We're shutting down CrowdPrisma, a bootstrapped applied AI company that was formed two years ago by my friend and I (both ML engineers) to solve free-text survey analysis. A ton of really important information can only be gathered by open-ended surveys and as NLP models were maturing it seemed like a nice and relatively niche market to go after.
I think we had a unique value proposition as our NLP engine was fairly sophisticated and we also integrated its output nicely with other non-text variables (check our demo on the site).
Getting significant business traction was difficult (for reasons which would warrant its own blog post), but now with GPT4, Office Copilot, etc coming online it'll be near impossible.
We learned a ton from the experience and wouldn't change one bit, but I do wonder, how many other companies must be out there like us..
Although it might seem like there's a generative AI startup frenzy going on atm (which is great), I do have the suspicion that in most domains, large tech companies will dominate the market, due to several reasons (another blog post maybe).. Will see.. anyways, interesting times ahead..
Basically MS is putting this into Office, and Google doing the same.. in a year's time this tech will be basically free to use for anyone w a computer and it's excel anyways where they gather their feedback from the surveys.. why would they then export it and go to another site when they can just ask questions about their data directly in excel.. we assessed this situation for weeks and basically long term, this product doesn't have a USP anymore..
That doesn't add any value at all to the conversation. They had a head start, even if tons of companies "will," they "do." Also, given the context limitations of transformers, the value in using a transformer here might be extremely dubious.
A head-start on the, now deprecated, tech they were implementing. Not on the interface and business idea, which is much more easier to replicate.
From a company with a tech advantage, one that they hoped to capitalize, they are now just a team with a front-end on what's now a publicly availabe commoditized technology - one where a third party controls the state of the art even.
It's a totally different business proposition, and a much less winning one. Not some VC money getting one either.
The technology they developed on that space has been superceded and deprecated. They once had a tech advantage, or so they thought, now they'd at best have a front-end to a widely available technology controlled by a third party.
The failure is that the company didn't have the goal of solving a customer issue. If it did, pivoting to use GPT in the survey space would be completely natural. The reason the company is shutting down is because it didn't just want to solve survey analysis, it wanted to do it using it's own tech. I can see how using GPT doesn't offer as large a moat as your own tech, but if you can't use GPT better than your competitors to solve your customer problems, you're not in the customer service business, you're in the software/tech making and selling business. Both may be ideal but the former is certainly feasible.
I would say don't let the hype bring you down. A very large general solution can never suit every single use-case that exists out there. In fact, you should think about bringing in an LLM-based solution as well. If you can't beat them, join them.
Show your customers where traditional ML beats LLMs hands down.
People are using LLMs as a hammer for everything. That hype will die down.
Hum... I've noticed that this post has a deeper explanation of what your product does than your entire site.
I am really curious if ChatGPT really beat a slightly modern highly specialized AI. Did you actually try it and get better results, or are you afraid of the hype?
Did you consider just using LLMs for your product? Even with LLMs it doesn’t seem trivial to format the survey data, design the prompts, validate them across a large dataset, and present the results with nice charts and links back to the original text etc.
With LLMs I’d imagine you could do even more interesting things with analyzing survey data. It seems like the core concept of your product is still useful, and could potentially do more now. Are you actually losing customers to GPT or just feel the end is near?
Also would love to read that future blog post! Thanks
OP here.. yeah, these are all great suggestions and we considered them at length (even validated some)... the problem is, before GPT, building a deployable (i.e. not just academic paper but something that actually works) NLP pipeline was fairly niche and hard and now the barriers to entry are almost zero (but over time it's definitely trending towards zero) .. we're a small bootstrapped company doing this on the side (until we can afford to switch over).. we can't afford to compete against 100x new companies doing this (some with way deeper pockets bc either they are VC or daddy funded).. so we're not going to.. also see my response about ms copilot etc above..
Respect for being in the arena and working on a useful problem. Sorry about the decision.
Can I try to spin this moment in a different way: you have a fantastic story to tell as you pivot go head first into AI.
You’ve built amazing, relevant skills in an adjacent space. You’ve shipped, which is more than what most people do.
Rest, refuel, and put together that narrative. It’s an interesting time right now and I think there’s a solid route to raising some kind of initial funding for round 2.
I think we had a unique value proposition as our NLP engine was fairly sophisticated and we also integrated its output nicely with other non-text variables (check our demo on the site).
Getting significant business traction was difficult (for reasons which would warrant its own blog post), but now with GPT4, Office Copilot, etc coming online it'll be near impossible.
We learned a ton from the experience and wouldn't change one bit, but I do wonder, how many other companies must be out there like us..
Although it might seem like there's a generative AI startup frenzy going on atm (which is great), I do have the suspicion that in most domains, large tech companies will dominate the market, due to several reasons (another blog post maybe).. Will see.. anyways, interesting times ahead..