Revealing coosmo’s master plan

In short, coosmo is currently a service-based company with the ambition to become a product company (or productized service).

As the name says, coosmo has the ambition to become something big, a company that really moves people, with societal impact at large, made of very high-quality individuals.

Right now, coosmo is starting from what we can do best, with the skills we have at hand and what we believe there is a market for in the short term: helping SMBs discover and deploy AI applications to benefit their businesses.

In the future, coosmo has the ambition to become a very large category-leading, focusing on a specific use case, for a specific type of customer, to help them accomplish a specific task.

Our front end is currently a service-based company which helps us collect a variety of AI use cases from a variety of industries.

In the back end, we are doing two things: a) evaluating whether the use cases we discover with and for customers hide a larger market opportunity, b) proactively pitch use cases where we believe industries can be changed and processes can be reimagined thanks to AI.

Logically this motion can lead us in two directions

1/ we put together a portfolio of proprietary AI applications which we either sell individually or in bundle (if all from the same industry) or use to facilitate the delivery of services, based on a proprietary tech stack.

2/ we become a product company, focused on one vertical, one use case and one very specific ideal customer profile (ICP).

As we say, our goal is to “build a small engine” that works (e.g., makes money) with a small fuel tank (e.g., by bootstrapping). Once we have this small engine, we start driving on not so crowded highway (e.g., a big market), and we know where we are going (e.g., we have access to distribution), we will consider adding a much larger fuel tank (e.g., raising funds) and scale the heck out of this company and break barriers (e.g., start going 200km/hr).

This model has a few inherent shortcomings, most evidently the lack of focus and the slowness of iteration. Additionally, if the plan is to become a product company, it’s important not to build an organization (e.g., hiring) to cater to service delivery, you want to stay lean and hire only once you want to productize. This means you need to outsource or sub-contract a lot, which is fine if you find trusted partners (as we did).

Contrarily, the main advantages of the model are:

- follow the market: you solve problems customers have by delivering a non-scalable service (Paul Graham would be proud: do things that don’t scale), and your solution is validated commercially

- learn their language: if you really manage to solve a problem with AI in a specific industry, chances are you got unique insights into industry-specific processes and workflows. You learn how to speak your customer’s language

- repeated sales: if you manage to sell the same solution to multiple customers via a service, you effectively have a solution-market fit, provided your solution is not excessively customized to a specific customer.

- financed product exploration: you are exploring product opportunities, while getting paid, or to say the least, covering costs with pilots and PoCs.

With this being said, a few open questions remain:

- if you want to become a product company, why not focusing on one specific vertical from the start, fail fast and change vertical if you don’t find a product opportunity? → we tried a couple of times but did not end up finding a good enough opportunity, we did not just dive into the first thing we found and decided to focus on what we know we can deliver best: a service.

- are you building yet another AI automation agency? no, we believe we provide much more value beyond an automation, if you work with us you always get a solution to a problem you already have and someone who supports you to deploy that solution, whether that is an automation, a custom software or a software ready to be used.

- do you want to build a consulting company? it is not our goal, but if we believe this model can have commercial sense and a solid and healthy company can be developed in this way, we will surely explore continuing along this path.

In conclusion, we decided to begin following this playbook because it is the most authentic and genuine path forward that we believe could work for us. We stay true to ourselves, provide value, learn along the way and evolve based on what we learn.