🎬 how your AI intelligence gets made

bot memo bts: the good, bad, and completely broken

Bot Memo reports are all about numbers. But I’m not just a numbers guy.

I have been thinking about how to share my authentic voice and make certain parts of this project more exciting.

And so, I asked myself: “How about you just share a raw, unfiltered bts bot memo glimpse?”

Today’s newsletter is going ahead with this experiment.

Let me pull the curtains on how I used AI at Bot Memo last week. It’s as messy as you think.

Before we begin, I wanna do a vibe check.

🔧 what i did with ai this week

Last week, I tracked 125 new startup funding rounds (88 were identified as AI) and extracted 20+ data points per company.

I have built Python scripts that handle the initial data extraction, writing and classifying AI startups for me. But man, my Google Sheets are totally chaotic.

Once I have data about various startups, then comes a messy part (which we’ll talk about more in the next section).

But hey, once I have this data, I have a couple of data analysis scripts that pull up really cool dashboards for me.

I have tried to just share raw data with Claude and ChatGPT. But the hallucinations just kill me. I realized it's much better to have AI design Python code that just does this data analysis for you.

🤦‍♂️ where AI failed me this week

My biggest headache continues to be finding an automated, scalable way to determine if a company is using any AI, from the 100+ funding rounds I extract every week.

The prompts I use to have Perplexity research specific companies probably need more work. But sometimes it just ends up not finding relevant info on startups that raised funding.

But manually checking and filtering out non-AI startups, researching about them, and checking if they have any AI features?

Oof.

It’s just really frustrating.

This week, I tried Tavily AI’s API playground. They offer 1k free credits as of now.

I was considering its API as an alternative to the Perplexity API for better research accuracy. Plus it could serve raw content directly to ChatGPT for classifying startups. But honestly, the results were subpar.

If you want to integrate search in your backend data pipelines, I do recommend you check out Tavily, a specialized LLM search engine (no, that’s not an affiliate link!)

I am gonna reconsider ChatGPT API’s search at some point (couldn’t get it to work the last time). But it will probably cost much more (and isn't specialized enough for this kind of research).

💡 my aha moment of the week

For weeks, I've had a seductive automation dream. I lift a finger, and my AI workflow just delivers insightful data on AI startups.

Integrating Substack and Twitter with Google Sheets and routing them all through the Claude API was a part of this dream. But some dreams take time.

Turns out all I need to start scheduling social media posts and drafts in Substack were MCPs. At least as a starting point. I tried them before but felt they weren’t gonna be sufficient if I wanted to completely automate my Python scripts via an orchestrator.

So I have already grabbed a lifetime deal of TypingMind (a frontend for all major LLMs of the world, and no, that’s not an affiliate link either). I’m gonna start routing connections to the services I need, and have a semi-autonomous system.

🛠️ what i am working on this week

My main focus this week is starting to do some data quality checks for the Q2 Bot Memo AI landscape report. I am also gonna *try* to do more regular cleanups for the funding data I discover during the week.

Oh and I am so looking forward to connecting my Trello board via its MCP to TypingMind. And just vibe with my task management. Of course, the Claude API will help me plan the most impactful tasks and put them visually on a Kanban.

My empty Trello board’s waiting!

Oh and I have got myself Twitter Premium for my personal profile and would love to distribute my newsletter content there. But let’s see what time permits.

Just want to keep this one short before I understand if this makes sense to you. Let me know :)

PS: I am sending out this newsletter to only my most engaged folks so that I know if it’s of any value for you :)

PPS. If you're building with AI tools and facing workflow challenges, hit reply. Most of us are figuring this out as we go, and I'd love to just connect and geek out on AI.