Build Club Spotlight: 🧠🐠Brainfish with Daniel Kimber

Welcome to the Build Club Spotlight Series, where we feature some of the most exciting AI startups redefining industries!

This week, we’re talking with Brainfish, a startup reimagining how businesses help users become power users. I caught up with Co-founder and CEO of Brainfish Daniel Kimber to hear their story.

In late 2022, Daniel and Ajain Vivek (CTO and Co-founder @ Brainfish) saw a common problem: digital products were hard to master without constant, hands-on support. After experimenting with early LLMs, they launched Brainfish—an AI-powered platform that answers 90%+ of customer questions instantly and guides users seamlessly through products. By early 2023, they secured their first design partner and have since grown rapidly with a global presence.

Brainfish is innovating with CX and product adoption leveraging generative search and AI actions. If you know someone passionate about reshaping customer engagement, they’d love to connect!

Check out their demo below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Let’s dive in!

What’s your background and the story of founding Brainfish?

I built my career from a foundation in customer support and leveraged that experience to becoming a product manager in a few successful Aussie startups.

I met Ajain when working at SiteMinder in the early days of my career, and we ended up working alongside each other in one of the product teams for a few years. Towards the end of 2022, my co-founder Ajain and I kept seeing a consistent issue with each of the products we had worked on and built. It was extremely hard to enable the majority of users to become power users without essentially providing a white glove service throughout the entire post-sale lifecycle. Having spent a good chunk of 2022 experimenting with LLMs, we looked at how we could develop a new kind of solution that at the beginning, could answer 90%+ of customer questions instantly & accurately, and then over the long term, help each individual user to learn, adopt and leverage an online product using AI. We launched a website testing this theory in December 2022, and by February had our first design partner and a list of beta prospects from around the world.

How would you describe your product offerings to a new customer and to an AI engineer?

New customer:

Brainfish helps users learn your product through a combination of advanced AI models embedded in your UI. Products like generative search, AI actions, and themed analytics enable businesses to deliver a best-in-class digital experience at all stages of the customer journey.

AI Engineer:

Brainfish is a product discovery agent that learns through user behavioral analysis, to provide insights to the business on how users interact with them. For end-users, Brainfish engages users both proactively and reactively through dynamic nudges, generative search, and AI actions that can route users throughout the product.

How has the journey been so far - how has Brainfish evolved?

It’s been a wild ride. We built the initial MVP for Brainfish outside of normal working hours, and since leaving our jobs in April last year, we’ve grown immensely, and now have a great team, great investors and a growing global presence. At the beginning, it’s super important to focus on solving problems that are right in front of you. Now we’re a little bit further down the garden path, we’re spending more time looking at how we can upscale the problems we solve whilst still moving at lightning pace.

What advice would you give to aspiring AI builders?

Focus on getting to the real root cause of problems for customers, make sure they're worth solving (the value of solving can be articulated clearly), and then build a prototype to test and learn with. We believe in failing fast, but building for the sake of building is not always the best use of time. Sometimes the most effective ways to solve problems can be with better process, or a better understanding of the people you are solving for (a good mockup goes a long way). That being said, speed of quality code delivery is super important. Your product will never be perfect, so ship early and often (as long as it’s good quality).

How can our audience help you build and grow Brainfish?

Get the word out! There’s a new way to think about product adoption, and how it connects to customer experience. Solving customer problems based on business functions is an old school mindset, we’re here to solve problems based on how end-users view the world. We help companies all around the world to engage and support their end users in many languages, so if you know anyone that wants to revolutionise the way they foster customer delight, let us know.

Liked this post and want to be featured next? Reach out to Daniel Malkinson or [email protected] 

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