Startup Spotlight #17: How to Compete With ChatGPT
When taking on industry behemoths like OpenAI, you need a radically different approach. Today's featured startup may have just found one.
Project Overview
Dexa describes itself as a platform “where curiosity meets credibility.” It provides expert insights on health and fitness, AI and technology, business and finance, as well as self-development and other popular topics.
At the core of Dexa’s content are expert-hosted podcasts. The platform has already curated episodes from hundreds of handpicked experts and continues to expand its library.
On an expert’s page, users can explore their latest podcast episodes, either by watching or listening to full-length recordings or by reviewing AI-generated summaries. Additionally, these pages include a list of popular questions the expert addresses in their podcasts, with AI-generated answers.
Dexa’s standout feature is its search functionality, allowing users to ask questions and receive direct answers. Queries can be general — where the AI finds the best response from any expert — or targeted, focusing on a specific expert’s podcast.
The platform delivers answers as short audio or video clips where the expert provides a response relevant to the user’s query.
Launched in February 2023, Dexa currently attracts about 50,000 monthly visitors (though my data on this is now a few months old). Despite its modest reach, the startup recently secured its first funding round, raising $6 million.
What’s the Gist?
Dexa began its life as a personal solution. Its founder, Riley Tomasek, was an avid listener of Andrew Huberman’s podcast, where Andrew once discussed the benefits of magnesium for better sleep and shared specific usage recommendations. However, when Tomasek decided to follow the advice, he couldn’t recall the exact details and spent hours locating the episode and timestamp in the 3.5-hour podcast.
This frustration led him to create a simple AI tool to quickly find answers within the podcaster’s content. Sharing this tool on Twitter caught the podcaster’s attention, who reposted it, sparking overwhelming interest. Requests poured in for similar tools for other favorite podcasters, ultimately giving birth to Dexa.
Dexa is positioned as a new type of search engine. Unlike Google, which excels at factual queries, Dexa focuses on sourcing advice and recommendations from trusted voices. Google often ignores this content as it’s buried in podcasts and videos.
An investor in Dexa highlights the platform’s innovation: replacing Google’s “10 links” or ChatGPT’s generic summaries with opinion-driven, person-specific content indexing. People seek expertise and wisdom, not just information extracts.
This shift reflects a broader trend: people prioritize insights from trusted individuals. Social networks, blogs, and podcasts thrive on this need for human connection and perspective.
While traditional sources like news outlets and databases suffice for facts, advice and recommendations hinge on trust. People value personal takes over generic objectivity, whether from blogs or podcasts.
Even as AI models like ChatGPT become mainstream, many still prefer guidance from their favorite podcasters over anonymous algorithms. This underscores Dexa’s philosophy of providing “living wisdom over extracted content.”
Quench, a similar startup, embodies this trend too. Initially aimed at busy professionals needing concise learning, it now markets itself as a “content-to-AI assistant” tool.
Like Dexa, Quench uses AI to extract answers from long-form expert videos.
Key Takeaways
Let me start by saying that I don’t see any groundbreaking technological innovation in Dexa. But more often than not, a startup’s success isn’t about having unique technology — it’s about taking advantage of existing tools.
In Dexa’s case, the innovation is in replacing the traditional LLM approach of summarizing general opinion, which is what ChatGPT and similar tools typically do, with personal, subjective opinions of experts in a particular field.
Interestingly, this same principle can be applied in many different (and sometimes unexpected) areas.
Take pet care, for example. Right now, the internet is full of answers to any questions that you might have on the subject. But a startup called Dr.Tail decided to go even further, consolidating their expert data on pet care and creating “AI consultants” that can provide personal care plans for each pet.
People are willing to pay for the confidence and authority of answers delivered by a real person — especially if they position themselves as an expert and/or have actual credibility that they can tangibly prove. Similarly, AI systems developed for a clear, specific purpose elicit more trust from the users than ‘general-purpose’ systems do.
This principle has plenty of potential applications. Dexa uses it to provide expert advice from podcasts. Quench applies it to answering students’ questions in educational videos. Dr.Tail leverages it for pet care advice.
So, what other product could you create based on this idea? In which areas do personal opinions, advice, and recommendations from specific individuals matter most to you, rather than generalized answers from ChatGPT? Where could you source the information? And how could you best communicate the value and uniqueness of this approach in a given field?
Let us know in the comments!
Company info
Dexa
Website: https://dexa.ai/
Last funding round: $6 million, 05.02.2024
Total funds raised: $6 million over 1 round