Welcome (back) to AI Minds, a newsletter about the brainy and sometimes zany world of AI, brought to you by the Deepgram editorial team.

In this edition:

• 🔨 How to build a defensible startup

• 🚀 How defensibility drives innovation… and makes big-tech a bit worried

• 🐦 Social Media on DevDay and new releases

• 🛡️ Defensibility in action: What successful startups are doing

• 🌳 A CMO’s guide to Startup Growth (Video)

• 🤖 Bonus: How good, really, is AI at predicting the stock market?

Thanks for letting us crash your inbox; let’s party. 🎉

We coded with the brand-new Whisper-v3 over the past week, and the results were not what we expected. Check it out here!

🐎 The Importance of Defensibility in Startups

Following OpenAI DevDay, many find themselves excited at the new technology, while others remain steadfast with a competitive business mindset.

Defensibility is a term in business that refers to the measures businesses use to protect themselves from competitors and other circumstances. Here are some of our thoughts on that:

• Unveiling Defensibility Strategies for AI Startups: Here, we walk through Defensibility Strategies for startups at all stages, including Feature Density Differentiation and Innovative Monetization Models.

• Important! Defensibility among AI Companies: Here, we discuss why Defensibility itself is important, beyond guaranteeing the longevity of your company.

🐝 Social media buzz

OpenAI DevDay not only showcased new models, but they also caused many to think about these innovations’ impacts on business—some more humorous than others.

For example, Linus Ekenstam’s Tweet below reveals quite the thread…

And, of course, memes about defensibility and competition arise:

🎥 Watch this! An expert’s guide to startup growth

The Deepgram startup community has now grown to support over 100 unique startups leveraging voice and AI capabilities.  

One benefit to being part of the community is the bi-weekly meetings where the community gets together to help each other level up. This past week our very own CMO Marcel Santilli joined us to talk about marketing for startups. 

In the name of defensibility, the conversation centered around how to build something repeatable, sustainable, and scalable. Each startup is in a different phase of growth mode and Marcel talked to us about what startups should focus on depending on their maturity level. 

Finding product market fit? Focus on customer retention, early adopters, personal network and referrals

Finding Go-to-market fit? Focus on scalable unit economics, building processes and leveraging one scalable measurable medium.

In the growth and moat phase? Focus on revenue growth rate, and utilizing multiple mediums that are tightly aligned with sales.

Watch the video to learn more!

📓Defensibility in Action: See how others succeed

If these companies can do it, you can too! See how these businesses are thriving and perhaps we can follow by example.

• Top 7 AI Text-to-speech and Voice-cloning Startups of 2023: Check out how each text-to-speech provider stands out from the rest!

• Five Startups Shaping the Language AI Landscape in Africa: The AI World extends much farther than Silicon Valley. Check out how LLM companies in Africa employ defensibility techniques!

🤖 Additional bits and bytes

Interested in this topic? Check out these additional bits and bytes to delve deeper into defensibility!

• How good, really, is AI at predicting the stock market? - Yes, we’ve talked a lot about money in this edition. But that’s business-money. What about personal money? Well, if you want to know how well AI can predict the stock market, check out this article!

• The Cost of ML & Defensibility Flywheel - How (supervised) ML-enabled companies should think about building a foundation for defensibility and scale up their value proposition over time

💰 From our Startup Community

We can’t talk about defensibility and startups without actually showcasing some amazing startups themselves! The Deepgram Startup Community is an incredible network of founders, techies, and entrepreneurs. Here’s a sneak peek into what’s going on behind the curtain 🎭

Knowt

We want to show some love to every student's new favorite companion: Knowt. 

Knowt is an all-in-one AI-powered study app. As recent graduates, the founders Abhi Patel and Abheek Pandoh know the problems that students face on a daily basis. They provide an easy way to create flashcards, and practice tests from your notes, lecture videos, and slides.

Since making the product GA, things have been up and to the right! We are super excited to see them help students everywhere learn faster and more efficiently!

Stimuler

Speaking of learning….

Working on polishing your English skills? For those of us who are still learning English, Stimuler is here to help. They are building a 1-1 AI Tutor for everyone learning English as a Second Languague (ESL). 

The goal is to interact with an AI-generated tutor that can converse with the learners, engage them, and understand issues with students' verbal communication skills. After taking all these factors into account the app can give speech exercises customized to students strengths and weaknesses.