
Ask HN: Who is my target customer base? - kavita_sam
My team and I run a separate AI consultancy and thought to start &quot;productizing&quot; some repetitive AI tasks through a secondary service https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techsensus.com<p>We realized that a lot of small businesses and startups frankly do not have the resources to hire ML engineers or figure out hardware to train models on state of the art. There&#x27;s a gap in the market.<p>We are now trying to figure out what kinds of startups and small businesses would most likely use our service. Ideas? if you are that demographic, what pops out to you and what isn&#x27;t useful.
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quaquaqua1
My understanding of US economics is as follows:

If it's so expensive that only large corporations can afford it, then you have
to score some really huge relationships at the top of the company.

If you're targeting small businesses, then it basically has to be turnkey,
affordable, and it must deliver basically 10x value overnight if it is to be
really successful.

The reason I say this is because I used to work for a cash-strapped repair
garage. Rent, Payroll, Materials, Debt. Those were the 4 major expense
categories.

Rent was set in stone for years, and wasn't precisely negotiable. Likewise for
debt. Materials would be difficult to innovate, because you are creating a
physical product (oil, metal, plastic, etc).

The biggest cost-savings potential would be to replace labor. If you somehow
made a robotic mechanic or robotic electrician, that would save a 1M USD shop
probably about $300,000 per year in mechanic salaries. But at that point you
are getting into fields of computer vision and also robotics, and those are
most definitely hard problems to solve.

So to sum it up, your value prop comes from any technology that can feasibly
replace human workers salaries.

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mtmail
I learned that the highest cost for gyms can be salaries. Not rent, equipment,
power, heating, etc.

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quaquaqua1
Same with hotels for hospitality workers!

