StartupAdvisr - Your startup journey friend!

An interactive platform that has been designed for startups to share ideas, connect with investors as well as grasping necessary information and reaching support along with their startup journey

Comment

Inspiration

It has been heard that roughly 137,000 startups formed every day. Unfortunately, it has been also reported that as much as 90% of the startups have had to give up their journeys. Source: failory.com.There are too many factors that caused the startups to fail such as, just name a few, how to concise a new business idea? how to deal with a lawsuit? how to evaluate the scope of the market? How to raise funds? How to identify potential investors? etc. Rooted in our experiences of starting up an interactive video streaming business, we deeply understand the major obstacles of building a business from very early states which almost every startup has to face. Such valuable experiences have been motivating and directing us in starting this idea where every startup can join, share and collaborate on startup ideas as well as expanding connections with potential investors. Our momentum of making this idea come true is simple as “nobody has to struggle with the same issues that many others have already dealt with in starting up a new business”. Here come to StartupAdvisr, a friend of every startup.

What it does

StarupAdvisr is an interactive platform for the startup community which is deeply integrated with Facebook ecosystems. At the heart of our platform is a chatbot that is built on top of Facebook Messenger. It is also powered with the Facebook core AI platform, “wit.ai” for natural language processing, etc. Furthermore, a website is also available at startupadvisr.com for browsing, searching and exchanging bright and sharp business ideas amongst communities. Following are the core services that StartupAdvisr is providing:

1. Sharing business ideas: This service allows anyone who just comes up with a new business idea or one has mature ideas about their startups to share and exchange their experiences on the ideas. This service is a combination of multiple advanced technologies in natural language processing for smooth and interactive conversation. Ideas are exchanged either through one-to-chatbot conversation or one-to-many through web-based communication channels.

2. Checking the collision of startup ideas: It came from a very common demand when one has just come up with a new business idea. This service helps these people to concise their idea in the way that they can avoid repeating others' works. Through interesting conversations with the chatbot, one can quickly learn about what aspects of the idea are uniquely available so that he/she can sharpen his/her idea, and confidently start his/her business journey right the way.

3. Looking up startup and business-related glossaries: This service provides a comprehensive way for a startup to get familiar, building up and firming their fundamental knowledge of starting a new business.

4. Making connections between startups and (venture) investors geographically: This service deals with the challenging issue for both startup and (venture) investors in finding and forming business connections amongst them.

5. Suggesting business names and domain names for startups: Based on conversations with chatbot and description of a business idea, StartupAdvisr will suggest a meaningful and memorable business name as well as a domain name for the startup. This service helps to solve the challenge in naming a business that comes straightforwardly from the beginning of any startup.

6. Suggesting unique and attractive company logos: This service is integrated inside the chatbot. It bases on provided business names and/or entered business descriptions to instantly suggest appropriate company logos. With this capability, the power chatbot can help users to start their business at ease and probably reduce a lot of effort in finding ideas on how to design a company logo together with possibly eliminating the cost of hiring designers for the task.

7. Checking availability of a domain name: This service quickly helps startups to verify the availability of domain names for their startup websites.

8. Discovery new beautiful and potential business ideas: This service is designed mainly for investors or ones who are looking for new business ideas. It is also helpful in making connections between one who has ideas and one who is looking for potential ideas to invest their capital.

How we built it

Central to our approach is a chatbot that was built on top of Facebook Messenger which provides a comprehensive way for people to make connections, share their ideas and opinions. Most importantly, in order to make our chatbot communicate smoothly and interestingly with our parties, we investigated huge amounts of time on designing conversation flows and scripts as well as Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms so that the communications could be more informative and fluent. Based on the contents of communications with startups via the chatbot, we extracted out their intention, actions and important phrases that our communication parties have mentioned. That extracted information will be further used for our services such as looking up for a definition, suggesting appropriate business names, checking the availability of domain names for their new business, suggesting potential investors, etc. For example, in order to suggest business names for a new business idea, we are using NLP advanced with an open-source thesaurus dataset from the crowdsourced corpus of 80 million synonyms and antonyms (source: https://www.powerthesaurus.org) as our additional references for suggesting meaningful and most appropriate business names from a business idea’s description. On the other hand, we also developed a website located at startupadvisr.com and a Facebook FanPage for startups community and investors to share their business ideas as well as keep track of new flying ideas. The website is connected to a growing database of startup glossaries, ideas, comments, investors information, legal procedures, etc.

Finally, we have released the chatbot, bought the domain, opened the websites and the Facebook fan page to friends and communities for testing and getting feedback so that we soon can move to the next stage of production.

Challenges we ran into

  1. The very first challenge was concising brainstorming ideas into a practical idea and making the right scopes and plans for realizing the idea. We have spent almost the first half of this one-month timeframe for brainstorming, defining developments and release phases, technologies investigations, and planning.
  2. The second biggest challenge to be named would be the data collection which is time-consuming. Recently, in just one month of timeframe, besides the data of startup glossaries, ideas, investors’ information, we are also using proprietary data from Crunchbase for this project demo stage.
  3. The third challenge was actually a technical challenge, it was NLP for English. Frankly, for us, English is a second language, therefore understanding and analyzing correct syntactic and semantics of English sentences are still challenging. Luckily, there are some good libraries, explanations out there that have helped us tremendously.
  4. The fourth challenge would be an international team working, even though for this project we have only two persons in charge, both of us actually in different countries with 2 hours of differences in time, personal schedule constraints. We managed this issue by regular meetings late evening where both have well settled after a day of a busy schedule.
  5. Last but not least, it was also a technical challenge. It was the challenge of suggesting meaningful, memorizable and short enough business names as well as domain names for a new business just from a business description. We have dealt with this challenge by applying NLP advanced with a large corpus of 80 millions of synonyms, antonyms, and sound-like words. This task is still a challenge because an appropriate business name is rooted inside the meaning/semantics of the startup’s idea, motivation, missions and how they expressed it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We have released an NLP powered MVP product on top of the Facebook ecosystem that consistently works in production environments within a month of timeframe. This product, in fact, could prove the feasibility of our idea as well as capture most of our ideas and visions for a full-grown release. More importantly, this is the first time we work remotely and internationally to develop a product that can be valuable experiences for our future business collaborations.
  2. We have gotten one step closer to our dream of providing a solution that could eliminate unnecessary obstacles, connect and assist startups from the very beginning of their venture journeys.

What we learned

  1. We have learned numerous technologies’ concepts, tools, and experiences in developing an AI, NLP and chatbot based product in a constrained time frame with remote collaborations.
  2. We have also learned that our idea could be very practical and can be further developed to benefit the startup community. During the time we develop this idea, we have chances to research and dive deep inside the fields, the more we research the more we confidently confirm the feasibility of our idea.

What's next for StartupAdvisr

Here is our full plan for building and release StartupAdvisr: https://bit.ly/38yJXjV

There still are many chances for our product to be matured and start to provide actual benefits to the startup community. The following are a brief description of further services of our product to be developed:

  1. [Connect] The place where startups can form their teams, connections, find appropriate co-founders, potential investors.
  2. [Lookup] Help startups to find precise definitions of startups and legal procedures, terminologies, and strategies.
  3. [Advice] Assist startups phase by phase:
    • The chatbot will answer queries related to startup phases, similar ideas, experiences that others have been shared. For example, “What one should pay attention to when starting a new e-commerce startup?”
    • Connect with startup consultant services to get private advice for a startup if requested.
  4. [Fundraising] A platform for crowdsourcing fundraising as well as private fundraising services.
  5. [On-demand Service] Supports for private channels in startup consulting in each phase of a startup.

Resources that we used for building StartupAdvisr

Share this project:

Updates

posted an update —

We have just developed a new feature to generate some unique and attractive logos for your business name. It bases on provided business names and/or entered business descriptions to instantly suggest appropriate company logos.

Generate logo

Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.