Startup Minded: from AI consultancy to building our own Advisor
Startup Minded is a startup I co-founded. It started as an AI consultancy helping small-to-medium businesses integrate AI into their workflows, then evolved into our own product: SM Advisor. Services: https://startupminded.com/services Advisor: https://advisor.startupminded.com/ This is the condensed story—what we tried, what hurt, and what we learned. Phase 1: AI consultancy What we did We helped companies adopt AI in two ways: Internally: automate processes (ops workflows, report generation, doc handling). Externally: chat-bots assistants (FAQ/lead qualification/chatbot experiences). What was hard (the real work wasn’t “the model” nor the software) Finding customers: AI interest was high, budgets were not. Many calls were “curiosity calls.” Requirements gathering: converting the “make it smarter” into measurable outcomes. What we learned Services scale with people. If you want leverage, you need a product or a process. Good projects started with one narrow workflow and a clear before/after metric. The deal is usually won on trust + clarity, not on “AI magic.” Phase 2: building our own product — SM Advisor Why we built it We wanted something more scalable. SM Advisor became a project-management style tool with an AI chat experience that could: ...