""When Ramineni and Udotong came up with the concept of a meeting notetaker AI, their backs were "against the wall," Ramineni told Business Insider. "So we said, we're down to our last bit of money, let's figure something out, but this time, before we write a line of code, let's make sure that we can actually validate it," said Ramineni,the CEO of Fireflies.ai. "And we had to pay rent, and SF is really expensive.""
""Ramineni was living off savings after a brief stint with Microsoft, and Udotong had never had a full time job. To validate their idea, Ramineni said, they reached out to some friends in the tech space and asked them if they would be willing to pay $100 a month for their meeting notes to be fully taken care of in 2017.""
Sam Udotong and Krish Ramineni manually took notes for over 100 meetings while posing as an AI bot called Fred. They charged early customers $100 per month for meeting notes and disclosed only that there would be some human involvement. The founders joined meetings live to take notes by hand and typically delivered notes within a day. The approach validated demand before writing code while the founders were low on funds and needed to pay rent. The effort helped grow Fireflies.ai, which automates meeting note-taking and later reached a $1 billion valuation as virtual meetings rose. Reactions ranged from praise for validating product-market fit to questions about the ethics of presenting manual work as AI.
Read at Business Insider
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