I'm a Client at My Own Company - And It Works Surprisingly Well

As a founder of an AI company, I had one important goal: surround myself with people who can teach me about AI. Now, a year later, I regularly sit with my jaw dropped looking at what we build for our clients.

We operate at the boundaries of what's possible with AI. That means we sometimes run into limitations, but that's exactly where we make the difference.

The difference between "just" 20 minutes of time savings or 5 hours per week for our clients.

However, there's one decision I made that proves crucial: I became a client at my own company. And I haven't regretted it for a moment.

Understanding Your Own Processes Better

As a startup, you (almost) always start from scratch. That means processes don't exist yet. Customer onboarding is one such crucial process that I dove into again last week. It's essential because we create custom AI solutions and therefore need to perfectly understand what the client wants.

That's why I wanted NinA AI to be included in our client dashboard. As a client of my own developers and project manager, I can now critically look at the process from a client perspective.

This immediately yielded valuable insights. We noticed, for example, that there are sometimes days of silence after we've requested API keys and get to work. For us, this means we're working hard, but for the client, this can be unclear.

This experience taught us to communicate better about the status without overwhelming.

The Use Cases We Build for Ourselves

Let me take you through some AI projects we've built for ourselves or are currently developing:

That last use case is what really excites me. We've set up different workflows that bring all information together: email contact, documentation, website information, meeting transcripts, updates from our client dashboard and hour status from Toggl.

What's special is that we not only collect this information but can also query it through a chat interface. This eliminates the traditional process where a colleague needs to be bothered, has to look up information, possibly can't find what's needed, needs to be called, and ultimately forgets to answer.

Yesterday I saw a demo of this system and was literally sitting with my jaw dropped. Although our sprint still has two weeks to go, this sneak peek has given me enormous confidence in the direction we're heading.

Conclusion

By becoming a client at my own company, I've not only been able to improve our processes, but we're also building valuable use cases that we can share with clients. It forces us to constantly look through the client's eyes, and that makes us stronger.

What do you think? Would you become a client at your own company to improve your services?

Until next time,

Olaf Lemmens
Founder NinA AI Agency