A better way to build

At Ryft, our team has been crafting digital products for a long time, navigating various markets, and collaborating with teams of different sizes. We've encountered many startup-building and product-development approaches throughout this journey.

Some of these approaches, particularly those involving large teams and complex workflows, proved far more complex than necessary. But we learned that simplicity, craft focus, adaptability, and a scrappy mindset are essential for success in the fast-paced world of startups.

As a venture studio—a startup that builds startups—our primary focus is refining our process of transforming ideas into viable businesses. At Ryft, our process will prioritize craft and experimentation above all else, with no excess of ceremonies, templates, or frameworks but the right balance of data and intuition.

The rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) has provided us with an expanded toolkit to help with speed. This enables us to build products faster without compromising quality, build AI products, and leverage AI to build our companies from the ground up.

In this blog series, we'll delve into how Ryft builds products, sharing insights from our experiences and highlighting the strategies that have proven most effective.

I don't know how often we will share, and we are still early on a few of our experiments, but we want to be open and talk about what works and what doesn't work for us and what we believe makes good products.

 

Doing more with Less

One of our critical principles at Ryft is our commitment to frugality. We believe in achieving significant results with limited resources and avoiding unnecessary expenses like lavish offices and excessive hiring.

Our startups prioritize delivering unmatched "value for money" for customers, positioning themselves as the best option in the market - a startup that eats away at its competition.

We understand the importance of revenue generation and self-sustainability. By taking a lean approach and prioritizing quick revenue streams, we aim to minimize the need for external investments and foster organic growth within our startups.

Our technical strategy involves a hybrid team structure, combining local architects to guide core code bases with offshore providers specializing in UI development.

This approach allows us to maintain quality while optimizing costs, and most importantly, it allows us to do things quickly.

Building a lean and efficient team is just the beginning. To truly excel in the fast-paced world of startups, we must also embrace cutting-edge technologies and innovative strategies.

Enter Artificial Intelligence.

 

Building for ourselves first

Automation through AI tools is a crucial aspect of our build strategy. It enables us to enhance efficiency and streamline processes over time. We are building our agents internally to automate tasks, such as generating company insights from articles or sifting through our documents and models to extract relevant information.

As we build, our startups extensively leverage AI tools and services to establish strong revenue streams, control expenses, and maintain healthy profit margins.

Internally, we have been exploring how agents can make our lives easier, from trying to teach it to log in to Xero for us via the browser to have all our company data and research uploaded in a model so we can query it when needed.

This approach allows us to learn quickly in an ever-changing AI world, sets us apart, and positions our startups for long-term success in the ever-evolving business landscape.

By building for ourselves first and leveraging AI to its fullest potential, we are improving our processes and paving the way for a new era of startup innovation.

 

We are just getting started

Over the coming months, we aim to be fully transparent and release detailed posts on how we identify opportunities, prototype and test ideas, and examples of how we make decisions.

With AI, we will see giant leaps in designing and building software in the next year. At Ryft, we are committed to building a world where the differences between disciplines are blurred, where logic and intuition truly coexist, and where collaboration is not painful but inspiring.