Aakash and I have been friends, co-founders and colleagues since 2010. Our last startup together, C42 was acquired by Gojek in 2015 and after more than 7 years as employees, we were itching to start up again.
Our usual modus operandi is to not worry too much about 'the idea' and instead, focus on warming up by generating some revenue in the easiest way possible. By November 2022, we were generating 5 digit MRR through strategy consulting for Series A-C startups while slowly starting to crystallize a broad thesis about the market.
The Sector
As interest rates went up and the global economy slowly weakened, we increasingly built our conviction that we should focus on proven, reliable business models. Our background in IT Services made the sector an obvious market to explore. At $1.2 Trillion and 8% CAGR, the IT Services sector was booming, showing strong resilience to the economic downturn.
What held us back was the difficulty in scaling a services business. The manpower intensive nature of the business meant scaling was organic and margins were relatively low.
The Black Swan
In November 2022, ChatGPT dropped and the world changed. After using it for a couple of weeks, we realised that white-collar knowledge work was going to be disrupted in a way that was unimaginable. What we knew for sure though was this: manpower intensive IT Services businesses were going to transform into AI-First, compute intensive, high margin businesses within the decade.
Committing to this vision was a no-brainer. We decided to start a company that would help IT Services companies transform into AI-First businesses.
realfast was born.
The Segment
We spent several months exploring both the technology and the market. We built prototypes to understand the contours of Generative AI, then used them as conversation starters with stakeholders in the IT Services sector. Slowly, our conviction grew that the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem, a $150B subset of the IT Services market was the best place to start.
The Salesforce PaaS platform is also arguably the most technically advanced of the large PaaS platforms. This dramatically lowers the investments we have to make to viably use AI Agents to do work on the platform.
The Opportunity
Our research indicates that at least $30B of the estimated $150B Salesforce Implementation Spend is amenable to automation through Generative AI. These include everything from requirements analysis and summarisation to code generation to test scenario generation.
This segment is now our area of focus, and our first SFDC AI Implementation Assistant in currently in private alpha. We are incredibly excited about the future and look forward to sharing more about our journey with you. Watch this space!