Alec Nguyen, co-founder of Afforai.
Alec Nguyen, who will turn 23 this year, is the co-founder of Afforai. He started his business journey with nothing while still in university. Afforai is a research process platform that helps researchers manage all their quotes, references, and research papers. It also makes it easy to review documents using AI.
Afforai is an AI research app and one of the best AI chatbots for research, acting as an AI research assistant to boost research productivity. This AI tool database with semantic search capabilities is loved by academic researchers, PhDs, master's students, and even professors and post-doctoral researchers, for enabling collaborative research and improving study efficiency.
Afforai is now one of the top products on Product Hunt (a US website for sharing and finding new products). It's also one of the best products on AppSumo (a popular online platform that offers software deals for businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide).
Alec's company has also just received a good amount of investment. However, few people know that Alec and his friend started Afforai when they were still students.
"I started it as a project while I was still in school last year. My co-founder friend and I joined a startup competition. The prize was $10,000 (about 230 million VND). We had just under 4 months, from January to April, to do our project," Alec Nguyen says.
"Around January last year, ChatGPT became very popular. We thought, okay, let's learn that technology and create different versions of the product in different areas. At first, the product was called Code Assist AI. I wanted to improve AI technology to help students write code for their economics and data science projects more easily. Then we wanted to make it even better.
One of the biggest problems we found was that students and researchers spend a lot of time reading research papers, essays, and articles for professional researchers. This is called doing a literature review. By the end of March, nearly half of the students at the school had signed up to use our product. We were very surprised. We didn't expect it to be so popular. We set a goal of 100 sign-ups, but in reality, 500 people signed up, almost half the 'population' at school. My school is quite small. It was just a student project, we didn't expect much. However, when we realized we were bringing real value to students and researchers, I wanted to continue this project," Alec remembers.
Alec Nguyen came to the US in 2019 to study at Lawrence University. As an international student, he and his friends had to deal with problems like immigration visas and legal issues. To stay in the United States, they needed a sponsor or a job.
“I sent my CV to many companies, about 500 or even more. But I didn't even get a chance for an interview. I worked 3 or 4 jobs at the same time and did summer internships. One job I'm really proud of was being a guide for other students. I had big dreams then. I had two startup ideas and felt very sure about them. We won a startup contest at our school and got to the big final round with a $10,000 prize. But when the contest happened, we lost.
So, I couldn't find a job to stay in America. I lost the contest and didn't get the $10,000, which I thought could help me live there for a while. At that time, I only had two choices. I could go back to Vietnam, or I could turn my current product, Afforai, into a company. I thought about how far we had come. We didn't sleep for 4 months, just working on this product. So we wanted to keep going. After deciding to start the company, we had less than $10,000 to do it.”
After graduating until July, we wanted to launch our product on Product Hunt. I thought it was a common way to get attention and check if our product was good. We didn't sleep for 48 hours, focusing all our energy on the launch. We answered every comment and wrote down all the feedback to see if the server would crash. If it crashed, we would fix it right away. With this hard work and focus, we became one of the Top 4 products of the day. We had no marketing or big investment, so being number 4 made me feel proud after all our efforts.
That's when a startup investment company called Sputnik ATX VC noticed us. They offered to invest $100,000 (about 2.3 billion VND) in our company. When we finished talking about the investment, we were very happy. But we also thought that this was a big change, and from now on, we needed to be more serious about our journey. They also gave us an office to work in.
On this difficult startup journey, three books inspired me. The first book is "The Mom Test". This book taught me how to interview users. It also taught me that the first rule is to never just talk about your product. Instead, start by telling the other person about your daily work and what you've done. From there, you can find out the exact problems and guide them to the areas you want to talk about.
The second book is "Digital Marketing". It gave me a very complete list, guide, and explanation of all the different types of marketing tactics. It really helped me choose the first 5 marketing strategies that I invested my first $5,000 in.
The third book is "Get back". It gives me the exact formula for making a marketing presentation that helped me raise more than half a million dollars from Venture Capital funds. Reading this book helps to create a really great presentation that gets the attention of venture capitalists.
Alec says that because his business was just starting, he often worked 100 hours a week on this journey. He always tried to work as much as possible. "Throughout this journey, I learned one lesson. When you don't focus on profit, but instead focus on developing the best product, then profit will naturally come to you. It took me quite a long time to realize this," he shares.
When asked about the importance of attracting customers and then using their feedback in the product, Alex says, "I think a company, no matter what you provide, product or service, it needs to bring some value. As a startup, our mission is to find an idea that brings enough value and solves a real problem, something that makes customers willing to pay us. And so, for us, a young startup that has just been established, we are in the process of exploring to build a solution worth providing to all our customers."
Afforai is an innovative AI writing tool that uses advanced AI models to assist with academic writing and knowledge management. It serves as an AI with sources that can conduct Google searches to find relevant data sources and information for research. By using AI to study, Afforai promotes personalized learning and helps maintain academic integrity.
Some key features of Afforai include:
AI-powered tools for literature reviews, document annotation, and citation management
Semantic search capabilities to easily find relevant sources
Reference manager to organize research and boost productivity
Integration with Microsoft Word to optimize the research workflow
AI-driven feedback to improve study efficiency and the overall research process
With its focus on information accessibility and collaborative research, Afforai is transforming how AI is used in education and research. It's no wonder this AI research bot developed by a Vietnamese entrepreneur has become so popular with American professors and PhD students looking to enhance their research with cutting-edge technology.
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