Kontractify

Had an awesome chat with Founders Brief on how Aftercare (YC W24) is challenging the Survey industry. Christian is a great interviewer, and it was fun to relive parts of our early startup journey! Aftercare's AI surveys dig deep for better insights and save you hours sifting through response data. The industry shifting toward AI surveys, and we're excited to be innovating here. https://lnkd.in/ghe6xdpe

We're launching Aftercare (YC W24) on Product Hunt tonight at 12:01am! We're aiming to be one of the top products for 12/10 and would be super grateful for your support and feedback 🙏 Here's our launch post: https://lnkd.in/gqPbiYHR I'll be posting a few updates along the way, so stay tuned for more 👀

Aftercare (YC W24) helps you run surveys with AI-powered follow-up questions to dig into responses for deeper insights—it’s like having a skilled interviewer for every survey. While building a survey tool for eCommerce shops, the Aftercare team realized the most valuable feature for customers was using AI to ask follow-up questions. This allowed them to understand the “why” behind the first answer and better understand their users. Aftercare also uses AI to automatically categorize and summarize open-ended responses so you don’t have to manually process all that data yourself. The team realized these powerful features could be applied to all surveys, so they expanded their survey platform for anyone to use. Start on Aftercare for free and collect better insights than traditional survey tools, which cannot react to respondents’ answers or ask follow-up questions. Congrats Anand Nanduri, Justin M., and Aidan Lee on the launch! https://lnkd.in/gssSr268

We just launched Aftercare (YC W24) on the Y Combinator site today 🚀 The survey platform is out of early access and anyone can get started for free. If you have any feedback we'll be working on it ASAP 🫡 https://lnkd.in/gS4uptsi

Sneak peek at our adorable new mascot, who will be part of the Aftercare (YC W24) 2.0 launch. tl;dr: We’re building a survey platform that can gather better insights with intelligent AI follow-up questions. Why the 2.0 launch 🧐 - During the time we were building an eCommerce post-purchase survey, one of the most valuable features for customers was using AI to ask follow-up questions to dig into open-ended responses and uncover deeper insights. - Often, the first response to an open-ended question didn’t tell the whole story, and our customers were able to use this feature to ask intelligent follow-up questions to get to the “why” behind the first answer—almost like having an interviewer ask good questions live for every survey. What we’re about to launch 🚀 - We realized that this powerful feature can be used for any type of survey. We're expanding into a survey product anyone can easily use. - If you need to collect any type of open-ended feedback from a group like gathering product feedback from users or surveying colleagues, Aftercare will do it better than any traditional survey platform (think Google Forms, Typeform, or Surveymonkey). Check out our new landing page in the comments (and sign up for our waitlist 🚀). We’re stoked for you to try it in the coming weeks! We're also gearing up for a Product Hunt launch in December and we’d love your support when launch day comes! Creating a Product Hunt account ahead of time would be awesome, as the competition only counts users who’ve made an account with some activity.

“We’re not going to be competitors… right?” Prior to building Aftercare, we met Emir Sahmanovic and Haris Sahmanovic at Y Combinator. We found out they were building a similar product in the same industry as us at the time. You might think it’s worrisome to get too close to founders who might become competitors, but, when you’re pre-series A, way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. We shared tips and info which helped both our teams. Plus, these guys are also from our home state (New Jersey) so it would suck if we ended up not being good friends. While we’ve left procurement and moved into eCommerce to build post-purchase surveys, it feels great to bet on our friends at Forge (YC W24) to dominate the hardware procurement space. Here’s us last Wednesday eating burritos (my first time in Dolores Park!)

This was us, sleep-deprived at 4am, pre-YC, ordering Taco Bell and grinding on a new product in Anand's parent’s house Building a startup while working a full-time job and getting into Y Combinator is possible, but it’s grueling and you should know what to expect. We were moonlighting for 8 months (including 1 YC rejection) before getting into W24. If you’re going to try this, here are a few tips: - Set a consistent schedule with your co-founders, work on the start-up every day (even if a little bit), and every weekend. - Discuss accountability early and hold your co-founders to it. Everyone will be tired, but showing up every day is incredibly important to keep energy high and make progress. - Set a time to quit and dive in fully. This could be a 10+ year journey, and it’s unsustainable to do a startup and a full-time job for an extended period. I knew this was necessary as I lost 15 pounds while keeping everything afloat. - Some might disagree — but don’t completely drop your performance at your day job. Tech/startups are a small world and your reputation precedes you. You’ll also be more stressed out if your performance dips (note: if you work a ton of hours like an investment banker, you’re better off quitting. You won't have time for both). We learned the hard way (and from YC) that you shouldn’t accumulate too much sleep debt. Now while working on Aftercare, we prioritize a good night's sleep, take a day off per week, and keep our health in check. We’re in this for the long haul!

Say hello to our new startup, Aftercare (RIP Kontractify) TL;DR: After months of pivoting, Aidan Lee, Justin M., and I are launching Aftercare, an AI platform that helps e-commerce stores run conversational post-purchase surveys to capture deeper customer feedback and marketing attribution data. During our long search for a new idea (in between the hours pouring over Linkedin Sales Nav and the long gym sessions to blow off steam), we talked to many e-commerce directors, founders, and marketing leaders, and became obsessed with the unique set of problems they’re facing. At the forefront: with the “death of the cookie” rapidly approaching and privacy concerns on the rise, e-commerce stores have to rely more on 1st- and zero-party data to inform marketing decisions like where best to spend money on ads. And so, e-commerce stores are more widely adopting tools like post-purchase surveys. However, the current post-purchase survey landscape is surprisingly limited: - They mainly offer multiple choice questions that don’t provide enough context - They ask the same questions regardless of the user’s segment or previous responses - They don’t integrate well with the rest of the marketing stack. We built Aftercare to be the modern post-purchase survey tool that uses AI to go beyond the traditional multiple-choice survey. Take a look at a sneak peek at the bottom of this post. It: - Asks open-ended questions to capture more detailed and candid feedback. - Changes what it asks based on user’s previous responses so you can ask smart follow-up questions in real-time. - Summarizes all insights in a single dashboard to inform product and marketing teams at a glance. Our MVP is a Shopify App but stay tuned — we’re already building out other channels including a generalized web Iframe, SMS, and voice to meet millions of merchants and customers where they’re at. We couldn’t be more excited to build out Aftercare and serve e-commerce leaders by providing them the most authentic customer data yet. Our Shopify app will be out soon, but in the meantime sign up for the waitlist (link in the comments below).

Goodbye to our startup, Kontractify. I took this picture with our Times Square billboard back in May knowing a pivot was on the horizon. After finishing YC W24 and a series of stalled sales processes later, Anand, Justin, and I did some soul-searching and concluded that we’d come back stronger starting from scratch. In our retro, there were a few learnings we gathered: - Building a nice-to-have: People were incredibly kind, continued to meet with us and told us our product was “useful”, but talks stalled when it came to pay for our solution. When you’re fighting incumbents and years of entrenched process for a limited budget, value has to be crystal clear, and the problem you’re solving must be hair-on-fire to get a shot. - Articulating a clear problem statement: SaaS verticals go through periods where platforms vs point-solutions dominate. The procurement industry is re-bundling toward platforms, and to keep up with this, we promised a wide range of features to compete with incumbents. This caused us to solve many small problems, vs building something deep with a clear problem statement and value. - Targeting too broadly: Talking to users is critical, and our idea of this was anyone in the industry we were targeting. This is motion, but not progress. The user base was too broad, with feedback all over the place. We needed to narrow this down to spot patterns and pain points. It’s hard to say goodbye after spending countless hours and effort on an idea. But the most important advice is to not die and keep moving. We’ve gone back to the drawing board and are launching Aftercare, a post-purchase customer experience for eCommerce stores. Excited to build again. Look forward to our new launch this week!

🎉 Welcome to our family Aidan Lee, Justin M. and Anand Nanduri! Thrilled to be a part of childhood friends turned co-founders with deep software engineering expertise and operational experience! Kontractify, a Y Combinator startup, is redefining how enterprises manage the Request for Proposal (RFP) process—a critical function where companies invite multiple sellers to bid for large contracts. Its innovative usage of LLMs addresses challenges in generating questions, managing workflows, evaluating proposals and facilitating reverse auctions.