fast, but not necessarily right 😉
Astronuts believes that the main problems are:
- Incorrect estimation of the time and effort required to program a given functionality.
- Incorrect and/or overly long estimation of what will need to be refactored in existing code as a result of introducing new code (initial impact analysis).
- Lack of knowledge about how and what works in existing code, leading to a lot of time being spent searching for answers to these questions or creating duplicate or conflicting code.
- Missing critical and fundamental implementation details, leading to subsequent rewriting of code.
- Uneven skill levels among different team members, resulting in less skilled programmers holding back the entire team and reducing the overall quality of the result.
I would pay particular attention to the last point, as the results of some experiments (even outside the programming field) show that the biggest effect of using AI tools is achieved by less skilled employees. Their efficiency increases by 43%, while the efficiency of their more skilled colleagues increases by only 17%—resulting in the difference in efficiency between them narrowing to almost imperceptible 4%.
Therefore, implementing AI helps align the skill levels of any team members, bringing less skilled members up to the level of more skilled ones, so they stop acting as bottlenecks that spoil the team’s overall work results.
However, identifying problems and even providing team members with tools to solve them is not enough. The application of such tools needs to be made a managed process. And, as is well known, you can only manage what you can measure 😉
Therefore, the central part of Astronuts is not even the AI tools. It’s a dashboard capable of showing 60 different indicators of the programming team’s work quality—through which team members and their leaders can monitor work efficiency.
However, simply recording the situation is good but not enough. Therefore, Astronuts can suggest which specific indicators the team as a whole and each of its members need to improve. This is where the AI assistant of Astronuts starts to actively guide each programmer in the direction they need to go 😉
An additional tool that encourages team members to use AI tools to improve their own metrics is the built-in micro-reward system in Astronuts. This system allows rewarding programmers for improving their personal metrics, which they needed to improve to increase team productivity.
Astronuts automatically credits these rewards as the platform’s calculated metrics change and sends them to team members via Slack in the form of links to gift cards of the corresponding denomination. The rules for linking metric dynamics and reward sizes are set by platform administrators.
Thus, the startup sells companies not just an AI assistant for programmers with an AI search engine for code and documentation but a “Matryoshka.” The first Matryoshka—programming on time with the required quality. Inside it—a Matryoshka with metrics of the team’s timeframes and quality. Inside it—a Matryoshka with individual metrics of each team member. And only inside it—a Matryoshka with AI tools to help each team member improve these metrics. And the cherry on top of this Matryoshka—a micro-reward system that incentivizes the use of these tools.
Where to Run
No tools are needed by themselves, so selling them is very difficult. People are much more willing to buy results—what can be achieved using these tools. The more beautiful and convincing the very first matryoshka looks, the easier it will be to sell all the other nested matryoshkas hidden inside it.
Therefore, structuring the offer and product as a “matryoshka” is a very good approach that should be used in the development and sale of products in any field.
So, the most general and main conclusion is to figure out how to restructure your own product as such nested matryoshkas.
What is the ideal end result that the client wants to achieve? What additional nested matryoshkas need to be developed to descend sequentially from the end result to the set of tools you are initially developing?
Today’s Astronuts is a specific example that can be taken and developed further. For example, by adding other AI tools to it that can help achieve the ideal end result—releasing high-quality software products on time with fewer developers.
Considering delays in software development and a shortage of qualified personnel, this is a specific direction to move in. And the matryoshka system that Astronuts has only outlined so far is an attractive packaging in which the corresponding AI tools will be easier to sell 😉
About the Company
Astronuts Website: astronuts.io
Last Funding Round: $150K, 03/13/2024
Total Investments: $150K, Rounds: 1