UX for AI

EP. 79 - 2024 Retrospective w/ Omid Sajedi

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In this episode of the Bonanza Podcast, Hassan, Behrad, and Omid explore the lessons learned from a transformative 2024 and share their bold outlook for 2025. They discuss how market uncertainties shaped their strategies, the importance of staying agile, and the value of rethinking traditional client engagement models with an emphasis on outcomes.

The conversation highlights the rapid pace of AI-driven disruption, the critical role of digital transformation, and the urgency for businesses to adapt by owning their data and embracing an "always-on innovation mindset." With insights into their unique approach to delivering scalable solutions, the team offers a roadmap for navigating the future of tech and innovation.

Whether you're a tech leader, entrepreneur, or innovation enthusiast, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you thrive in a fast-changing world.

Interested in joining the podcast? DM Behrad on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/behradmirafshar/

This podcast is made by Bonanza Studios, Germany’s Premier Digital Design Studio:
https://www.bonanza-studios.com/

Hello and. Welcome to the. Bonanza Podcast. Your go to guide for product innovation. Nice to meet you. I'm Hassan. Producer of Bonanza Studios. Over here with me, there's Behrad. CEO of Bonanza Studios. How's it going, Behrad? Very well. Fantastic. Excited to be here. Also here with me, there's Omid, CTO and founder of your partner. How's it going, Omid? Doing well. Thanks for having me. This year, Vanessa and your. Partner have joined. Forces for an ultimate goal. Full stack, highly scalable solutions for businesses. In a matter of days. It has been a wild year, and this is just the beginning. Let's talk about your thoughts in 2024. Different. And that's a better answer. I think. What Initially, I predicted was absolutely useless. Absolute misread of the market. Just to give you guys context, is that a lot of businesses. They got hit really hard in the middle of 2023 towards the end. That did not apply to us. So we went into the end of the year in 2023, assuming that market is going to be fantastic because, you know, we had a fantastic year. But it was merely a large it was merely a delay in receiving the market impact. So entering 2024, we just saw how the market it is and. Just purely out of, observation and looking at the overall macro macro market trends, is that 2024, especially in the beginning, the the amount of investment that poured into startups has reduced by half, even more than half. The market has was on the verge of turning and moving towards a basically a more positive, flow of investment. But beginning of 2023, it was one of the hardest year of hardest time of my, management and yes. So when we started to realize that, okay, this is the market dynamic, this is the market trend, this is the market's overall sentiment. Then we realized that we need to really dig deeper and understand what the market wants today and what we can offer. So given that the investment was, A lot lower than previous years and, companies are risk averse, we started looking into different ways of offering a response and offer to the market that could capture our attention. So we started rolling out low touch services, especially on the design front. But I think one of the biggest investment we made is through collaboration partnership with by PE technologies by PE partner and especially or meet. So we look into the and let me to sort of the coming and filling that part because you know that that's, that's I think you can really touch upon really. Well, we basically saw a very big opportunity in development space, especially in the field of digital transformation, working with, the, hyperscalers as well as the some, the like, in the beginning, SMEs, they were not on our book. We did not predict that there is a market over there. But the more we work, the more we realized that there is actually a big market over there. There is actually a big need over there. Actually, our services could be much better catered to those folks than hyperscalers. So that's sort of like a the the year in nutshell. And since we introduced rolled out the the joint offer with by technology and or made as well, we've been overbuilt to in a very positive way. We have learned a lot, evolve a lot. And yeah, 2025 I cannot be anything but bullish and optimistic. I can add to this. Honestly, I remember 2023 being extremely, uncertain. I think that there was a word for we came out of this Covid era where a lot of investments, everything were kind of being flooded into the market. Then everything kind of dropped. No M&A, no investments, no funding. A lot of startup suffered, actually. And that uncertainty actually set through in 2024. Right. And that's where better than I had the amazing idea to say, you know, go and launch a new product, new a new kind of service offering. And let's, let's deep dive into this uncertainty and what I can see reflecting back in the previous months is that actually, it hasn't been I mean, it's been just a couple of weeks, maybe even that things are picking up properly, that people are becoming more optimistic. They're trying to kind of push things forward. And, that kind of gives us a lot of energy for 2025 to really push things forward. You know, specifically putting out our partnership, building your partner, VoIP technologies, we we are really changing the way software gets built, but more importantly, the way digital products are kind of put into market and what we are trying to achieve there is and that's kind of also answering your question, what changed? Right. For 2023. With the way I is now accessible and available to everyone, right. I do see a complete shift in how products are being built right now. But what I don't see yet is the traditional consulting firms or even the the sexy SaaS. No code tools. They're very lacking behind. And that is where there are. And I try to kind of put a dent into the market and really change things. Right. So my outlook for 2025 are actually quite optimistic. And we have fortunately, a lot of work, that needs to get done. One of the big moments of this year for me was going through essentially the brainstorming phase with all made and trying to understand. His vision for disrupting the typical agency model. Right. Because you know, something that we really don't want to do for our clients, you know, we we don't want to lead with retainer models, right? Essentially, what you know is eventually our engagement with clients turn into a retainer. But we want to turn the page on this, right? Because essentially, what both of us have experienced when we were on the other side finding vendors, is that we get sort of a we have to opt into this never ending retainer offers deals that we don't see any ROI in this. So we, when we brainstorm initially about what we can do. And I would like to really add to it, because we essentially when we started developing the development, art development and development package, we were really looking after hyperscalers, early stages. And for the early stages. Look, you know, you have an idea, you have an agent, you want to get out there in the market, you get out there with your app. You don't know whether you are going to be able to capture a market portion of the market or not. This is a different topic when it comes to enterprises, SMEs. These guys have customers. These guys have is users. That's why there is a class of application called enterprise grade applications, right? The amount of security, the amount of nuances that we need to bring into this application is unmatched to the amount of work that we need to put into push. An app for early stages to the market. Right. So that's why like essentially our collaboration with enterprises dictate a longer term engagement, but by no means we want to copy or like, do the mistakes that a lot of agencies are doing. Most of these agencies could lock in one year or two years of engagement, but after that, when the contract is over, the of the client is gone and they don't want to come back because they don't see any ROI. So one of the big moments over there that I really admire about Amit as well is our obsession to deliver outcome for our clients. So we want to place our focus on outcomes. So that was a big moment especially. It took me a while to understand the vision of, you know, all about development because, you know, I'm not a technical person. He's the technical. So it took me a while to understand. Now I clearly understand the power of platform that we are developing. I think the development that we are, developing, and we are going to invest a lot further on it in 2025 is another big moment. I would say this year. And also the lastly, the type of clients that we have attracted and the some of this project we are working on is extremely, extremely fascinating, both on the intellectual level and both and also on the craft level. Right. The stuff that we are doing for clients, I hope we can get to talk about it at some point in 2025. Extremely fascinating. Right. So the there are three big moments for me, like, you know, hashing out how we want to develop the offer and push it to the market. I think the outcome driven mentality really, really something I'm proud of by going extra mile for our customers. That was a big moment. The development platform we are developing is extremely, extremely, extremely captivating. Has a lot of potential. We don't know how to, you know, what's going to be the first version of it that we really see the market for is going to be fascinating. And the type of clients, the type of negotiation that we are running. Very fascinating. Like, really like established businesses. They have millions of millions of like, you know, users revenue, whatever the case may be. And these, these folks trusting us with their businesses and this is very, very honorable for me. It is. I want to expand on that, specifically on the whole fact that, the way we change, we are changing things is the pay per hour model with like, genuinely neglected, we, we, we we push that aside. Why do we we don't want to we don't want to come onto a project, put a couple of hours of our opinion on, on the contracts and just get paid as long as possible. That that just doesn't sit well with us. And the whole being able to set outputs brings a lot of predictability for our clients into what they can expect at the end of the of the, of the initial collaboration, like, that really changed things around. I mean, the offering was so such a number, it looked like a non brainer that when I launched this, I think back in April, I booked about 20 calls in with after one campaign, that run for about two weeks, you know. So it was, it was such a crazy, overwhelming, response that we got on this, it was actually thanks to Behrad that we were able to understand. Okay, what what is our ICP? Right? Who is our ideal customer profile? And for me, that was one of those moments. That allowed us to now focus only on our niche, the right customers, you know, the enterprise, like so limited enterprises as a means that help us through or at least at least help we help them through the whole digital transformation phase in eye transformation. But I think more importantly, we are now also understanding much more how powerful the technology that we have built is. And that's that's quite weird to say, but, we knew that we were sitting on some gold, but we didn't know how much gold it was. Or maybe we were sitting on a rough diamond, but we didn't know how polished it was. And, to give you an explanation, we were in contract negotiations and we said, you know what? In three months we can deliver this for you, right? We cannot do this earlier. This is not possible, you know, three months, within four weeks, I think, or six weeks of pure development time. We delivered the end to end solution. And I was extremely happy, positive, surprised. You know, and that kind of got me to my second moment. And then that's where alluding to this platform can be extended and provided to the, to the wider world to be able to build their own visions and dreams and apps and whatever they want to do, you know, and that's actually what's going to come in 2025. We're going to really release a specific part of this platform to the wider world, for they can themselves actually push things live, pushing forward, without the need of anyone around them. To close it. As a in terms of bright moment, I think one thing that I think we could share is that one of our clients, after working with us for a while, unsolicited. So we didn't ask. They told us that you guys squeeze in eight weeks of work in two weeks. Actually, I wasn't in that call. It's only to me. And, yeah, kudos to kudos. So kudos to the rest of the team. I think, you know, I've been in this business and service business for quite a while now, almost five years. I haven't seen any other service agency go extra mile that only ten teams is going. Right. You know, we are responsive around the clock. We try to really like, under-promise overdeliver. I think that's sort of, our strategy across the board. You know. It's our mantra isn't it? Is our mantra. Like, you know, if you say one month, but we deliver in three months, there is no value for you. But if you say three months, but we deliver in six weeks if there is value in it, right? So these are the things that we are trying to and it's not by no means. It's something that we're going to still be improving actually. Or we made it take it the other day that we need to create a delivery Bible, so to speak, right. And it's the only thing that we need to and we are going to improve further because, what we, what we, what we see with our reading, the market is very clear. Customers are in our tired. There is a frustration we feel when the clients come to us and work with us and they see, okay, there is a way, there is a you know, there's some service providers. They care about the promise, they care about the quality of services. So we are going to really, even, double down on the the quality of our services because, it's very clear for me and I think we're on the same page on that. It at the end of the day, a service business, if they can deliver quality services, VIP services, as we like it, we are going to stay around as long as the market wants us. No. Please. No no no no no. Skipping. I mean, I really can think of one point, to be completely honest. And we just started this, right? So the lowest point was the beginning, where we need to kind of really push things forward to where we were, meeting so many different people, but still no results. We didn't find, like, really pinpoint or ICP pinpoint what we can deliver and what we can, can put to the market. And obviously demotivating in the beginning, but maybe that's just what the entrepreneurial journey is about. You just pushing through and going through the ups and downs, to be able to kind of reflect on, on on the grateful things we have, actually the things that we, we should actually be grateful about right now. You know, so for me, definitely starting out and the first couple of months with the uncertainty that kind of came in from 2023, in 2024, where people really weren't ready to invest. Yeah. That was that was, for me, the biggest low moment. Specifically. But turning that around, it helped me to learn a lot about our business, our capabilities, the opportunities that lies ahead, but also and more specifically. And that's again, thanks to Barack's defining who our actual ICP is, because right now we know what I mean. Yes, we know who to kind of target and I'm not saying it's easy, but it helps us very much to to go into 2025 with a, with a, with the ease of mind. You know, so as part of a little point here is, you know, so so it's a multi-dimensional business. So we have designed services. We actually one of the learnings that we realized and I think, we touched upon it, is that, is that for us now, the process of screening the clients are becoming a crucial, crucial point. We need to see certain things that they have. And, because if we see that it's not a good fit, actually, we are the ones that reach out and tell them before the data loss, because we don't want to waste no one's time. So we had to disengage in in a couple of cases with certain clients. I didn't really see a fit of helping them, although they were happy to stay on the on the on the client and stay on the board. But we had to let go because essentially, you know, there is no short of work here at, at our businesses. So the the more we can free up time, we really want to, you know, find the companies, find clients, find partners that we can provide our services and for services can be moving their business forward. So, this year we learned that it's actually much better to let go of certain clients that we more or less we could help them, but actually it's not right fit. So we are learning to sort of like find those. We are creating the red flags. We have a documentation for it. So elaborating on those documentation as well. So, so to move clients to through a more rigorous onboarding process, making sure they're cleared the way we work. And if we see that it's a good fit, we you know, we continue working. If not, we are going to be the first one to say like, look, I think, you've got to find another vendor. It's not the right fit. You. I that's that's a tough one. To be honest. I don't know where to begin. What I will say is that 2023. We were shocked by how I is disrupting. Right. So we basically gone through the season one of that TV show. But when the season two, 2024 came about, I think everyone more or less, knew that what the game is, is in play. Any time that ChatGPT new version or Cloud or Grok or Llama new version comes in, we need to be expecting drastic disruption in the way we work on a daily basis. So we went from industrial revolution to to basically internet revolution and now to AI revolution that so the, the life cycle of disruption went from 20 years or 30 years or 50 years to a crazy anything like this to every couple of months, every every half a year. We have to now, I don't know if you noticed that as soon as ChatGPT introduced multi-model, capability to, OpenAI have been they introduced multi-model capability for ChatGPT a lot of early stage startup that there is considerable amount of money to actually be doing the same thing. They went out of business overnight. So I think that's going to be I think more businesses are becoming comfortable with this motion of work, that the bits that are making on the business strategy level needs to factor in what open AI, what Grok Llama Cloud will be releasing, and how can they create a strategy that could be affected as less as possible by those releases? I think now people are understanding this motion, right. And also what I will say is that at the end of the day, I think those folks, I think executive, especially in companies in enterprise level, especially the the matter of strategy is going to become ever more and more important than before. Not like this fluffy strategy that you bring in. And consultants actually try to have a clear read on the market and see what we can do, can differentiate us from the competitors and do not overlap with the release of new ChatGPT. I think that's something that I see that a lot this year. I feel like, 20, 24, there were moments of euphoria. People are sort of like shifting gears and trying to sort of like be open again, open to investment, open to take risks. I think, again, market bounced back a bit as well, but I feel like the 2021 more than feeling. I think there is enough evidence to say that there is going to be a year that I think that's the flipping. There is going to be. The mood will be shifting towards more, risk, you know, investments and more invest. More investment will be poured down into startup as well. Yeah. I mean that's spot on right. So we started the year with a lot of uncertainty. I think with all these startups kind of going up, going bust pretty much because ChatGPT just replace them. That was a wake up call for a lot of people, which eventually turned into an open to progress type of scenario. Right? Where if you think about this, right. And I think it can deserve its own conversation, but people were all scared when we came into 2024 about AI is going to replace us. And the normal developers. There are no more this or no more that which in reality, what I'm seeing right now is I'm just ten times more productive than I was before. But I can do the job of five, six, seven engineers. And that's that's not an exaggeration or something, you know? And that is where the openness to progress for me comes from, that all these AI tools that are evolving extremely rapidly, how can you move into the world with an innovation on mindset or better said, always innovation on mindset, right? So that you can always be a step ahead without competing with like the actual and then, building like an alarm or competing with this because it doesn't make sense. It's just like saying, I'm going to build my own next cloud provider. No, I'll do that. Everyone is kind of on Azure or hosting or whatever, you know, you just set up your own servers. It's super simple. It's the same for me with these tools. And these are tools that we can leverage to make our day to day lives first easier, but second, also our service offering to make it just way more qualitative than it was before. Put that into what we have built internally and all these ingredients all together brings us really into open for progress and really an optimistic outlook to, to, to, to next year where I genuinely see that what I'm doing is first adding value to our customers. But most importantly, it's not just replaceable by any other cool tool out there, right? It's not just as easy as a saying, oh, OpenAI has now released a new model. They're going to replace everything that we're doing. I don't see that personally being possible and that just gives me a lot of ease of mind to say, okay, now I'm in that really innovation on mindset to push things forward, to make a dent and difference in the market, but also to make sure that I keep and stay relevant, you know, and that's my message to everyone to keep yourself still relevant. You know, instead of just trying to focus on, let's call it small or simple problems, I don't I'm not sure what I can, I can phrase it like that, but that is that is how I feel about this. Is spot on. To be honest. I think just to add to what, it says right now, I think with all this abundance of I don't even call them powerful tools, this if you bring me back to five years ago and say, hey, here are the tools that you can do all this stuff I would consider them as magic. It's not power is not powerful is some of them are magical. And I think Omega Point is very important. Always on innovation mindset. And now with this abundant abundance of these magical tools, you really can. Because when you talk about consultants or like digital innovation offices, they always want to go after low hanging fruit. Yes, of course they bring immediate ROI. But with these magical tools at your disposal, why don't we look at those some of those daring initiatives that getting dust on the shelf in some of your rooms, right. Well, why don't we tackle some of those daring initiatives? Because, yes, used to be difficult to work on those. But if you have the right team, right, that have that can help you with research, strategy, design and implementation at a really high level, combining them with these abound the abundance of these magical tools. You really can now go after those daring initiatives. Spot on. I have one, I think regarding is related to our craft. That's a post I actually published today is that, you know, I'll always look at the topic of digital transformation as nice to have, really transparently speaking and I didn't see the point of it, but now I clearly see the point of it. I think. It's going to be a very crucial. Every company has a crucial time window of time that every company has a crucial term time window right now, more or less six, six months to two years and it took me a long while to understand what digital transformation means to me. And thanks to all mate and his its technical inputs, and also talking to lots of other folks. It's becoming clear digital transformation is not about building an application. It's part of it. It is. But the bigger groundwork is about data integration and data processing. Data constellation. Right. Because essentially now with this abundance of magical, powerful tools that we have other service, there is absolutely a bullish pause, a positive use case to be made for every organization that we know today to become an agent to a AI organization is very possible, right. And essentially, companies that take a solid step towards realizing that vision, they are going to untap, unlock exponential productivity that competition and competitors would be meaningless to them. They there is no competition anymore. When you unlock an exponential productivity through these powerful tools. Right. Digital transformation in my opinion, that was a big moment actually, when we, you know, when we were in London or Milan discussing back and forth is now or never and again, in my definition, having a customer facing an agent first thing interface is optional is not necessary. But without the data integration, without the data processing side of things, if you don't own your data, there is no case. There is no possible survival scenario for your business in the next five years and is now literally is now. The time is now to really pull up your sleeve and own all the data streams that make up your business, and that is digital transformation. Now it's very big. Now it's very clear for me what digital transformation is and where it's going to lead to. Because make no mistake, if you want to just create a customer for the customer facing interfaces, there must be a third party application you can use, right? Of course, it doesn't give you the best bespoke software experience, but it does the job up to 70% 60%. It's necessary, right? It's not urgent. But when you combine that, the bespoke software that you're making and knowing that where you want to end up with, which is agent AI awards for every key player, a key employee of your team going to work with the agent. I to deliver something exponentially better than before. That's a real business case. I think to to really take a step further. But there are just sets because, for me, that was also my moment really about okay here. And it also digital transformation I think it naturally comes AI transformation in it. For me there is no differentiation anymore is the digital transformation. There's a hyper there's an application layer to it. There's a data strategy to it. There's a overall digital strategy to it, you know, which is super important to keep in mind. But, my point right now, what I want to kind of allude to is your competitive edge lies within your data. And if you don't understand your data, that innovation on mindset won't happen, in my opinion. So you really need to make sure that first of all, you understand what's what's happening on the hood, get that data sorted and visualized. What? And that brings me actually to my biggest learning for this year. And that is instead of focusing on that return on investment of, okay, how much money do I put into this and what I'm expecting to get out of it? Think about it in terms of what is the cost of inactivity. Yeah, that's kind of helped us tremendously in shifting our approach towards our clients building products and how we going to push things forward, like, because if you think about the cost of inactivity, of if I'm not going to go with my time right now, how much is going to cost me actually for not taking any action? That mindset will beat you way faster into a actual number that will always be very accurate in terms of what's going to happen if I don't do things in six months time, rather than trying to predict the future. You're looking at the data that you have right now and try to kind of work with what you have right now in the estimations for the future, and that that is definitely one of the biggest learnings. That cost of inactivity, helped me a lot to position our offering. Also much better. And that's why maybe just to conclude, that's why we offer output, right? That's why we don't do pay per hour. We have a fixed output fixed budget. And you know what you can expect once you once we deliver, our end to end results spoil. Optimism. I would say optimism. A lot of people are changing their the narrative, changing their perceptions, changing their attitude towards what's going to happen in the world. I do think that Europe is unfortunately lagging and lagging a bit. I think there are other parts in the world where they are jumping ahead and we are, I would say, crawling ahead, but we are crawling health, you know? I mean, anyway, we're getting there. But optimism is, for me, definitely a key in going to, to at least from a market and economic perspective. I can't say it better, to be honest. I think optimism is we see in our, negotiations and with partners, people are willing to invest people are they you know, they make no mistake. You know, we are service providers. But at the end of the day, we are serving really smart people. You know, again, you know, it's something that I think only than myself really pay attention. We by no means we want to assume that other people, we are smarter than other people. We really work with smart people, smarter than us. We are just like enablers. We are like bulldozers. We do certain things really work right? And like we do not claim that we can do everything. We just really focus on what we can deliver with the bits. And we wanted to just competed on that. But we work with very smarter people than us and they are seeing they are beginning, which we are seeing some folks that are really going all all in Europe because European clients or Europe is crawling. But there are some really exceptional folks here all making big bets, and we are really, we love to meet many of them because we like to we like to work with risk takers. We really like to make sure that their betting, the bits that are making are going to, see fruition. Europe is crawling, I think I do want to tap into the political landscape, but what I see in the Europe and the European Union level, certain initiatives are very promising. Europe ink allowing to found startup across Europe without having without the need to go through, you know, dealing with the German finance or Romanians or friends. So it's one, one entity, a startup entity that we can go across different country. I think that's what we need to revitalize this European startup scene. I think there is a lot of cool initiatives are coming. We are a bit late to the party, but, you know, we're going to we're going to stick around as long as we want. And then again, I think, I think it's going to be, a year that a lot of businesses take initiatives and we see it, we feel it. And I think it's going to be a very exciting year for both of us. I think we are on the right path. I mean, we are following the the we are both following what's happening in Europe again, I think is the conversation broader than this podcast. But the we see a lot of positive signals coming in and, we welcome that. We really do. I think it's long overdue. And I think everyone is, is now very clear about what needs to be done in Europe. The really good initiatives are taking, taking into consideration that in 2025, we see some of those initiatives turned into reality. Yeah, I know, for me, just to add to that, I feel unification is a key, key word. Just making sure that we we are a unified bloc working together, instead of working against each other. You're spot on. I think you're taking the right steps now, hoping to really accelerate that and really get get the right results in there. But yeah, optimism I think 2025 hopefully. And let's see. Right. But for me at least, I'm very optimistic about the next, next year. So let's, let's see what our peers have to say and what's going to happen. Great question for where can we begin home? It. Yeah. Yeah. I could borrow what you mentioned earlier. Brought up earlier. Cost of inaction, I think, is becoming even more serious than before. You know, we are living. We are working under in, in environments in, in a landscape that literally our workflows get disrupted on a bi monthly, on a quarterly basis. Now, right. The way even I was using ChatGPT earlier, you know, has drastically shifted. And I am not a technical person. I'm sort of like, I don't need ChatGPT as much as, you know, someone that doing marketing, performance, marketing would need it, right? So cost of inaction for business is going to be deadly. Now, in my opinion, five years back you could as established business that you have secured a portion of the market. You could have said, okay, after you don't have time anymore. Believe me, you don't have to. It's just really now, never right again. I think you need to take the steps towards digital transform. Do you own all the data streams that are crucial for your business? Terms of if you're using third party, how much access you have to the data? I, you know, say like, okay, I can always go export the data, but what do they give you? Right? The owning the data stream, which the key data stream is crucial. Processing those is really crucial because these are the steps you need to be able to move towards an agent. And I. Right. And at the end of the day, either today or later, your answer is agent I do digital transformation powered by either you want to I either you want to embrace it now or like look at it in future the same however you look at the that's the answer. So I think a lot of companies in this release are looking into how where they are, how does their business look like today, what needs to be done from the macro perspective? From the macro perspective? Well, I mean, they don't worry about it, but from the bird's eye view, see very what your business, is doing where your business is that right. And most likely if, if this is resonating with you, most likely your business is not doing too well. On data integration and data processing. And this needs to be taking care of that should be your number one priority, in my opinion. I would say be optimistic. Just hustle and take it a day at a time. Take it one sprint at a time. Perfect. Cheers. Preciate it. Have a great day. Take care.