What is Toucan?
Toucan AI is an AI sales bot for e-commerce stores that can be set up nearly instantly.
My friend Vishnu (who I met while we were undergrads at Duke) and I co-founded the company right out of college and spent nearly 3 years trying to build something special in the conversational AI space.
Ultimately, even though the final outcome wasn’t exactly what we’d envisioned, we learned more throughout the process than we ever could’ve imagined, going through nearly every piece of the stereotypical startup journey there is (fundraising, hiring, product development, sales, marketing, firing, and acquisitions, to name a few).
The Timeline
| Year | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Came up with the original idea (conversational AI for video games) | Applied to various startup accelerators; graduated from Duke | Did the MIT Play Labs accelerator; pivoted to current idea | Raised ~$225k; built early product demos; set up shop in Atlanta, GA |
| 2019 | Hired our first full-time team member, Marifel, who was awesome from day 1; started our blog | Got our first customer to agree to piloting us! | Got several more pilot customers, and several interns | Raised another ~$225k; reached 10 active e-commerce pilots |
| 2020 | Launched on the Shopify App Store; launched our podcast featuring small e-commerce business owners | Reached 100 Shopify store customers! | Reached 400 Shopify store customers | Got “acqui-hired” by AddShoppers |
The Takeaways
I’ve learned countless lessons from my experiences with Toucan, far too many to list concisely here, but a couple of them in particular stand out.
Carefully choosing the people you work with is the most important decision you’ll make throughout your entire startup experience. You’ll be asked to weigh in on and make decisions about innumerable aspects of your company’s marketing, sales, product development, management, and moral compass. Having a team you can feel comfortable being open and communicative with will make all the difference as you’re encountering these new challenges.
Also, working on Toucan for several years and then working for another startup in the same industry have contributed to my strongly held opinions on workplace and employer ethics. While I’m currently neither my own employer nor anyone else’s, it’s likely that I’ll be in that position again at some point in the future, and when I do, I will be using it to improve the startling imbalance that exists in the world, rather than contributing to it.