Product-market fit insights for technical founders.
Practical resources for experienced professionals.
No hype, just help.
Built the initial innovation and now it's time to find product-market fit? Get relevant discovery insights on nuanced market requirements, target personas, user journeys, and more. Tailored for startups.
ExploreLaunched a career and AI feels like chaotic nonsense? Discover respectful learning resources to help you decide what is "real" and not "real", for yourself.
Discoverunconventional underdogs was founded on the belief that technical excellence, product insight, and helpful products don't have to be separate universes. We understand the complexity involved when building emerging, and potentially, disruptive products. We also have deep experience working with technical founders that are akin to unicorns, dragons, and sabertooth tigers. We are here to help and enable, not control.
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Unfortunately, many technical founders build amazing innovations that do not get used. This results in a lot of time wasted and soul crushing heartbreak, for everyone. Oftentimes, this happens because product insights, particularly about potential users and market dynamics, weren't discussed or incorporated. Because relevant insights for emerging products are hard to acquire. Also, tradeoff conversations are very hard to have. Yet, identifying the right personas and applying product-market fit methods helps address these challenges. We've seen this pattern from multiple angles: bringing emerging technologies to market at O'Reilly Media, building developer tools at NVIDIA, and working directly with founders navigating these waters.
We work with technical founders in machine learning, data science, data engineering, and infrastructure to build bridges and tunnels between technical excellence, users, and product success. This includes:
Technical founders are akin to unicorns, dragons, and sabertooth tigers. Product insights data without traceable provenance is not helpful, particularly when responsible for the care and support of highly unique intelligent entities with intense skills. unconventional underdogs acquire specific contextual insights on technologies, markets, target users, constraints, and potential tradeoffs that support nuanced complex product roadmap and engineering decisions.
Acquiring this relevant data and insights may mean structured user interviews to validate or invalidate assumptions. It might mean analyzing usage patterns to find unexpected use cases. The insights may broker intense internal collaborative conversations about prioritization. The work adapts to what is actually needed, not a restrictive spec or doctrine that may not be applicable for product development built on emerging technologies.
We specialize in working with founders who have deep technical expertise in:
If our approach aligns with yours and you'd like help with understanding your market, your users, or your product strategy, contact us.
The "AI" domain is filled with supposedly helpful resources that are inflated with hype, hallucinations, advertorials, arrogance, even worse ...toy examples that do not transfer, migrate, or are applicable in a professional setting. There's very little for experienced professionals who need practical guidance on what actually matters for their work. Professionals are under pressure to provide quality work. Professionals need to understand which tools are worth the time investment, which methods are transferable to multiple situations, and how to build confidence with "AI" technologies.
In 2012, when data science was just emerging, our founder took the stance at O'Reilly Media that anyone could become a data scientist. There was, and is, no single path. The same principle applies now: AI technologies, methods, and techniques are just "instructions", maps, or tools. Instructions, maps, or tools to build, move, connect, deploy, serve up, or deconstruct something else. All professionals do something, create something, and communicate. All professionals use some sort of tools for their work. unconventional underdogs provide resources, or bridges and tunnels, to these potentially new knowledge bases, methods, techniques, and tools. We provide access. Ultimately, we support you in your decision on what you want, or don't want, to do, based on your situation.
Expertise is all relative. "AI" is a domain that is constantly changing and increasing fluency within the domain helps professionals build skills to assess and navigate the emerging domain. As professionals build up fluency, it becomes easier to understand the limitations of "AI" and where it can actually help. unconventional underdogs resources are intended to provide professionals with knowledge that is additive and reinforces confidence.
Today's marketing conventions and messages around "AI" are motivationally anchored in scaring people into paralysis and accepting potentially harmful norms. No, it doesn't have to be this way. It really doesn't. We believe helping people build fluency in the technologies also provides people with the means, and choice, to be included in the "AI" technology developments. If that is what they want to do. We provide resources, or build bridges and tunnels, to these technologies for you to decide if, and what, you want to do. Whether or not you decide to use "AI" technologies and influence their development should be your choice, not someone else making the choice for you or deliberately blocking you from accessing knowledge about them. Some technologies may be helpful. Some may be extraordinarily frustrating. Yet, if you want to know about them in order to decide for yourself, then you should have access.
Interested in diving deeper on navigating AI without the hype? Contact us to be notified as resources become available.
Contact →unconventional underdogs was founded on the belief that technical excellence, product insight, and helpful products don't have to be separate universes. We understand the complexity involved when building emerging, and potentially, disruptive products. We also have deep experience working with technical founders that are akin to unicorns, dragons, and sabertooth tigers. We are here to help and enable, not control.
As the Data Editor at O'Reilly Media in 2012, our founder championed the idea that anyone could become a data scientist. Even today, there is still no single path. Our founder built technical resources to help onboard developers to new emerging data science, data engineering, and machine learning technologies. They also helped amplify emerging founders who would go on to build companies like Databricks. At NVIDIA, they launched an open source recommender systems framework with libraries that were designed to accelerate data scientists and ML engineers' workflows. Today, we provide product insights to startups with expert technical founders in machine learning, data science, data engineering, and infrastructure.
contact [at] unconventionalunderdogs.com