Week 14 - Avengers Assemble
I saw a cool tweet on March 18th. Now, I’m returning from Dubai after a week of meeting with government officials sharing learnings about building a company with AI.
When the dust settled and the pre-seed round was done, AIsthetic Apparel changed as a company.
Taking in outside capital, we are now responsible for deploying it as best we can.
Moments like GPT4 suggesting we charge Printful 170,000 EUR in influencer marketing will happen again - but now we should probably send out a more reasonable number instead.
We’ll have to be a bit more famous to earn those digits.
Speaking of fame, our story made it all the way to the Dubai Future Foundation, who was organising a week-long training program for government officials in Dubai, and kindly invited us to share our journey and my views on the impact of AI on the startup ecosystem.
The building below was one of the first ever to be fully built through 3D printing, and hosted us every morning last week.
As we launch marketing campaigns in the weeks ahead, I will prompt ChatGPT4 to deliver high-quality marketing campaigns, testing its ability to act as the CMO of an e-commerce brand.
That means following best practices for any question:
Instead of “pretty please”, I’ll ask the AI to “answer like an expert in the field”.
Then, to optimise resource allocation, ask it to “break down the question into sub-sections and analyse each one in order to generate a recommendation”.
I also need to use my time as efficiently as possible, which means delegating, so I have the brain space to work on the company’s top priorities for 1 hour, every day.
Sounds easy, but when your inbox is constantly flooded with requests, it gets overwhelming - fast. You feel like all you do is reduce the number of unread messages instead of producing actual work.
To tackle this, I’ve decided to start collaborating more often with good souls.
I brought in Maya Moufarek on as our Marketing advisor, leveraging her experience as a startup CMO to go through GPT4’s proposed marketing campaigns with me.
We will do our best to prompt GPT4’s marketing blasts until we feel the space shuttle is strong enough to survive a return trip and generate return on ad spend.
I pinged Sara Almeida, former Nike executive turned consultant and McKinsey advisor, to help me explore production options, margin optimization and – you guessed it – a potential AI sneaker brand.
As always, we will not run the company ourselves - simply prompt ChatGPT4, review its recommendations and double-down on the best.
Finally, I’m talking to two potential interns who love startups and want to shadow my work and learn as much as possible.
I’ll do my best to give them a mix of workflows that are easy to delegate and will allow them to build in-demand skills that will help their employment prospects in our highly connected world.
I can’t wait to spend less time doing media appearances and I’d love to stay away from airports as much as possible during Q3.
After living as a nomad for 3 years, I still absolutely love to travel, but increasingly value the peace of mind that comes with stable routines and friendships.
When everything that used to be fun feels like a chore, you know it’s time to take a break. I’ll be doing that for one week in July, and another in August.
Hopefully it’ll be enough.
I just got back from my annual guys-only offline weekend, with Portuguese friends from the impact investing scene.
Lunch pic at Solar dos Amigos - a must if you’re into old school Portuguese restaurants.
Annual rituals are amazing - it’s a great way to see life and its constant evolution.
May it be the first of a series of days recharging offline this summer, I hope you’re scheduling some in your calendar.
Be kind to strangers, especially if they forgot to bring sunscreen.
J