Source: SPEEDA Edge research

Background

Questions

1. You’ve been working with GPT since GPT-2. What were the capabilities with GPT-2 and what potential did you see in it? How has that evolved through GPT-3 and GPT-4? What are your expectations for GPT-5 and beyond?
2. You pivoted and niched down into generative AI for academic writing as ChatGPT came out and decimated the prosumer businesses of Copy.ai and Jasper. What was the impact that ChatGPT had on your business at the time? How did you decide to niche down on academic writing? Did you consider going enterprise as Jasper and Copy.ai have done?
3. What are the key features that you developed for Jenna to drill into the academic research use case? Can you talk about the rough breakdown of usage between undergrads and graduate students/PhDs? Who pays, the student, the parent or the institution?
4. High churn is emerging as the key risk factor for prosumer gen AI apps as people promiscuously jump from app-to-app trying them out. You wrote about your goal of getting Jenna’s 16% monthly churn down to 10%. How’s that going (if you want to share any numbers) and how do you think about improving retention?
5. You’ve said that influencer marketing is a big part of your go-to-market. Can you talk a bit about how you identify, source, and contact relevant influencers for Jenni? Roughly what percentage of your overall marketing budget goes to influencers?
6. Relatively speaking, you haven’t raised much money. You were in the first batch of AI Grant which has produced some big names like Perplexity. Can you talk about the value of AI Grant and how it’s similar or different from startup accelerators like LAUNCH or Y Combinator? Do you intend to take the indie approach and if so, how does AI enable that route? How are you thinking about your capital strategy and the route of company building that you’re taking?
7. What other use cases do you see Jenni expanding into, either around academic researchers’ needs or expanding outside of that? If everything goes right for Jenni over the next five years, how do you see what it becomes? How has the world changed as a result?