In search of the Dreamed User with Grace Mehrabe, CEO and co-founder at Outmind
if you have been reading me you know how much interest I put in search because I have written about several ways of approaching the industry of search and bootstrapping a search startup that will play its role along with big search solutions like Google and Bing. Duckduck and .. did. Neeva followed and refocused on enterprise search exactly the niche search industry that Grace Mehrabe and the people around her tackled very successfully with Outmind a search engine startup she cofounded with Arthur Caillaud in 2019.
That’s with a clear user need identification accompanied by a clear value proposition that Outmind entered the market of enterprise search and grew its user base to reach $806.1K in revenues in 2022 (source but it might not be the right number). Grace Mehrabe has impressive expertise in the strategies, tactics, and best practices that help a startup define and clarify the user needs it solves and the value propositions it could bring to the market. That’s this expertise that helped Grace Mehrabe discover that the core users of Outmind were consultancy firms, firms that handle the mind-blowing flow of information for providing clear analyses and insights to their customers. Armed with many personas and hypotheses Grace Mehrabe interviewed many professionals and tested Outmind’s MVP with them, this allowed outmind to target the right user with the right search product and features because she used her expertise to get the right data at the right time. Getting the right Data at the right time is one of the key features of a search engine product like Outmind.
Outmind shows that what most people think that is the search engine market is a closed market dominated by Google and Bing is false because there are many special search needs and use cases still not covered by mass market search engines. This same week I have been back tweeting with Alex Wilhelm about a specific search need he has need that other journalists likely have.
In its way of expanding its reach Outmind could come to fill this search need for journalists if it doesn't already because I should confess that I have not dealt with Outmind’s offering before writing this blog article but I am sure that it’s a platform that delivers what it promises to its userbase
There is a misconception about mentoring and coaching. many think that a mentor or a coach is the one who will gonna show you the path to follow what’s rarely true. A mentor or coach, the good ones, give you a compass that will help you along your journey such that if you know where you want to go you will have a tool that could help you in the many paths you could take to reach the point you want to reach.
with Launch, this creative and powerful platform offered by Station F for supporting entrepreneurs all around the world, I had the chance to be guided by Grace Mehrabe in my quest to figure out the user and value proposition of this startup. With Launch by StationF, you have many more other experienced entrepreneurs like :
- Guillaume Moubeche, CEO at Lemlist,
- Anthoine Dusselier, CEO and founder of Tarmac Technologies
and others who will guide you in your entrepreneurial journey. So don’t hesitate to look at how Station F is helping entrepreneurs if you are on your way to launching a startup that I hope will conquer a niche market and grow globally from this niche market like what Grace Mehrabe did with Outmind the search internal search engine that connects to all your tools, and boosts your efficiency thanks to powerful artificial intelligence.
PS: May not be related or interesting but I thought it important to share this tweet. It is one of my many tweets about the industry of search engines but I might be wrong.
