Henrik Werdelin has spent the final 15 years serving to entrepreneurs construct massive manufacturers like Barkbox by means of his startup studio Prehype. Now, along with his new, New York-based enterprise Audos, he’s betting that AI may also help him scale that course of from “tens” of startups a 12 months to “a whole lot of hundreds” of aspiring enterprise homeowners.
The timing actually feels proper. Mass layoffs throughout a wide range of industries have left many employees reconsidering their profession paths, whereas AI instruments have markedly lowered the barrier to constructing digital services and products. On the middle of that Venn diagram is Werdelin’s newest enterprise, with its promise to assist “on a regular basis entrepreneurs create million greenback AI firms” with out requiring technical abilities.
Werdelin’s journey from Prehype to Audos displays the broader transformation occurring in entrepreneurship proper now. At Prehype, the main target was on working with tech founders to construct conventional startups, the sort that may elevate hundreds of thousands and goal for billion-dollar exits.
Now, he tells iinfoai, “What we’re attempting to do is take all that information, all of the methodology that we’ve created through the years of constructing all these massive firms, and actually attempting to democratize it.”
The thought is that “on a regular basis entrepreneurs” might sense a shift is afoot however might not be eager to experiment with so-called AI brokers or know the right way to attain clients. Audos is more than pleased to assist them, supplying these people with AI instruments to construct subtle merchandise utilizing pure language, and benefiting from social media algorithms to seek out them their area of interest clients.
“Fb and a whole lot of these platforms, they’re simply unbelievable algorithms, and so they’re unbelievable at determining [how to reach your customer] for those who outline a buyer group,” says Werdelin, who co-founded Audos along with his Prehype associate Nicholas Thorne. The truth is, Audos makes use of this technique to rapidly take a look at whether or not a founder’s enterprise concept has sustainable buyer acquisition prices.
The method appears to be working. Audos has helped launch “low a whole lot” of companies since its beta launch, with its personal clients discovering the platform by means of Instagram adverts asking “Have you ever ever considered beginning one thing, however don’t know the place to go?” Amongst them, Werdelin says, are a automobile mechanic who needs to assist folks consider restore quotes, a person who’s promoting “after loss of life logistics” companies, digital golf swing coaches, and AI nutritionists. In a winking reference to billion-dollar companies, or so-called unicorns, he calls these one- and two-person groups “donkeycorns.”
All went by means of the identical course of: they clicked on Audos’s advert, its AI agent launched a dialog to determine the issues these people need to deal with and who they need to serve, and, when it was glad with the solutions, Audos received them in entrance of potential clients as quick as attainable.
As for returns, Audos operates on a essentially totally different mannequin than conventional accelerators or enterprise capital. As a substitute of taking fairness, the corporate takes a 15% income share from the companies it helps launch. In return, founders rise up to $25,000 in funding, entry to these AI-powered enterprise improvement instruments, and assist with distribution, primarily by means of paid social media promoting.
“We’re not taking any fairness of their enterprise,” Werdelin says, partly as a result of “we don’t assume these firms would possibly ever get offered. What we’re actually impressed by are the mom-and-pop retailers which might be the spine of our society.”
The income share continues indefinitely, just like platform charges charged by Apple’s App Retailer. For founders, meaning giving up a good portion of their income in perpetuity — a 15% minimize that would value entrepreneurs a whole lot of hundreds of {dollars} over time. Some will undoubtedly see that trade-off as worthwhile; others would possibly query whether or not the long-term prices justify the advantages.
Audos’s worth proposition raises different questions given how rapidly the panorama is altering. Whereas Werdelin emphasizes serving to founders construct relationships with clients, it’s unclear how a lot of that work the AI brokers can really deal with. There’s additionally the matter of differentiation. As Werdelin readily acknowledges, “the world is stuffed with these instruments” and so they’re getting higher quickly. What occurs when entrepreneurs can entry comparable AI capabilities with out paying a everlasting income tax?
Audos’s VCs don’t sound anxious about these eventualities. True Ventures led Audos’s $11.5 million seed spherical, with associate Tony Conrad explaining the attraction in a Zoom name this week. Along with having confidence in Werdelin and Thorne, says Conrad, “I feel there are simply heaps and many folks” who would possibly eagerly embrace the chance to work with a platform like Audos.
Conrad attracts parallels to Instagram’s $1 billion exit with simply 13 staff, suggesting that AI might allow much more leverage, even when Audos — which itself employs simply 5 folks altogether presently — isn’t chasing unicorns. As Werdelin explains it, “What we’re after right here is the hundreds of thousands of people that can create million-dollar companies or half-million greenback companies which might be actual and life altering.”
Provides Werdelin individually of why he spun up Audos, “What we’re attempting to do is to determine the way you make 1,000,000 firms that do 1,000,000 {dollars} turnover. That’s a trillion greenback turnover enterprise.”
It doesn’t sound loopy. Extending the advantages of entrepreneurship to individuals who historically haven’t had entry to startup capital or technical abilities is an more and more compelling proposition as conventional employment begins to really feel much less and fewer steady. “We imagine that there must be anyone who goes out and actually helps these smaller entrepreneurs which might be constructing one thing that isn’t enterprise backable,” says Werdelin. “We imagine that the world is healthier with extra entrepreneurship.”
Audos’s different buyers embrace Offline Enterprise and Bungalow Capital, together with quite a few high-profile angel buyers – Niklas Zennstrom and Mario Schlosser amongst them.
Pictured above, left to proper, Audos co-founders Nicholas Thorne and Henrik Werdelin.
