Jeannie Cahalane
Samim and Tamim founded machinemade to fix one of enterprise tech’s most expensive problems: failed product specs. After a year of consulting, they saw how unclear requirements waste time, burn budgets, and block collaboration. Their platform helps teams turn vague ideas into shared, buildable blueprints before writing a single line of code.
1. What inspired you to start machinemade, and what problem were you most determined to solve?
Samim: I was packing my bag for a trip to Tokyo when a large development order hit my inbox. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area is expensive, which prompted me to start a side gig: consulting other businesses and founders on AI-related topics. On the 11h flight, I laid the foundation for the R&D company, and texted my brother to join me. He prepared the paperwork to incorporate the company because we heard horror stories of how long this can take in Germany. We got lucky since that process only took us two weeks.
The plan was simple: Work on custom AI software projects until we gain enough experience and niche insights to build our very own product. What we didn’t know was that it was going to take us 1 year to reach that step.
We found out that nearly every client had one problem: They couldn’t articulate what they wanted. And they are not alone. Enterprises face the same problem every day when business and product teams have to describe their requirements to the technical department.
Tamim: In fact, it’s a systemic problem. Studies have shown that almost 40% of software projects fail because of poor requirements. In complex enterprise software projects, it is up to 70%, as one of our industry experts said in a customer discovery interview. Globally, this amounts to operational failures of $2 trillion.
2. How did your respective backgrounds—Samim’s in robust AI research and Tamim’s—shape the vision for a platform that could be used by non-technical teams?
Tamim: Throughout my 15 years of industry experience, from technology consulting, and being in charge of global engineering processes, to my last role at a Munich-based deeptech startup, I consistently found myself serving as the bridge between business strategy and technical execution.
Samim: Both of us being engineers, we are used to explaining how complex things work. Having Silicon Valley and PhD research experience in AI and Machine Learning helps, too.
However, ultimately, the experience I gained as a Teaching Assistant at Stanford University’s famous entrepreneurship class, Lean Launchpad by Steve Blank, working with several startup teams. This experience allowed me to put myself in the shoes of customers, users, and non-technical stakeholders. Oftentimes, it is not about what features to build but what customer pain to solve. The features come from the user’s interaction with your product.
3. What were the biggest technical or market challenges in building a platform?
Tamim: Beyond the typical challenges every startup faces, such as narrowing down the ideal customer, finding channels to reach them, interviewing them with learnings from the Mom Test, and of course, focusing on the problem rather than being in love with one’s solution, our biggest challenge was to build a product that amazes both technical and non-technical users.
Samim: We set a goal for ourselves to answer all questions and launch within 6 months. In that timeframe, we pivoted 3 times. The most important learning was to distill the solution and value proposition into a sentence without technical terms. Surprisingly, for engineers, this is not as easy as it sounds. We had to pitch our idea to a lot of people.
4. How did you divide the early responsibilities of building machinemade, and what were some key moments in your journey?
Samim: Typically, in early-stage startups, you tend to do everything, sometimes even at the same time. Still, in some areas, we would leverage our strengths. Tamim had the industry contacts, and I had the tech knowledge to build the product.
Tamim: It is important to stay focused on the important things, though. While Samim and our Founding Engineer, Elmar, were working on the MVP, I was doing customer development and lining up interviews with industry experts from leading companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, SAP, Audi, and Accenture. It is important to get out of the building. Talking to these potential customers not only shaped the product, but also laid the groundwork for getting enterprise design partners on board that help us develop machinemade.
5. Can you walk us through how the machinemade platform works?
Samim: We are still in stealth mode, but I can share the high-level operational flow. machinemade aligns business and technical teams to understand each other when building products. We believe building great products is deeply connected to team alignment and transparency around crystal-clear and universally understood requirements.
Typically, a product owner or product manager starts the product development process. Stakeholders from different teams get invited to the platform and collaborate on building the product blueprint. We only provide selected information to each user, depending on the development stage and their role, and we use the latest technologies to orchestrate this. At the end, the product manager receives a technical blueprint of how their software (or hardware) product works, including the logic and system behavior, signed off by engineers, minimizing the risk of product failures.
6. What sets your technology apart from other low-code or code-generation tools on the market?
Samim: We are not competing against low-code or code-generation tools. If at all, we are channeling the requirements from non-technical teams to speed up and de-risk product development with AI-assisted tools. We know AI will soon be able to perform tasks of traditional IT departments. For that, crystal-clear requirements and a unified product understanding are crucial to instruct AI systems to build software products. Our tool is exactly that: an AI-native hybrid that combines the structured collaboration of tools like Miro, the workflow and project management of tools such as Jira and Monday, and lean, organized communication similar to Slack, to cater to a singular, unified product understanding.
7. How do clients use machinemade to accelerate internal tool development and improve collaboration between technical and non-technical teams?
Samim: We see an increased outsourcing of technical responsibilities to offshore teams. While it might make sense economically, our industry partners see an increase in communication issues. Now, technical teams hundreds or thousands of km away, who have limited brand awareness and customer insights, build products for the local market. machinemade addresses this issue by providing a platform for all stakeholders to gain a shared understanding across distributed teams.
8. Can you share a success story that illustrates how machinemade helped a client bridge a critical communication gap and deliver a project more efficiently?
Tamim: Our founding engineer, Elmar, used the framework, which is the core of our tool, at two leading German car manufacturers. In one project, he helped introduce and roll out a cashback program within the whole enterprise in less than six weeks. This is unheard of in enterprises of that size.
9. What challenges have you faced while building and scaling machinemade, and how did you overcome them?
Samim: Naturally, as a scientist and engineer, I tend to overengineer simple stuff. You go down rabbit holes because you want to solve that one issue or find that one bug. Sometimes you have to physically leave your desk and go for a walk or talk to your co-founders.
Tamim: Communication is key. During the pandemic, I think everyone learned how to work from home efficiently. We, too, had founded an NGO that we scaled to 50+ people, everyone working from all over Germany, and even from abroad, from Japan to the United States. Working in the same office, however, allows us to have quick discussions and to overcome being stuck for too long, without the barrier of a digital screen and scheduling meetings.
Samim: Perhaps the most significant challenge, and ultimately an important learning, was embracing sales. As engineers, this is most often the last thing we want to do. We even considered bringing on a co-founder for this. However, we quickly realized that nobody knows the problem, product, and vision as we do. Founder-sales is a non-negotiable, and something you cannot outsource.
10. Looking back, are there any strategic decisions you would approach differently now?
Samim: It took us a while to nail down our value proposition and problem/solution statements in a single non-technical sentence. That was a learning curve for us as engineers. We were lucky that we had advisors who challenged us on that and helped us think in different ways to convey our message.
Tamim: But getting “I truly don’t understand what you’re building” as feedback after pitching is not what we were expecting to hear. We took up the challenge and refined our language and the overall pitch. We potentially could have accelerated this learning by engaging more non-technical advisors earlier in the process.
11. What does success look like for you and machinemade in the next 5–10 years?
Tamim: Ideally, we become the default for how enterprises build products, translating complex business needs into clear, actionable technical blueprints. We define success by significantly cutting down the cost of operational failures due to poor requirements. The outcome would be measurable in improved metrics such as lower spending, faster time to market, and a higher percentage of successful products.
Samim: The core of this transformation lies in empowering knowledge workers. They possess immense insights and understanding of the company and its philosophy, yet most of the information remains trapped beneath the surface. This is a direct consequence of communication barriers and a lack of structured methods. Success in this context means enabling deeper involvement of knowledge workers in the product development process.
12. What does a typical day in your life as co-founders look like, and how do you stay motivated?
Tamim: There is rarely a typical day. I think that’s what makes the startup journey exciting. But if we were to describe our day, it is a dynamic blend of deep work, planning ahead as we’re bootstrapped, and integrating the learnings we gain along the way. And of course, light lunches and a lot of coffee.
Samim: What enables this dynamic is the fact that as founder-brothers, we can be 100 percent direct to each other. We can challenge each other’s views and offer criticism without the fear of misunderstanding or damaging our co-founder relationship. That helps us to stay motivated and push each other to excel in everything we do.
Editor’s Note
What makes machinemade stand out is the founders’ deep focus on precision and communication. Samim brings AI research from Stanford. Tamim brings 15 years of enterprise systems experience. Together they’re building a tool that treats miscommunication like technical debt and removes it at the root.
