Friends of Dentro | November Recap

Welcome to the second edition of Friends of Dentro! 🎉

We set up this newsletter to keep you in the loop of what we’re up to at Dentro. Our work with clients, our own products and everything along the way. A wild mix of learnings, thoughts and things we’re working on. For anyone interested in AI, digital products and Dentro in general.

In this edition we will be talking about options for companies to use internal data with AI. We'll also recap our latest product launch and share insights on what else we’ve been up to recently.

Thanks for reading along!

Topic of the Month:
How EU-based companies can leverage AI with their internal data

We often hear concerns from EU-based companies about using AI with their internal data. "Is it even possible?", "Won't we violate GDPR?", "Do we need to build our own AI?" – questions like these usually arise. Let's clear the air and explore the real options for EU companies wanting to use AI in combination with their proprietary data:

1. Self-hosting: Keep it in-house
   This is the Fort Knox approach. You bring the AI to your data, not the other way around. It's like having your own personal AI butler who never leaves the premises. Great for data security, but requires more technical know-how and resources.
   

2. EU-based only: Stay in the neighborhood
   Think of this as the "EU clubhouse" option. You're using AI services, but they're all based within the EU. It's a good middle ground - you get the benefits of specialized AI providers while keeping data within EU jurisdiction. Perfect for those who want to play it safe with GDPR.
   

3. Worldwide with DPAs: Go global, stay compliant
   This is the "world traveler with a really good insurance policy" approach. You can use global AI providers, but with solid Data Processing Agreements in place. It opens up more options but requires careful legal footwork. Think of DPAs as your data's passport and visa rolled into one.

Bonus: Anonymize it
Consider this the "witness protection program" for your data. By anonymizing your internal data, you can use it more freely with AI systems. It's an extra step. But it can significantly reduce privacy risks and open up more possibilities for AI use.

Most EU companies we work with don't need to reinvent the wheel. They need to find the right balance. Balance between using powerful AI capabilities and maintaining data protection. Often, a combination of these approaches works best. The closer you want to get towards the Fort Knox approach though, the more effort it usually takes to set things up.

For a deeper dive into navigating the EU's AI landscape from a GDPR perspective, check out our recent blog post: GDPR in AI: The 3 survival levels

We launched NoteThisDown 🎉

Last month, we introduced our very first paid product, NoteThisDown, to the market. An app that lets you transcribe handwritten notes with AI. It stores the results straight to a new page in your Notion account.

Despite being in its MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage, we decided to launch and gather real-world feedback.

Frankly, we didn’t have the highest expectations, but the results proved us wrong:

• 1,997 unique visits

• 216 CTA clicks

• 94 Sign-ins

• 22 trials

• 7 sales

• 100€ revenue

These figures suggest there's genuine interest in what we're offering, so we definitely consider this a success. Are you interested in the details of our launch and the lessons we've drawn from it? We've published an in-depth blog post here: A transparent digital product launch experience

And here’s what we’re going to do next:

• Keep refining our product development blueprint by incorporating learnings from the NoteThisDown launch.

• Talk to early users to get our hands on as much direct feedback as possible.

• Gradually improve the product by working on improvements, bug fixes and transcription quality.

We really appreciate the early engagement we've seen so far and look forward to sharing updates as NoteThisDown evolves.

A peek into what else we’ve been up to in October

Building 🛠

• Put a bit of content on indie-hackers.com, which is one of a few new domains we’ve recently purchased. You may recall indie hacking from the previous edition of this newsletter. We believe that (among other topics) indie hacking will gain mass market adoption over time. So we wanted to have something out there in that space. Although it doesn’t have the highest priority at the moment, we plan to put a bit more effort into it in the mid-term.

• Updated DentroChat with multiple new features, such as improved history, voice recording and web search. Still in testing at the moment but we’ll release it to all DentroChat users very soon.

• Worked on our AI agent that assists with writing blog posts. It’s still a bit work in progress, but we’re getting there. The process we’re aiming for is: talk about a topic —> answer some questions about it —> receive your blog post. That’s as simple as it gets. Besides helping us a ton, we see potential user interest for such a tool as well. We might therefore even release it as one of our next products. You can see early results already published on our website here and here.

• Built sequential Agents with Flowise, one of which is the aforementioned blog writing tool. Another is a website chat. We will probably write about agent systems in more depth in the future, but in short these are multiple AIs working with each other and using a set of tools in order to achieve more complex tasks. What’s special about this is that the individual agents are able to decide themselves what tool to use and what step to take next, depending on the given situation.

• Started creating an AI employee for Dentro, her name will be Paula. We believe in the future every company will have AI representatives and we’d like to lead the way. Paula will be a showcase for prospective clients on what’s possible regarding photo, video, voice and customer service with AI. Stay tuned, you’ll meet her soon 😉

• Improved our AI voice bots, which are based on a platform call Vapi. Been experimenting with advanced features called squads, which let multiple voice agents handle a call together. They pass the call around depending on the caller’s language and specific needs.

Background activities 👨‍💻

• Completely rethought the authentication solutions we’ve been using so far. This led us to testing multiple alternatives: Clerk, Kinde, AWS Cognito, Supabase and manual setup as well. We learned a lot and decided to go with Supabase for the time being.

• Realized in the course of the NoteThisDown launch, that we were not at all prepared to send automated emails to our users 🙈 Took a good bit of research and testing different tools, but now we got a plan and will start sending emails with Plunk.

• Research physical server options for a prospective client with very high data protection standards (ITAR compliant, to be exact). We usually host everything with secure cloud storage providers like Hetzner or AWS. bBut this didn’t cut it in that case. We learned a lot about a regulation we’ve never heard of before and about physical server setups as well. Prospective client was happy and we were able to advance in the process.

• Started recording all our internal calls in order to then transcribe them and access what we’ve been talking about in subsequent tasks. This for example allows us to produce protocols, bullet point lists or summaries in a matter of seconds. It’s like an assistant who always listens in and can help you out whenever you need him to.

• Researched how to backup our apps and encrypt data at rest. We use the Reflex framework with a SQL database, and are considering AWS RDS, Litestream, and Supabase for management.

Miscellaneous ✨

• Realized that writing offers takes lots of time. So we started thinking of how to streamline this process. As any project we do is unique, it’s hard to fully automate this, but we do have a couple of starting points and will aim to gradually improve this over time.

• Worked on improving our storytelling and client communication skills – explaining what Dentro does is not easy when talking to people from a wide array of backgrounds and tech knowledge and it’s our responsibility to make sure everyone gets the infos they need.

• Did a video interview with Kirk Marple, CEO and founder of Graphlit. Actually, it was less of an interview than a developer showcase. And quite a lengthy one with a duration of about 50 minutes. But it was totally worth it and well received, we might do more of this format in the future. Watch it on YouTube.

And this wraps up the second edition of Friends of Dentro. Thanks so much for being a part of it and reading along as Dentro evolves!

Questions, feedback, or anything else you’d like to tell us? We’re happy to read it all
– just hit ‘Reply’ on this email.

All the best,
Paul & Paul from Dentro

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