The pain and passion behind product development

Both Dan Scarfe and Mitchell Feldman experienced personal issues with deafness among friends and family, so they decided to take on the mammoth task of transforming the lives of those within the deaf community.

XRAI Glass is made up of an app that converts audio into visuals, and this app is connected to a pair of smart glasses that turn speech into subtitles in real-time. Not only has it revolutionised the lives of those with hearing impairments, but it has also been shown to help those with cognitive difficulties, such as APD.

Dan and Mitch talk us through the pain and passion that goes into creating an innovative tech based product, how to improve your product through feedback, and we learn how competitors shouldn’t always be seen as an enemy.

Here’s their unfiltered advice below:

• What is XRAI Glass?
• How difficult is it to create an app?
• Giving your consumers options is key
• Big competitors like Apple aren’t always your enemy
• How to collect feedback from a particular community
• Feedback can improve your product and tailor it to more markets
• Finding like-minded founders
• Getting feedback from 3.2 billion people with a barely working product
• Being a small startup means cleaning up your own messes
• Stick to your mission statement when creating new innovative products
• Dealing with competitors and handling criticism
• Big multinationals could discover you through their children’s TikTok
• Know your market and how sellable your product is
• Can journalists use the XRAI Glass app for transcriptions?

What is XRAI Glass?

Bex Burn-Callander:

Welcome Mitch. How you guys doing?

Dan Scarfe:

Good. Tired, but good, thank you. We are honoured that you’d have us on.

Mitchell Feldman:

Hey Bex.

Bex Burn-Callander:

Hi Mitch. You’re over in Canada, is that right, Dan? Is that the usual split where one of you takes the sort of US and Canada and the other is over here in Blighty?

Dan Scarfe:

So I am over here in Canada, yes.

And I’m not sure it’s necessarily the classic way that startups would get going with the two people at the opposite sides of the Atlantic from one another, but yes, that’s the boat that we have found ourselves sailing in.

Bex Burn-Callander:

Well, I’ll ask you more about that in a minute, but first can you tell us about this tech?

So what have you created with XRAI Glass?

Dan Scarfe:

So XRAI Glass turns sound into subtitles in real time, which allows those who are deaf or hard of hearing to become part of the conversation.

So the story behind XRAI was actually a personal one, my grandad, who was 96, had lost his hearing, one of the other founders, Paul, whose dad had worked with people for many years had lost his hearing, and then five other founders who were all touched by the same personal story all came together to create what would become XRAI Glass.

So it has been quite the journey that we’ve been on over this past year, and we just keep finding new people that we can help.

That’s the wonderful part of this business, we started with the deaf, but actually there are so many more now.

Bex Burn-Callander:

And crucially this is an app, it’s like a piece of software that runs on external hardware.

So you don’t make the glasses, you are not making a product. This is IP, this is design, this is software rather than a factory out there somewhere pumping out gadgets, right?

Mitchell Feldman:

Yeah, I was going to say indeed.

In fact, when we started this business, we purposefully made the decision we didn’t want to get into the hardware business. The pace of innovation within that space is so hard to keep up with that actually leveraging all of the technology that’s out there.

All of the innovation in these new glasses is what we fixated on and just investing our time and effort into the software, which was the important bit.

And that’s come to play very nicely for us.

Dan Scarfe:

And it’s also about providing an on-ramp to this technology. These augmented reality glasses are brand new. Most people have never even heard of them before, never mind experienced them before. And just dropping people into this AR world is confusing for them.

So actually starting with an app, starting with something that people are familiar with. And people’s first experience with XRAI will just be using the app, understanding how it works, understanding how the transcription works.

And then when they’re ready, attach a set of augmented reality glasses and have that same experience that they’ve just got used to in an app but now in glasses.

So it is a much easier on-ramp for people we think.

How difficult is it to create an app?

Bex Burn-Callander:

And in terms of actually creating the app, how hard was that? Was it a matter of finding existing kind of clever technologies and almost binding them together?

Because people on their phones, they can dictate and see the words pop up.

So there is sort of similar tech out there, but were you designing something brand new or were you kind of bundling?

Dan Scarfe:

So fundamentally we bundle, we are an integrator.

And we too thought when we first set out on this journey, it must be really simple. I mean I’ve already got it on my phone, look. Surely we must just be able to take this and put it into augmented reality. It must be simple.

Unfortunately, in order to build augmented reality apps, you’re basically building a video game. We use a piece of software called Unity. Unity is designed for building video games.

We’ve got things like render loop, so 25 frames per second. This thing’s furiously going away, and then we’ve got to try and get audio from the microphone in real time. We’ve then got to try and send that up to the cloud in real time, get it back, get it up onto the screen all in less than a second.

So something which sounds trivially simple actually in this augmented reality world was quite a challenge. And it wasn’t just one provider of course that we wanted access to, it was more than one.

So as well as being agnostic to the glasses, we wanted to be agnostic to the transcription providers as well. So you’ve got all that complication times by the number of glasses times by the number of transcription providers and that then starts to give you a hint at some of the complexity behind something that looks so trivial.

Giving your consumers options is key

Bex Burn-Callander:

So did you want to make sure that your app could run on all different kinds of devices because you didn’t want to bind yourself to any one manufacturer and maybe one price point?

You want to give people the option to access what you’ve made, whether they’re getting something that’s like top of the range or something that’s a little bit more affordable that they can still have a play and get the benefit basically?

Mitchell Feldman:

Yeah, I mean it’s important that we give people the choice because there are so many factors to consider.

What phone are they using, what operating system are they using, what geography are they in? What budgets do they have? What other ancillary devices are they using? Are they using cochlear implants? Are they using hearing aids? Do they have no hearing at all?

So it was really important that we put that choice into the hands of the consumer to allow them to use the device that’s at the right price point and suits their lifestyle and requirements.

Dan Scarfe:

I mean, we want to be the Spotify of these kinds of services. It doesn’t matter what phone you’re on, what set of glasses you’re using, what device you’re on, it’s always XRAI behind there, providing that intelligence layer.

So it was super important for us to be agnostic. And paid dividends yesterday of course, when Apple released their new glasses.

And guess what? Our software will run perfectly on them because of the way that we’ve designed it also, we were very excited about.

Big competitors like Apple aren’t always your enemy

Bex Burn-Callander:

Can you tell me about that? Were there any kind of conversations happening with Apple in the background over the last few months? Because I know previously this was Android only.

So did you have communications with Apple? How did you get that connection?

Dan Scarfe:

I don’t think Apple unfortunately would have the time to talk to such lowly folk as us, but maybe one day we might get the phone ring.

But no, we just ported our app to the iOS ecosystem. So we use a piece of software called Unity, and Unity is compatible with iOS. We had to do a bunch of engineering work in the background to make it work.

But the fact that we have now done that and the fact that Apple announced yesterday or the day before yesterday, Unity support means that our app will now run perfectly we hope on the new Vision Pro.

So for those that can afford it and want the holographic see through face and the Lamborghini of augmented reality glasses, they can now go buy it and still use XRAI software.

Mitchell Feldman:

You know what’s really interesting is just from a startup perspective, how brave we’ve been and continue to be, going up against these hyper-scalers, going up against Apple and Microsoft or Google or other, or even Meta.

At first, you would think that they were an enemy. And actually as we’ve developed over the last year, we’ve realised that they’re actually friends.

Apple bringing out their new cellular glasses is great for us because it’s an endorsement. The bell that we’ve been ringing for the last year, that the world is going to augmented reality or some version of that, we’ve almost been sounding a bit like a sycophant about it.

But then someone like Apple coming out and saying, “This is the way that we are going,” is great for us. And it’s been encouraging to say the least, certainly in the last 24 hours.

How to collect feedback from a particular community

Bex Burn-Callander:

And you mentioned that initially this product was aimed at the deaf community.

So did that mean that you had to canvas a lot of feedback and opinions and advice from that community? And if so, how did you do that?

Dan Scarfe:

So we took a very staged approach, I guess, to the development of this software.

We knew we had something, but we weren’t quite sure what it was that we had. And so in classic startup fashion, we wanted to get something into the hands of users as quickly as humanly possible. Making sure of course that it didn’t quite work, because if it worked, it was too soon.

So we spent between last May and the end of July creating an MVP, whatever you want to describe it, a barely working version. There’s a better analogy, perhaps. And we launched a pilot.

So we said to the world, “We’ve got this thing, and it just about works and would you like to be a pilot user and give us some feedback on what we can improve?”

And the pitch was, “Can you please go and spend £400 of your own hard-earned money to buy a set of glasses to use a piece of software which barely works and give us some feedback to help create this incredible piece of software for other people?”

And despite that, we had 1000 people sign up and dozens and dozens and dozens actually went out and bought glasses and worked with us. And that was some of the most incredible feedback we had.

So it was a big ask of the people, but for those that had actually done it, they’re now really committed, and they want to go on this journey with us. And we paid them back.

Every time they asked for something, a week later or two weeks later, ta-da, it popped up in the product. So it was a great relationship we had with our pilot users.

Mitchell Feldman:

Yeah, I was going to say I think probably one of the greatest luxuries was the accelerant in the development cycle of the product. Having that 360 feedback, continuous feedback using a platform, we use Discord for that continuous feedback, really helped us understand and shape and size the product.

So when it was ready for commercial release, we actually had a really good understanding of what the market wanted, so that classic market product fit was sized and shaped by the users that were helping us trial it.

So that was a luxurious position, which I think a lot of startups miss out on, is they actually try and find that out when it’s already in market. We had the luxury of life of being able to get that information before we launched.

Feedback can improve your product and tailor it to more markets

Bex Burn-Callander:

And can you give me an example of something that came up as a piece of feedback that ultimately changed the way you developed the product?

Is there any one standout thing that someone said, and you were like, bingo, we’re going to do that?

Dan Scarfe:

The most obvious one we got almost straight away was, “Well, that’s wonderful that you do this for English, but I mean there are other languages around the world, and I might be travelling between different places with different languages. Is there any chance you might be able to get this to do automatic translation as well?”

And we said, “It’s funny you should mention that because yes, actually we can.”

So that was one of the first examples of, that’s now one of our three core pillars of functionality, and that was just one of our users making an off-cuff joke about could we do translation?

Mitchell Feldman:

There was one for me actually was we were fixated on the deaf and the hard of hearing, and actually one particular user who joined the program, and he had a condition called auditory processing disorder or APD, which meant he could hear properly, and he could see clearly, but he wasn’t able to process that information. Cognitively, he couldn’t digest and process that audio.

But actually if he read the audio, he was able to process it.

So all of a sudden, we were doing this program and then finding out all of a sudden that we can help anyone that’s got APD instantly, something we hadn’t even thought of.

And as we’ve developed the product, we’ve realised that it’s not just around deaf and hard of hearing, but a whole neurodivergent community who would get great benefit from this. And we continue to learn every day.

As Dan said, it’s quite the journey.

Dan Scarfe:

One of the other things of course that struck whilst we were on this journey was the small matter of ChatGPT. I mean, you may have heard some passing reference to this theme that’s apparently going to change the world.

We actually started working with GPT, as it was back then, last August.

So right after we’d done our pilot, we first started playing with this thing, and that’s the other one which has just grown and grown and grown and grown. And again, our company name is X-R-A-I, XRAI, Extended Reality, Artificial Intelligence.

So again, that was a real gift that technology came out at that time and all of a sudden, we’re able to not pivot, but add a huge amount of new functionality to the app, a whole new product line around this assistant.

And that’s a great lesson in whatever you are focused on to begin, don’t ignore these other things that pop up. Figure out how you can rotate into them and take advantage.

Finding like-minded founders

Bex Burn-Callander:

And you mentioned earlier on Dan that a couple of the founders, they’re coming at this with a very personal angle. They wanted to solve problems and challenges they saw in their own lives and their own families.

So how did all of you guys meet? How did you connect in order to work together on this project?

Dan Scarfe:

It was a whole series of personal relationships.

So Mitch, I’ve known for many years, we used to compete with each other actually funnily enough in our previous businesses. And we were both in the Microsoft space doing the great work of moving everyone to the cloud. So we’ve known each other for years.

A couple of our two main technical founders, one is my brother, so I’ve obviously known him a while. And then he runs a machine learning street talk channel on YouTube, one of the top 10 AI podcasts in the world. There we go.

So if you are ever wondering about some very detailed machine learning problem, then there’s probably a talk on their channel about that.

Paul, one of the ones that I mentioned at the beginning, we met ironically through a mutual connection, so the power of LinkedIn, and we’d both pitched the same idea to the same person and this person was like, “Well, maybe you two should talk to each other because you just pitched me the exact same idea in the space of a week.”

And so that’s how Paul got involved. He was working at Meta at the time.

There was then my previous finance director that joined us as an FD. And then finally Jackie Press, our chief brand ambassador who is a friend of Mitchell’s.

So it’s like most of these startups, it’s kind of personal relationships, friends, family connections, and you just pull together an amazing team. And seven’s our lucky number, seven founders, so that was sort of what we thought was a way to go about it.

Bex Burn-Callander:

That’s really interesting because often you hear that you need to sort yourself a founder and then get going, but actually it’s probably better to get going and then the people you meet on the journey that want to hop on the bus, they’ll end up being the best founders?

Dan Scarfe:

Yeah, I mean they were all there at the beginning. It wasn’t necessarily we picked people up along the way.

We sort of all got together over the space of, I don’t know, probably a month or two and kind of like, right, we want to do this, come on, we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it, we can do it. And then right bang, let’s go. And that’s kind of how it was.

Mitchell Feldman:

Yeah, I think one thing that’s important is that everyone that we spoke to about this within that those seven founders or original founders, was they all had a connection with the cause, with the vision, the problem statement that we were trying to solve. And they all felt emotionally connected to that.

And that was what the defining thing that said, you know what, I’m going to give up my big job because this is really cool, this is something that I can really get into.

And it was an emotional thing as well as a commercial thing.

Dan Scarfe:

And that was again, what’s driven all of us is the fact that we’re actually using tech for good. And I mean some of us were in the luxurious position where we got to choose what we wanted to do.

And one of the many reasons that we chose to do this particular business, and there were others, it was a metaverse idea at some point and there was this idea or that idea of course you, and you’re like, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, this one’s quite interesting.

And one of the reasons why this one was quite interesting was the human angle of course.

Getting feedback from 3.2 billion people with a barely working product

Bex Burn-Callander:

I totally get that. And getting people to leave a cushy job and a monthly salary to then take a punt on a risky startup, you want there to be a mission.

But on that point, how did you fund this startup? Especially as you said that it was not as straightforward to develop as you initially thought. So that must have burned a bit more cash?

Dan Scarfe:

So again, we were in the luxurious position where we both sold previous businesses. So we had a slight unfair advantage I guess on most founders starting out.

But we basically funded it to barely working product or whatever we called it earlier. We sort of at least took away a bunch of the technical risk from the investors. Because I don’t want to go to investors and go, “I’ve got this amazing idea, and it might work. Perhaps. Maybe.”

I wanted to go to the investors and go, “Look what we’ve created, and actually we’ve solved 50-60% of the technical risk at this point. Look at all of the press.”

And even that July, feedback reached 3.2 billion people.

So to get a barely working product in front of 3.2 billion people, that was quite impressive. Again, that’s not quite product market fit, but at least a strong indication of the potential for product market fit.

So off the back of all that craziness, we then did a SAFE, now a SAFE is a US phenomenon because this is actually a US firm, even though more than half of the founders are British, we decided to base it in Delaware because our potential acquirer will probably be a US tech firm. So we thought we’d make it easy for them.

So in the US you have these things called SAFE, it’s a simple agreement for future equity, it’s a bit like a convertible note. So we then raised $1.5 million as part of this SAFE, and then that’s what’s funded the business since then.

Bex Burn-Callander:

That’s interesting.

So from day dot, you knew that this was going to be the business, that you kind of proved the concept, you found the market, you perfected the tech, but then you would sell presumably to a much bigger tech company and then kind of move on to the next project.

How does that change your approach, your outlook when at the beginning that there’s an exit?

Mitchell Feldman:

Well, I think that I can answer this with confidence that it’s about coming out big, early. We knew that this was a digital arms race in terms of solving this problem.

So we made a decision that once we had got to a position where we had a device that didn’t require masking tape and Sellotape to hold it together, is actually to really make a big statement.

To Dan’s point before, we made sure that we got the marketing in place to create a wave of activity. And so much so that it reached, as Dan said, about 3.2 billion people because of the subject matter.

So at that point we had made a statement, it was then around fulfilling that and continuing to deliver value and turn it into revenue ultimately.

Being a small startup means cleaning up your own messes

Bex Burn-Callander:

And on that point about making a splash, as I speak to you, you guys are just exploding. The brand is everywhere. I’ve seen you on the BBC, I’ve seen you on Wired Magazine, in the States, in the UK all different major media outlets, people who watch Love Island, Tasha G is a brand ambassador. I mean, this is massive.

So I’m interested to know how are you guys doing? Is life incredibly intense? How are you coping with this level of scrutiny and all the media and all the interviews? I think a lot of founders who’d like to be where you are now, could benefit from maybe a bit of advice on how to cope.

Dan Scarfe:

Well, I guess, yeah, first of all, be careful what you wish for. It sounds like great fun, but try going live across the whole world about something you barely really know anything about and try and pretend like you’re an expert on it.

But it’s hard. It’s so hard. I mean it was 20 years since I did my last startup and I forgot all of the hard work involved in doing it and the fact that you don’t just have this army of people underneath you clearing up the mess behind you.

So I’m now my own mess clearer upper, which is a lot more difficult.

But it’s fun, it’s exciting. There’s so much innovation. We’re a small team, there’s only a dozen of us, but the amount that we crank out is as much as software companies 10 times our size. Actually a small number of brilliant people can actually deliver the work of a much larger number of average people.

So the rate of innovation is insane. We just launched the second edition of XRAI Glass, as we mentioned, last week. So that was the culmination of three to four months’ worth of hard work and giving us iOS support for the first time, which was massive because 80% of our target users are iPhone. So that was a big one for us.

But the innovation train is not slowing down. We’ve got new glasses coming out all the time. So these are my favourites. So these just got released, in fact, these arrived yesterday evening.

So these are the new Rokid Max, which you can see are absolutely beautiful, feather-light. And I absolutely love these glasses.

But again, always more work to be done on new glasses coming out, new frameworks to support, new people to go talk to and in new glasses like the Apple ones. So it’s fun, but it’s hard.

Bex Burn-Callander:

I love the show and tell, I love a bit of show and tell. Those glasses are so cool.

They look kind of like snowboarder meets the Terminator. Do you know what I mean?

Dan Scarfe:

Well these are the other ones. So these are the XREALs. So these were the original ones. So these are the ones that you’ve probably seen in all the videos, but again, it’s all about choice.

So it’s like what’s your style? What do you like?

Bex Burn-Callander:

I like the classics. They’re the ones I would wear, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Scarfe:

Okay. All right. These are the XREALs.

Stick to your mission statement when creating new innovative products

Bex Burn-Callander:

And you mentioned all these innovations, the innovation train. How do you make sure that you are not getting massively distracted by trying to do 10,000 things at once and going down some blind alleys in the meanwhile when perhaps you need to focus on a few hero ideas?

Mitchell Feldman:

It’s interesting because one thing that we’ve known is that we’ve sort of opened Pandora’s Box by creating this technology because we’re fixated on our core audience, which is the deaf, the hard of hearing, and slowly but surely moving into that neurodivergent community.

There’s no reason why we could not, with some engineering feats, start helping those who are visually impaired or creating other variants of our software like Dan’s had an idea about XRAI TV and giving subtitles to everything.

And it’s around staying focused, understanding what our mission statement was, and every time those ideas come up and say they’re great, and they have merit, but do they marry our mission statement? Are they going to get us to where we had that vision of when we first started this business?

So we’re in a position where we’ve built this nuclear power, it’s just about staying focused. And that’s a really important learning for all of the people on this podcast, is stay focused, stick to your knitting and just do that really, really well.

Dealing with competitors and handling criticism

Bex Burn-Callander:

Are there many competitors out there either that were working on the same thing at the same time, or that are springing up now that you guys are hitting the headlines? And what can you do about that?

Dan Scarfe:

I mean, there are maybe one or two other companies in the world specifically doing smart glasses with subtitles. I mean, as you said right at the beginning, there’s a dozen apps that can do this on your phone.

Although ironically, we’ve kind of started competing with them as well. I mean, we never set out to, we wanted the very best subtitling experience on glasses, but we accidentally created the very best subtitling experience on app as well. And many users of other apps have switched to our app.

So sometimes you accidentally discover these things.

But more will come of course. I mean, one of the dangers of being the first to put your flag in the sand and declare the start of the race is that everybody else is going to look at it and start to mimic you and copy you.

Especially on the GPT thing. There are various internet memes that have been going round the previous week, Reality GPT was one of them, although they must have been fairly upset that Apple chose Vision Pro rather than Reality Pro. So that was one.

But a lot of these are a hype. We know the engineering challenges that go behind these meme videos, and we know the difficulty in pulling off what they’re suggesting they might be able to.

So yes, some of it is trying to keep up with the Joneses, but some of it is staying focused on what you know is actually technically possible right now as well.

Bex Burn-Callander:

And how do you deal with detractors? Because you mentioned bringing out like an MVP, a minimum viable product, but obviously when you first bring out something that’s a bit clunky and even through development, nothing is going to be perfect when the company is one year old, there’s going to be a lot of iteration, a lot of improvements.

So what do you do if you get a slightly negative review or if somebody’s like, “Yeah, I don’t like this idea,” how do you handle that kind of criticism?

Mitchell Feldman:

Yeah, so one of the first things we learned is our first introduction, our first foray into users was meeting trolls. And we met our trolls when we first started, and we learned very early on don’t feed them.

But actually it’s really important to engage with our community. I think one of the things that I’ve been most surprised about is how little, I mean almost zero bad feedback we’ve received. You can scour the whole internet and there isn’t anything which was comforting and worrying all in the same breath.

But yeah, so we’re just learning that if someone does have an issue actually to talk to them about it, to understand it because it’s an opportunity for us to learn and to develop the product to make it even better.

Dan Scarfe:

That was the exact example I was going to use was our troll that hit on us, and it was on a barely working version release date. And we put this thing out basically saying, “We’re launching a pilot, we want some feedback from people. No one’s used this thing yet.”

And our troll came after us like, “How dare you release something that no one’s used. You can only release it once. Lots of people have used it and validated it.” And we’re going like, what?

And you can’t fathom, there’s no logic to them, so you just ignore them, as Mitch said, and just save yourself the brain wake of trying to figure some of this stuff out. It just makes no sense.

Big multinationals could discover you through their children’s TikTok

Bex Burn-Callander:

And I suppose, you mentioned, Dan, that you founded your last business 20 years ago and how much the world has changed in the meanwhile, there was no TikTok.

Now you have to be on all the socials, you have to be content creators as well as entrepreneurs and as well as innovators.

So how different is it creating a business today compared to previously? What’s better, what’s worse?

Dan Scarfe:

I mean, it’s all about brands and as we talk to investors about what’s the value of the company, we talk about market opportunity, where we are. Talk about the tech, the product. And we talk about the brand. It is a third of our company’s value, we would say, is the brand that we have created and the stir that we’ve created.

And it is quite amusing because we get cold called quite often from large multinational firms that in my previous business would’ve taken five years of knocking on that door before finally someone might open it. And in this new business they cold call us, it’s quite the phenomenon.

Anyways, you go on to these meetings with these people, and it’s normally the start of the meeting is the exec at this big company explaining how they saw you on their daughters or sons TikTok and that was where they first came across XRAI.

And you’re going like, oh my, this is madness.

Apparently that is how you get into big multinationals is through their kids and TikTok.

Mitchell Feldman:

Yeah, and that’s true. And I think one thing well is just again, that well articulating, well understood messaging. We’re not trying to spray and pray and go after everyone. We’ve got a very discreet audience with a very unique issue.

Being able to articulate that in your marketing will help you get to those customers much quicker. And that was, again, a strength for us, is we’ve in previous lives, anyone who had a computer with a plug on it that needs to move it to the cloud, we can move them to the cloud.

Now it’s a very specific use set that we can talk to, and we can craft of all our messaging around that. So it makes it much, much easier rather than the days of when I first started my business and mail shotting the nicest road in my local area and putting A4 printed pamphlets through their door.

Bex Burn-Callander:

Those were the days, Mitch. Those were the days.

Mitchell Feldman:

Indeed.

Know your market and how sellable your product is

Bex Burn-Callander:

And just finally guys, so to any sort of would-be tech entrepreneurs out there, what would you advise them to do in terms of focus if they want to develop the next hit technology? Should they focus on accessibility?

Because you mentioned that is really, really powerful right now. Is a sort of mission human a really vital element.

What is your advice to anyone who’s like, right, I want to do something tech oriented, but I’m not sure what?

Dan Scarfe:

Oh, that’s a tough question. Of course selfishly, I would say whatever you do, don’t do anything around XR or AI. There’s no future there at all, no money to be made.

But of course the reality is that they are the two hottest areas right now. And so anyone that can figure out this new world of extended reality and artificial intelligence and how they come together in some way, I think that’s fertile, of course.

But then I’m sure that’s the advice that everyone is giving right now, and that doesn’t help come up with what a use case might be in that new world, but there’ll be billions and billions of dollars of value created in companies in those two spaces over the coming five years.

Mitchell Feldman:

Yeah, I would add to that and just to say that it’s great understanding that you’ve got a product that has an addressable market, but understanding the competitive landscape and also one of the most important things is how easy is this to sell?

One of the things that we found, particularly when we’re talking to large enterprises, of which we speak to many who want to bring this into their portfolio to enable their teams, is those doors are easier to lean into. They’re almost open.

Whereas if you were to have a product that was talking to an IT tech team, it’s going to be a much harder journey to get involved and sell into those people. So diversity, equity and inclusion is hot on everybody’s lips at the moment and people want to do better.

So for us, that’s a great play. But again, just thinking about not only how you sell it, but how easy it is to sell is a really important factor to consider.

Can journalists use the XRAI Glass app for transcriptions?

Bex Burn-Callander:

That’s great advice. And guys, just finally, you mentioned several use cases for XRAI Glass, but the app specifically, as a journalist, can I ditch all the other transcription apps and just use yours?

Dan Scarfe:

I wish you would. Absolutely you can. And in fact, this one has ChatGPT built into it.

So actually you could have taken this entire interview gone, “Hey XRAI, can you write me a 50-word long intro?” And it would just do it for you?

Or, “Hey XRAI, can you summarise this hour-long interview into 10 bullet points? What were the three most interesting things the guys spoke about?”

Bop, maybe just do it for you straight away. So there we go.

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