btwn.ai

Guided by the belief that each individual possesses unique insights and background valuable to the world, our mission is to help people find their niche in the world of entrepreneurship. We aim to support and guide aspiring entrepreneurs, regardless of their experience, in identifying their strengths and passions, and ultimately, in realizing their full potential.

Inspiration

In today's fast-paced world, countless aspiring founders are eager to make a positive impact but often struggle to identify genuine problems worth solving. They may have valuable skills and passion, but finding the right market to apply them can be a daunting challenge. Existing tools for startup ideation and research are often complex, time-consuming, and lack breadth. Recognizing these barriers, we were inspired to build a solution that dramatically lowers the hurdles for enacting real change through entrepreneurship.

What it does

btwn.ai is an AI-powered platform that empowers founders to discover and validate high-potential startup ideas at the intersection of their unique strengths and market needs. The platform generates data-driven recommendations to help founders assess critical alignments in their entrepreneurial journey, navigating complex intersections.

Founder-Market Fit: Align your skills, experience, and passion with industries ripe for disruption.

Solution-Problem Fit: Validate that your proposed solutions effectively address the identified problem space.

Product-Market Fit: Ensure your product offerings meet market demand and have a sustainable business model.

Talent-Product Fit: Identify and hire the best talent to develop and scale your product successfully.

How we built it

To build btwn.ai, we created a simple and intuitive frontend using TypeScript, Next.js, and the Mantine.dev component library, hosted on Heroku with a Supabase database. We integrated Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4 for AI-driven insights, and leveraged the YouTube Data API v3, BeautifulSoup, and Selenium for comprehensive data collection from video transcripts, comment sections, app store reviews, and web pages. We utilized you.com's web-scale search API to scrape the internet for relevant sources, enabling efficient industry and problem space identification.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we encountered while developing btwn.ai was ensuring the stability and efficiency of our data scraping pipeline, particularly when dealing with highly dynamic websites. These issues led to prolonged payload requests and disruptions in the workflow. Navigating these obstacles, parallelizing processes, and optimizing the backend consumed a significant portion of our development time. Additionally, maintaining consistency in the responses generated by the large language models proved to be a challenge, as Claude and GPT-4 each excelled in different scenarios. Overcoming these hurdles involved extensive trial and error, but the process provided valuable insights into inference and interpretability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

When we first started this project, we had a vague notion of what we wanted to achieve with the domain name "btwn.ai," which we had owned for a while. As we brainstormed potential ideas that fit our team, we realized that we ourselves needed a powerful tool to help us validate and discover ideas that aligned with our team's strengths and target market needs. This realization sparked the creation of btwn.ai. We're proud of developing a platform that empowers startup founders who, like us, have a loose idea but need guidance in refining and validating it.

What we learned

Creating btwn.ai taught us so much! We learned how powerful it is to combine different AI models like you.com, Claude, and GPT, seeing their unique strengths come together to make something amazing. We also realized how crucial good communication is, especially when we're racing against the clock. At first, things were a bit chaotic, but we quickly found our groove and learned to work together seamlessly. It wasn't enough to just say "I'm done" – we needed to clearly explain what we did and how it fit into the big picture. By the end, we were a well-oiled machine, prioritizing ruthlessly and iterating rapidly to bring our vision to life.

What's next for btwn.ai

Looking ahead, we have ambitious plans to enhance btwn.ai's capabilities and expand its impact. We aim to further improve the platform's data integration and machine learning capabilities to deliver even higher quality insights. Additionally, we plan to expand support to adjacent use cases, such as competitive analysis, customer discovery, and product roadmapping, providing a comprehensive toolkit for aspiring founders. Ultimately, our goal is to partner with accelerators like SkyDeck, universities, and founders' networks to deploy the solution and create real-world impact by empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Not sure what to build to win your next hackathon project? Try btwn.ai :)