Last month, I kind of un-retired. That’s right. After a year and a quarter of slow mornings, travel, and lots of reading / board games, I’m now back at work. I found a company and a team that made me really excited, it turns out: Strudel AI. How could this happen? Quite by accident. As you might imagine, I was really enjoying not working.
Late August I went to coffee with Strudel’s CEO, Kristin Isaac, who wanted to talk about the Capstone I teach. She is helping companies find places to interact with the University. My Capstone is one such touchpoint for them.
The Problem Strudel Is Solving
But we hardly talked about the Capstone. It turns out she’d started a company called Strudel AI. They are solving a problem that plagues every software company imaginable: how do you decrease the amount of time engineers spend on customer support requests? Everyone loses when a customer support ticket comes in. First, the support rep has spent time – maybe hours – debugging the issue on their end hoping against hope that they don’t have to reach out to the engineering team. When they do finally realize that the engineers need to fix something, they’ll throw a ticket over the wall to the product team and hope someone can create time to look at the issue. Forget about it if the issue is somewhat low priority. It’ll go into a queue and may never get picked up.
If it does get picked up, the engineer will then spend their own time debugging the problem. Maybe for minutes, hours, days, or weeks. All the while they are taking time away from what they really want to be doing: building new features. When they finally do solve the problem, the fix gets tested then deployed (which can take weeks again, depending on how automated the pipeline is). Finally, the customer has their fix and everyone goes back to life as they know it.
Or they don’t, a large percentage of tickets never get picked up and fixed. Maybe a workaround is declared, maybe it’s just ignored. If you’ve ever been on the customer end of a support call, you know how frustrating technical support can get.
Strudel’s Solution
At Strudel AI, we’re bridging that gap between support and engineering. Our patent-pending AI algorithm does most of the debugging for both support and engineering. So, by the time a human picks up a ticket, there is a root cause and several suggested solutions. They just need to implement one (and maybe someday AI will do that too). Fixes go from taking weeks to minutes or hours. Customers get fixes the same day.
On Un-retiring
By the end of our coffee conversation, I knew it was probably a life-changing coffee. Kristin had already invited me to meet the team. I loved them. Soon, I was their new Co-Founder & COO.
So now I am at the smallest company I’ve ever been at (there are four of us). We just raised a pre-seed round of over $550k. We have two paying customers and have definitely reached “pain-market fit” (i.e. we know there’s room to fix that gap between technical support & engineering). We’re busy testing to find product-market fit with our existing solution. This is FUN! Enough fun to bring me out of retirement, it turns out.
Interested In Chatting?
If you’re interested in finding out more, reach out to me at amber.field@strudelbots.com. We’re running A LOT of customer discovery calls right now and I’d love to tell you more and get your feedback!
