January 2025
This post is part of our monthly supporter updates and reflects product development and thinking at the time it was written. Here is our latest update.
Hi all,
Here's what's new this month from Artificial Societies:
Today we begin our YC journey and we're not wasting any time. We went live with Wave 🌊, a shiny new web-app that allows startups to test their fundraising pitches in a simulated network of 988 real VCs from across the US, Europe, the UK, and Canada.
We chose this first use case to live up to the YC motto: "make something people want." Talking to our batch mates, we realised that all of them have demo day anxiety, and they've been impressed that we've already used our own product to refine our investor pitch. So we figured, why not productise this to help our peers?
We set a goal of helping 100 users iterate their startup pitch with Wave. By month's end, 372 users had run more than 1,000 simulations. 139 of them used Wave to not just test, but iterate their pitch, beating our goal by 39%. There's been a steady stream of usage every single day, even on Sundays.
Over the month, we shipped more than 70 improvements, all based on feedback from strangers using Wave. Each simulation now takes around 90 seconds — 10x faster than when we first launched.
We're beginning to work with design partners on their most pressing product and marketing insights challenges. We can add the most value when the target audience is active online and influencing each other, yet hard to reach with traditional methods. We're now planning to build our second artificial society. Stay tuned.