5 million customers. Eight-figure annual recurring income. Twenty thousand new customers becoming a member of each day. These are some stable numbers for a startup known as Turbo AI launched in early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, two 20-year-old faculty dropouts.
Most of this development has come up to now six months, the founders inform Trendster, throughout which their AI-powered note-taking and research instrument grew from a million to 5 million customers, whereas remaining worthwhile.
They are saying the concept for Turbo stemmed from a classroom downside many faculty college students face, which is making an attempt to take notes whereas listening to a lecture on the identical time.
“I might at all times battle with taking notes as a result of I simply couldn’t each hearken to the instructor and write on the identical time. I simply couldn’t do it,” stated CEO Dhawan. “Each time I attempted to take notes, I’d cease paying consideration. And once I listened, I couldn’t take notes. I used to be like, what if I might use AI?”
So the pair constructed Turbolearn as a aspect challenge to permit them to report lectures and robotically generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes. They started sharing it with associates, then it unfold to classmates throughout Duke and Northwestern, the place they have been enrolled till dropping out this 12 months. Inside months, the app had reached different universities, together with Harvard and MIT.
The product takes the same old note-taker components—report, transcribe, summarize—and makes it interactive with research notes, quizzes, and flashcards, together with a built-in chat assistant that explains key phrases or ideas.
Nonetheless, recordings in massive halls usually choose up background noise, so the founders constructed options that enable college students to add PDFs, lectures, YouTube movies, or readings as a substitute. That’s now a extra widespread use case than stay lecture recordings.
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“College students will add a 30-page lecture and spend two hours going via 75 quiz questions in a row. You don’t do this until it’s actually working,” stated Dhawan, noting that college students love how the product saves time and helps them retain data.
It’s not simply college students utilizing Turbo AI, although—as mirrored by the identify change from Turbolearn (a research app) to Turbo AI (an AI notetaker and studying assistant). Professionals have adopted it too, together with consultants, legal professionals, medical doctors, and even analysts at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders say. Some, as an example, add stories and use Turbo to generate summaries or convert them into podcasts they’ll hearken to on their commute.
Arora and Dhawan have been associates since center college and have collaborated on a number of tasks through the years.
Dhawan beforehand constructed UMax, an recommendation app that promised to make individuals extra engaging and reached #1 on the App Retailer with 20 million customers and $6 million in annual income. Arora, in the meantime, focuses on utilizing social media methods to drive explosive development and appeal to thousands and thousands of customers.
Constructing viral apps is a uncommon ability. However regardless of the size of their earlier tasks, the founders solely felt the necessity to drop out for Turbo as a result of they noticed a chance to construct a long-lasting enterprise.
Nonetheless, not like many fast-growing AI firms, they’re cautious about elevating an excessive amount of cash too early, having taken in solely $750,000 final 12 months.
“We raised that earlier than we had lots of traction. Since then, we’ve had lots of inbound curiosity, however we’re taking our time as a result of we’re cash-flow optimistic and have been worthwhile our total time as an organization,” stated Arora, who added that their 15-person crew is predicated in Los Angeles and centered on staying near scholar and creator communities at schools like UCLA.
College students pay about $20 a month for the product, however the founders say they’re exploring different pricing choices to mirror the worth sensitivity of scholars, even because the app scales past the goal group. “Proper now, we’re experimenting with different pricing and operating lots of A/B assessments to see what works,” Arora added.
Turbo AI sits between totally guide instruments like Google Docs and totally automated note-takers like Otter or Fireflies. Customers can let the AI take notes or write alongside it, the founders say. That method has helped Turbo stand out at the same time as opponents like Y Combinator–backed YouLearn goal comparable scholar audiences.
“What’s cool now’s that when college students consider an AI notetaker or AI research instrument, we’re the primary ones that come to thoughts,” Dhawan stated.
