HACKER Q&A
📣 namanyayg

No interest for my idea (private LLM and RAG for teams), how to proceed?


Hey HN,

I've been working on an AI + RAG B2B app for the past few weeks.

It's a AI chat interface for teams, to allow fast and private conversations with all company data (think Perplexity but searches on your company's data)

It uses open-source LLMs and has RAG integration with Jira, Slack, etc via LlamaIndex stored on the Weaviate vector DB.

Everything can be 1 click self-hosted for maximum privacy.

There are some similar products in this space so I know there's some demand.

But, I can't figure out a way to find potential users to talk to.

So far, I've tried Twitter ads and have found some people through my network, but in total it's only a couple of people who are actively talking to me.

What approach can work in this stage to get more people from my target audience to check out my product?

Or is this not a valid idea at all, and I should switch to working on something else?

(Link for the curious: prosgpt.com)

Cheers, N


  👤 danenania Accepted Answer ✓
The description here in your HN post is clearer than the tagline on your website imo. My guess is it’s not clear to people exactly what your product does and why it’s valuable. You probably just need to iterate on your one-liner until it’s clear that people get it. “AI chat interface for teams”, “One-stop AI for teams”, and others like this are way too vague and generic I think.

Beyond that, emphasizing privacy while also advertising your use of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., is confusing. In my understanding, the central challenge of enterprise “chat with your company data” is how to do it without giving the data to cloud model providers. Self-hosting the server where the model calls are made doesn’t address this at all and I think you may risk engineers and security people viewing this as misleading marketing as a result.


👤 fallinditch
Hi

This is a really exciting area to build a software business, there is huge potential.

Think about the audiences you need to get through to: potential customers yes, but maybe also systems integrators, consultants, agencies.

We can assume that there are many B2B service-oriented companies that have good client portfolios but do not have RAG-LLM-integration skills, some of these could be good targets to partner with.

You could consider focusing on a particular industry segment. Do an analysis to identify the most promising sectors. Build knowledge and contacts in your chosen sector(s).

More accurate target marketing in specialist media for that sector will give you more bang for your marketing bucks.

You could also contract with one or more independent sales reps who specialize in software sales. There are a bunch of platforms for 'commission based sales agents' that can link you up with software sales people.

I have more thoughts and will email you if you want to chat further.


👤 giantg2
AI is a premium thing. The people in power to purchase stuff are going with big name providers because they don't really know what to look for in the details. This is especially true with the tight budgets tight now.

👤 newzisforsukas
tailwind template site that looks like every other tailwind template site with four screenshots, not interesting. show me what it does in a more interactive way.

👤 chatmasta
There are hundreds of companies pitching some variation of this product. That includes startups with a narrow focus and also large companies like Microsoft who are integrating CoPilot directly into their Office 365 offerings.

The issue is not the idea, which is about as obvious as “b2b spreadsheets” would have been in 1981. The value of the pitched product is self evident, if it works. But why should anyone choose to try it over the many relatively mature alternatives?

If you want to win any slice of the pie, you’re going to need to find some way to differentiate, and some kind of growth hack or flywheel to systematically expand. Preferably you can identify one vertical and use case where you can offer features that are sufficiently specialized for buyers to choose your product over generic solutions.

In other words: don’t try to be everything for everyone. Instead of wasting your time building pipelines for 1000 sources that nobody will use, pick a cluster of them and hitch your wagon to that. Go deep on that use case, and if you find success, only then begin to expand “wide,” deliberately and methodically.

I admire your ambition, but personally I’d consider attacking the problem from a different angle. This is a crowded space with well-funded competitors.