Taking my next steps in AI through ScholarAI

Trying Something New

Soon after publishing a paper and doing another research project, I wanted a change of pace. Although very rewarding, I found that machine learning research was both very time consuming and often felt like I was not making a very big impact on the world. As luck would have it, as I was finishing my research a Dylan Ott contacted me about a new project that he wanted to work with me on. I had previously worked closely with him last year on a startup named SupaSole, which aimed to extend the lifetime of one's shoe. We were in operation for several months, and even pitched our idea to several investors, but we eventually closed down the company. The project that Dylan was in the process of creating was named ScholarAI, which used OpenAI's API in order to help students write notes and summarize documents. The intention is for students not to use AI to cheat on tests, but rather help these students study for said test. For example, many students in AP History have to read very long documents about historical moments and events, and this can be very time consuming. ScholarAI helps these students summarizing the document, which can help students save a large amount of time. Furthermore, students can also use ScholarAI to automatically write notes. I actually used this myself about a week ago, when we had a test in History on certain historical figures. By asking ScholarAI to make notes on the topics that I needed, I had the notes that I needed to study in a small fraction of the time that it would have taken me if I had taken the notes myself. 

Growing and Marketing

With the main development finished, we've spent quite a bit of time, resources and failed attempts on our marketing. We had one Tik Tok do very well, but the majority of our Tik Toks have been doing decent to bad numbers. A really big potential field to market on is Reddit, but our initial test, although successful, has proven hard to replicate on a bigger scale. Right now, the biggest thing that has driven people to our website is word of mouth. Word of mouth is infamous for being incredibly hard to reliably increase, but our Tik Tok and Instagram page seem to be doing the trick. Even if not every post does amazing, the few hundreds to thousands of impressions each post gets seems to have spread beyond just the success of the post. 

Additional Notes

Despite this being my first big, traditionally successful project, I've worked on many previous projects before. For anyone going down this road, I highly recommend making dozens of your own projects before you bother to learn how to host a website, buy a domain and pay for everything. More often than not, spending extra time ensuring your technical skills are sharp is well worth it before starting to work with or create a team of your own. That was probably the biggest mistake I made throughout this entire process, and this resulted in many fumbles and failures before starting to get things right. Failing is not always a bad thing, but I would've paved myself a much straighter path had I spent more time behind a terminal before jumping into this project.

**Update**

This update was written during October 2023. Now, ScholarAI has grown to well over 20-25k users, an app has been developed and we have started to make "passive income." Despite slowing down our marketing, the website is still doing well, and we are on the way to make well over 4 figures just in the past few months alone.