Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Tarun Tyagi: This is not an idea developed overnight, it's been the gradual process of reaching this stage. After running my own product company and selling a couple of perpetual licenses, I started helping out a couple of startups in their deep technology product development. All of them are struggling with product development that matches the founder’s vision at an optimized cost. Let me take one example out of many startups I worked with. The two silicon valley based founders hired one of the top Pune based product development companies in India to develop their AI based product and spent $1.7M in 19 months. They were very frustrated and asked me to audit their product stage after having understood the founder’s vision. I did the audit and found that the current product only 10% aligned with the founder's minimum viable product version. It seems the founder’s knew well in advance about the audit result I produced, so they immediately dumped the agency and asked me to deliver the product. I hired the team for them and delivered the desired product that matches the 95% of Founder’s vision vis-a-vis their MVP in just 16 months within a cost of $1.2M. Out of that $1.2M we discounted them 25% i.e $300K and signed convertible notes with the founders. So the net they paid us was $900K, and we have had our skin in the game. Now you can imagine the scope of the work which is almost 10 times bigger and delivered at almost half of the cost.
There are a couple of similar examples I can give you which I have successfully delivered. So that was the foundation of the idea which was validated first and then took the shape as a real company.
Great Companies: What are the various services provided by Xaigi
Tarun Tyagi: We offer our services right from Ideation/Strategy, Design to Product Engineering and Validation.
Great Companies: What makes Xaigi different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Tarun Tyagi: Exactly, so there are a couple of differentiations we offer. Please find them below.
1. We are the only company which works with startups on Cash+Equity basis, which not only reduces the cost of development but also increases the trust of our customers. Of course there is more risk that we are taking but there is more reward as well.
2. We positioned ourselves as an AI Consulting company for startups which primarily focuses on startups having AI and Machine learning in their core, so we participate in equity.
Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Tarun Tyagi: There are many challenges in delivering the services aligned to our vision. We are delivering our services on Cash+Equity basis and collectively the cost is less than from almost all big giants and medium level software consulting companies in India. Now the big challenge is how to be profitable on the Cash part ( only ) of the revenue by not factoring in the liquidation of equity in the several startups, while not compromising the quality of services and talent of our delivery team.
We resolve this problem by passing on the long term equity rewards to our every team member which we will receive by liquidating the booked equity in different startups. Hence every Xaigi’s team member has Xaigi’s vested stocks in their kitty which will keep accruing month on month on a pro-rata basis as Xaigi keeps vesting the equity in different startups. In this way we are hiring the best talent on lower cost with a big reward to follow on later and increase our margins.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Xaigi?
Tarun Tyagi: The plan is to work with more and more startups in the next 2 years and take our revenue close to $15M. Then start delivering various AI products using deep technologies for the betterment of humanity. Also we are looking to start our venture arm to invest in various startups including the ones we are working with and the ones we are not involved in their technology development. In the next 5 years we are targeting to build an ecosystem of startups where we are the part of at least 25 successful startups by working with them in different formats including our own products in different sectors.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Tarun Tyagi: The first thing is to have conviction in your idea and then start working hard on that, try to validate the same with the first customer and then replicate the same with many.
Website : https://www.xaigi.tech/
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