How individuals are looking to change their companies with AI apps
We’ve onboarded hundreds of product managers, CTOs, and founders looking to make a huge impact with AI, what are they trying to do?
We’ve onboarded hundreds of product managers, CTOs, and non-technical founders looking to make a huge impact — what are they trying to do?
We’re in private beta/early access mode here at Databutton, so myself and Trygve Karper have been onboarding every single person who gets into the product. We believe it’s important to personally connect with everyone coming into the new product for several reasons:
- As a company and product that is pushing on the very edge of what is possible with AI and AI agents, we need customers who want to be with us on this journey
- We want to set people up for success, informing them of our 2-minute-response-time support from Avra and Martin
- Understanding what customers intend to make in Databutton helps us create better content and improve the product continuously
- We are inherently a community-driven company and making personal connections with our customers is just part of our culture
But what drives the people that find us, join the waitlist, and sign up for a 30 minute onboarding?
While ChatGPT was announced to have 100 million weekly active users on November 6th, AI adoption in the workplace is lagging behind. Microsoft is dominating a lot of CIO and CDO buyer mindshare for large enterprises, but it seems the user experiences still have a long way to go. The developer segment is really the best served today with AI tools.
We’ve met some incredibly smart, motivated, and value-focused individuals trying to fundamentally change their businesses with AI. The people we have been onboarding see the opportunity AI provides to build tools that impact productivity, efficiency, and overall capacity in their workplace. Let’s get into some groups of people 👇
Product managers and product leaders
Product leaders and managers are primarily focused on infusing AI into their core product and into the product discovery and development process.
When it comes to infusing AI into their core product, there are so many degrees of freedom and paths to take. Product managers want to test out multiple ideas and directions, and they are limited by how many experiments they can run. Some things they’ve expliclity come in wanting to do:
- Run demand experiments by building an app, putting it on a landing page, and seeing the response
- Speed up product discovery work, particularly having multiple tracks when PM and engineering disagree on priority
- Use AI to create a more level playing field between disciplines in cross-functional teams — anyone can explore an idea quickly
In general, they’re looking to increase the pace of delivering customer value by shipping and also building more and more first hand insights for making better strategic decisions.
Non-technical founders
In many ways, non-technical founders are doing the same kind of evaluation, experimentation and discovery work that product managers are responsible for. The main difference is that it is at a business level — customer discovery vs product discovery. They’re coming to Databutton to quickly build and test MVPs for their business idea. In some cases, they are also looking at alternatives to hiring engineers or finding a technical co-founder. Some things they’ve come in explicitly wanting to do:
- Build quick prototypes that customers can just test to evaluate clear hypotheses
- “What I would like to happen is that the customer feels like they’ve had the idea”
- Need to be able to build MVPs to test demand and make it clear to product development teams what needs to be built
CTO/Head of Engineering
CTOs and heads of engineering themselves feel like a bottleneck for progress for software companies, bound by their own or their team’s capacity. They are business focused and also want to accelerate the pace of learning and delivery for the company. Some things they’ve come in explicitly wanting to do:
- Looking for ways to 10X their team and prototype ideas/features faster
- Aiming to get their non-technical co-founders involved in building and testing ideas with customers
- Have a surface to work together with non-technical folks
What they’re saying about Databutton
We get SO excited when interact with all these people and see what they’re aiming to achieve. Here’s a sample of what they’ve been saying during onboarding and while using Databutton:
“I see [Databutton] as a fantastic way for PM/Design to create a more level playing field with engineering at our company. I love that it is all online without having to do any setup and just get working” — a product leader
“I’ve tried a couple of players in the market but Databutton has the most refined product. It’s definitely impressive. This is as much about me learning ‘how to speak to the machine’” — a non-technical founder
“I’m liking [the Databuton] experience, this is something I can get my team into” — a CTO
“Designers in the company could benefit a lot by wrapping their heads around this AI stuff, like for real [with Databutton]” — a product manager
“I’m impressed by the capabilities and the potential going forward here. It is still early days in terms of how to approach the actual building of the apps and I feel that you still need to be quite technical and at least have some understanding of an architecture to make it work. But it is very impressive” — a product leader
Do you identify with the drive of our first customers? Try us out at www.databutton.com and let us know what you think on Discord.
Thanks for reading!
