Hi, I’m Sourabh, Co-founder & CTO of KushoAI, Ask me anything!

@GlassAttic Great question! I feel learning some product skills where you think about the end user’s wants and needs will go a long way in making you a better dev. Being able to communicate your ideas effectively is another thing that’s underappreciated, but becomes more and more important as you grow in your career and have to manage teams/stakeholders.

@OpulentDong Hey! For me (and a lot of devs), testing is a problem very close to my heart. In my experience, most devs hate testing, but on the flipside, if you don’t test your product properly, you’ll be woken up in the middle of the night to fix issues. Which is why it was easy to empathize with this particular problem for me, because I’ve faced it myself numerous times. Regarding how to identify challenges, I feel that instead of looking for things that seem lucrative and then trying to empathize, you should go after problems that you have personally faced and then pick the most lucrative one from it.

@ShallowSpawn Hey! We’ve just raised a pre-seed round and have built out an initial product and are iterating and getting traction. We’ll look at raising more soon once we need fuel to scale.

@SubtleRefund Hey! We’re definitely at the early stages of finding PMF. Being a category creator product, there’s a lot of work to be done in terms of discovering where exactly will users see value at scale. The process remains quite simple - putting our product in the hands of users, getting feedback, and iterating ruthlessly without biases getting in the way. It’s served us well so far and will hopefully get us all the way to PMF.

Thank you for answering! One follow up: in terms of category creation - you must have global startups also going for the same users, no? Or is it very nascent?

@awkward_potato Like you said, since the teams are tight-knit, many early stage startups end up hiring through personal connections and referrals. But we also made a few hires through platforms like AngelList and engineering slack/discord communities, so those are good places to track.

In terms of the skill-set needed, an early stage startup prioritizes candidates who have an overlap of competency and experience in their prior work, because there’s limited scope and funds to experiment. You’re expected to ramp up quickly and deliver outcomes at the earliest, without much hand-holding. There’s also always the unpredictability that accompanies daily operations, as opposed to structured processes in a larger company. Make sure you’re prepared for all of these things when considering working for an early stage startup.

@RevolvingPuzzle Can’t get into details, but we use a bunch of foundational models along with our own pre-trained models based on task at hand - we decide which model to use based on how reliably we can get the output that we want, how much latency is tolerable for the task and the cost incurred

@Bobble Our primary revenue stream is the subscription fee that we charge enterprise customers for using Kusho’s platform

@FuzzyEarth6 Hey! We honestly don’t foresee AI applications for developers replacing humans. It will for the most part augment what developers do and allow them to focus on more meaningful (and fun) things. If I don’t have to spend too much time writing tests or debugging, I can actually focus my time and energy on designing the next feature really well.

okay i sure ki who know AI better he is going to surive more!! any idea on the competencies!! is it better to to have in depth knowledge of tools or should be better at prompt engineering??

@dopamine Hey! Can’t really say about hardware since I’m not involved in the space but there are a lot of Indian startups solving hard problems using AI for global companies. Some of them are already seeing decent traction. At the application layer at least Indian companies don’t seem to be far behind.

@nanKhatai Great question! We started out with black box model because it is the easiest to use from a user’s perspective - you just need to provide API specs and you get ready-to-execute test suites without needing to seek anyone’s permission in your organization. For things like code repo access, we need to involve more stakeholders (from engineering, security team, etc.) in the decision-making process before users can start using Kusho, and this ends up prolonging the sales cycle - so we’ve deprioritized it for now. That said, this feature is definitely a part of our roadmap and we’ll launch it later this year.