George Levin

George Levin

Hints CEO & Co-founder
630 points

About

Over the past two years, I have been developing Hints, a new way to interact with software using natural language, and raised $2.5M. Before Hints, I co-founded Getintent, an ad tech SaaS, raised $1.4M, achieved $16M ARR, and successfully exited in 2019.

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Maker History

Forums

George Levin

1yr ago

What CRM are you using?

We are launching CRM Chat next week. It enables you to interact with your CRM through voice and text commands and can be accessed via WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram, iOS, and the web. We have already integrated with three CRM platforms and are wondering what our next integrations should be. What CRM are you using?

George Levin

1yr ago

Two Years, Two Pivots, Three Product Hunt Launches, and 13 Painful Lessons Learned

Hey everyone, Today is our 4th launch on Product Hunt, the most important one! I'd appreciate your support: https://www.producthunt.com/post... Also, it's a great moment to reflect on what we accomplished and all the lessons we learned. I will try to make this post as useful as possible. Chapter 1. How we almost guessed the direction. Those who fully guessed it raised $30M from a16z and OpenAI Fund. We launched Hints in the summer of 2021. The problem we were solving and our vision sounded like this: There's too much information around us, we forget to save it, or save it chaotically, then can't find it, worry, and experience FOMO. Notion/ Evernote/ Obsidian requires too much discipline and effort. We need a product that allows saving info in any format (photos, links, pictures, videos, texts, quotes) in one click from anywhere and automatically structures it. Half a year after the launch, we found a very similar startup, Mem AI, which launched a few months before us. We were moving in the same direction independently of each other. Our messages were almost identical. Hints had "quick capturing and self-organized knowledge." Mem had a "quick capturing and self-organized workspace." The guys immediately went into B2B and successfully positioned themselves against Notion, eventually closing a ~$5M round from a16z. We bet on B2C and got about 5000 users for free three months after the launch, but we couldn't monetize them effectively. Besides making the right decision to go into B2B immediately, the guys made another more fortunate bet. Mem focused on the automatic organization of knowledge. We couldn't figure out how to do automatic organization well and focused on quick information capturing. For knowledge organization, we devised a temporary solution - using tags and a simple recommendation system. Mem's automatic knowledge organization wasn't ideal then, but they continued to delve into this problem and hire ML engineers. Then, suddenly GPT appeared. By August 2022, OpenAI Fund invested ~$20M in Mem. The problem of automatic knowledge organization was solved :) On August 8, 2022, Mem's founder contacted me and proposed a call to discuss white-labeling our quick capturing for Mem, but we were in the process of pivoting. I hold great respect for Mem and admire their long-term vision. Takeaways:

George Levin

1yr ago

Something strange! We are still not featured despite 238 upvotes :( And no response from PH support

We've had a lot of preparation and received great community support. Strangely, we are not featured and don't have a place. I hope the PH Support team will resolve it soon

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