Catalog is an AI powered research assistant built specifically for undergrads and everyone else who isn’t a PhD. Academic & investigative research is sluggish–Catalog can change that.
Trying to write a paper? Use Catalog to organize your collected sources and recommend additional papers you should read.
Have 50 tabs open? Use Catalog to save, sort, and get summaries of them so that you can clear up your browser.
In a crunch? Let Catalog complete your bibliography and auto-check your paper’s formatting with its Microsoft Word plugin.
Need to prove that you’ve done your own research? Share your collection with a professor or colleague.
In my final year at Harvard, I wrote a 120-page thesis about COVID-19 and meatpacking plants in South Dakota. Although the research was interesting and exciting, the process of reading, noting, and tagging books and articles was often unproductive. I've been thinking about this experience and the tools I had at my disposal for the past two years, trying to understand what could have been different.
With the launch of Chat GPT3, I immediately thought of a better research tool. I believe that leading nonspecialized applications like Zotero, EndNotes, and Mendeley could be improved with quick summarization, tagging, recommendations, auto citations, and other AI-powered innovations.
I'm currently accepting small checks ($10-50k), up to $150k, to help me hire the extra hands I need to build the MVP.
While the market is limited in size (~10M active users on the three aforementioned platforms plus ~10M scattered across smaller platforms) a well designed product could capture a significant number of these users, specifically undergrads and those searching for a well-designed, but not overly designed citation management tool.
The TAM for this market is around $2.4B annually (let’s assume 20,000,000 potential users x $5/month x 12 months), I have more modest aspirations for this tool. I believe that we can build a non-AI enabled MVP that can easily capture 20,000 users at $2/month, totaling $480,000 in annual revenue. Following AI integrations over the course of another year, with time we can expect to capture 1,000,000 users at $5/month, totaling ~$60M annually.
November: Complete MVP, engage beta testers, and begin campus outreach
February ‘24: Launch subscription and begin six months of AI-integrations