Startup Spotlight #4: An Unusual Recipe for Success
In the tech world, losing all of your users is usually considered a bad thing. But does it have to be? In this story, we explore an unlikely tale of a startup’s success that was born out of failure.
About the project
Clueso is an AI tool that helps users effortlessly create high-quality demo videos, step-by-step guides and interactive how-to’s. To use it, all you have to do is record your screen while demoing a feature and explaining it with your voice.
What’s cool is that you don’t have to worry about making it “perfect” — the magic happens after you’re done recording. Clueso’s AI will analyze your demo and produce a studio-style video with professional voice-over and zoom effects, or a series of visually engaging instructional documents.
Clueso has a number of potential use cases — like making certain features more accessible for users, helping companies with onboarding new employees, or even adding some visual flair to sales and marketing pitches.
The end result can be edited, but luckily, this involves no video editing on your part. You simply have to edit the text that Clueso generated from your recording, and AI will automatically adjust the video based on your input.
Clueso emphasizes that the videos it produces are of “studio quality” — not only are there visual effects and a natural-sounding AI voiceover, but it also removes any fumbling and rewrites the script to make it more lean and efficient, covering the same content about 40% faster than the original recording.
As mentioned previously, Clueso can do more than just videos — it can also create instructional documents. Same process — simply record your screen as you would for a video guide. The AI then breaks down your instructions into visual steps, each accompanied by a relevant image.
These documents, just like the video guides, are of professional quality. Clueso’s AI analyzes your recording and edits the final text such as to maintain a consistent tone throughout the entire guide — even if it was recorded by more than one person. In addition, you can choose from various formatting options before you generate the actual file, giving you an easy way to beautify the final document. As a bonus, Clueso can auto-translate both your documents and your videos to over 30 languages.
Everything that you generate using Clueso is automatically stored in your personal catalogue, or what they call a “help site”. But only you get to decide who actually sees it, and who sees what. You can, for example, choose to show certain bits from the catalogue on your main website, while certain others are only visible on your enterprise portal. This design is simple and streamlined, making it easy to find relevant information.
Clueso graduated from Y Combinator in the spring of last year and has already attracted a number of clients to the platform. As a result of their quick growth, the company has recently secured $1,4 million in investments, in addition to the $500k they received from Y Combinator.
What’s the gist?
In principle, what Clueso does is nothing radically new. What sets their product apart, however, is its ability to create professional-looking, ready-to-use content on the fly, eliminating the need for any extra 3rd-party tools. And that’s exactly what they try to emphasize with the image below — that Clueso can single-handedly replace multiple similar tools, combining all of their best features under one umbrella.
This is, all things considered, a completely legitimate strategy for creating in-demand products. Instead of making something that only serves one specific purpose, you can make something that serves multiple, streamlining your users’ workflow while making your competitors’ products obsolete in the process. It also makes things significantly easier when it comes to getting your product’s value across to the users.
Clueso’s story is an interesting one, and one that leaves us with a few important lessons. According to the founders, it’s a story of going from 25,000 users to 0 in the span of a few days. Yes, zero.
“When our YC batch started, our product had over 25k users. By the time it ended, we had 0.
For over a year, my co-founders, Prajwal, Neel, and I had been building a startup called Desklamp out of college. Desklamp was a tool to help students and academic researchers make and share notes on PDF documents. It had become immensely popular in universities, and our power users were spending an average of six hours a day on it. Our confidence was sky-high, and the ultimate validation came when we were accepted into YC.” — recalls Akash Anand, Clueso’s founder and CEO.
He continues: “However, as soon as we landed in SF, our YC group partners told us they hated our product. They loved our building skills, but thought we were wasting our efforts on a tool that nobody would ever pay for. We didn't believe them. In an effort to prove them wrong, we pitched priced plans to universities and research labs. But no one would subscribe. Our own university refused to buy Desklamp. As a last resort, we tried shoe-horning Desklamp into other industries, like legal firms and news agencies. Nothing worked. So, mid-way into the batch, we made the hard decision to abandon our 25k+ users and pivot. For three weeks, we were stuck in pivot hell. The three of us had different ideas of what we wanted to build and were at each other's necks.”
At that point, one of the founders’ Y Combinator group partners gave them an invaluable piece of advice. He told them to solve for a problem they themselves faced while working on Desklamp.
“That's when the idea for Clueso struck us.”, Mr. Anand recalls. “At Desklamp, we observed that publishing demo videos on YouTube increased feature adoption, reduced churn, and converted more regular users into power users. However, creating these videos was a massive challenge. It took up to two weeks to get a video out - between preparing the script, arranging for a voice actor, recording in the studio, adding animation effects and music, etc. That's why we built Clueso.”
Key takeaways
When it comes to non-paying users, always take your numbers with a grain of salt. Having a product appeal to people when it’s free is very different from getting them to actually pay for it.
The sooner you know whether or not people are willing to pay for your product, the better. Don’t leave it until it’s too late.
If you’re struggling to monetize your product, sometimes it’s better to just let it go — even if you have tens of thousands of users. Or, at the very least, pivot.
It’s entirely possible to pivot and come out with an improved product in less than 3 months (the length of a Y Combinator course).
Finally, the most important lesson — it’s not necessary to create something truly unique in order to be successful. Instead, you can assemble several tools into one product, tools which are already being used by people to get the results they need. As we can see, this approach worked quite well for Clueso.
Company info
Clueso
Website: https://www.clueso.io/
Last funding round: $1.4 million, 24.04.2024
Total funds raised: $1.9 million over 2 rounds