👉 Malte Scholz, airfocus

2023 was a challenging year for the tech sector, characterized by funding drops, AI challenges, and major layoffs; therefore, a strategic pivot is essential for 2024. 

My advice: Approach H1 with a product manager’s mindset. 

• Prioritize tangible problem-solving and product refinement over expansive visions

• (Continue to) leverage AI meaningfully, ensuring it adds substantive value and addresses genuine customer needs, rather than just adding a label to your product. 

• Embrace a meticulous attitude towards resource allocation, optimizing financial, human, and technological assets to enhance product efficacy and establish robustness against potential crises. 

• Persistently optimize UX, utilizing tools like AI to craft a product that evolves in line with user needs and expectations. 

• Create a robust roadmap that includes a dedicated crisis management blueprint, pre-empting and planning for possible disruptions without sacrificing product integrity or trust.

• Building on the philosophy behind airfocus‘s modularity, build a product and organizational structure that embodies both adaptability and resilience, ensuring relevance and value in a fluid tech environment.

The ultimate success depends on balancing innovative and sustainable growth with the continuous satisfaction and engagement of customers, so make sure your strategic application of these principles helps you achieve just that in 2024.

👉 Amaury Sepulchre, Hexa (eFounders)

Don’t miss AI !

Beyond the hype and the buzz, AI has simply become inevitable in the software space. Whether we like it or not, we have to cope with it. The future as we see it today is full of AI, it’s our new reality.

As a founder, it’s thus impossible today to think of your business or prepare an investor pitch without touching on the topic. AI might be the core of your product or just a line of thought to improve your service or generate leads, but it must be there. Be sure to dive deeply into the subject so that it doesn’t appear as an afterthought or a buzzword thrown in at the last minute to catch the attention of VCs.

If AI doesn’t impact your business, then you’ve likely missed something. Revisit your plan; you will find it. It’s also possible that you might intentionally decide not to consider it, to purposely ignore it. In that case, it’s even more important to specify that.

In short, pitching your software company without addressing AI in some form is like discussing real estate today without mentioning interest rates.