Building A Prosumer AI Startup: The Merlin Story

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An Operator's Blog - with Soumitra Sharma

Soumitra Sharma

27 episodes

4 days ago

An Operator's Blog is hosted by Soumitra Sharma, General Partner at Operators Studio, a micro-VC firm focused on the US-India corridor. This podcast takes you into the world of startups and venture capital, featuring candid conversations focusing on sharing real operating insights, tips, and playbooks that you can immediately start using to solve your biggest challenges as a founder and operator. Join Soumitra as he cuts through the BS & interviews top founders, operators, and investors who have built businesses in the trenches for decades.

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Entrepreneurship

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Building A Prosumer AI Startup: The Merlin Story

An Operator's Blog - with Soumitra Sharma

1 hour 17 minutes 52 seconds

1 month ago

Building A Prosumer AI Startup: The Merlin Story

This episode delves in-depth into building a Prosumer AI startup.

We cover everything from overlooked spaces in AI, how to choose problem statements as a founder, learnings on upfront market research & customer discovery, creating defensibility in Prosumer AI, managing the foundation model layer, including closed source vs open source, Prosumer GTM, particularly influencers and affiliate marketing, new usage-based pricing models, fundraising learnings and finally, specific learnings for US-India founders.

Joining me for this discussion is Pratyush Rai, Co-founder of Merlin, an AI productivity assistant that you can use for everything from getting one-click answers to summarizing & repurposing content, and much more. Pratyush is an IIT grad, worked with BCG in the past, before starting Merlin with two of his batchmates, and has now scaled it to 2M+ users. Merlin was recently covered in A16Z's top 50 AI apps where startups spend money.

TIME STAMPS:

(01:27) What spaces in AI are being overlooked?

(05:26) Building a Prosumer AI startup: the Merlin backstory

(09:41) Choosing AI problem statements to work on

(20:21) Doing effective customer discovery

(21:12) Competition & differentiation

(24:15) Creating defensibility as a Prosumer AI product

(30:33) AI front-end experiences: Browsers and Chrome Extensions

(34:03) Managing the foundation model layer: closed vs open source

(42:46) GTM Approaches for Prosumer AI: Influencers & Affiliate Marketing

(57:08) Pricing learnings for Prosumer AI startups: usage-based

(1:05:55) Fundraising learnings for Prosumer AI founders

(1:12:54) One hard-earned lesson for US-India founders

Connect with Pratyush on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratyush-rai/ and follow him on X - @pratyush_r8

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Check out "An Operator's Blog" (https://operator.blog/) for weekly posts on Startups, Investing, and Life.

I am a venture investor focused on the US-India corridor. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumitrasharma5/) and follow me on X (@soumitra_sharma).