AIMinds #029 | Abheek Pandoh, CEO at Knowt Inc.

About this episode

Abheek Pandoh is the CEO of Knowt Inc. He graduated from Rutgers University in 2020 with a degree in Computer Science and Statistics. He started working on Knowt as a small project in High School, and worked on Knowt throughout College. Currently Knowt has close to 2,000,000 registered users and has growing by over 1,000% in the last year.

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In this episode of the AI Minds podcast, hosts Demetrios and Abheek Pandoh dive into the entrepreneurial journey behind Knowt, a groundbreaking educational technology platform. Abheek shares how his early passion for technology led to the creation of Knowt during high school, initially as a grading app for Scantron tests. He and his co-founder Dan evolved the platform by integrating OCR and machine learning to transform study notes into interactive learning tools.

Abheek discusses the development challenges and milestones, from securing initial funding to navigating the startup ecosystem. A key moment came with Knowt’s use of AI to turn textual content into practice questions, which fueled explosive growth, especially during the shift to online education driven by COVID-19. The platform’s user base surged from a few thousand to 1.8 million, largely thanks to viral marketing on platforms like TikTok.

In the latter part of the conversation, Abheek reflects on lessons learned, the importance of ongoing innovation, and user feedback. He envisions Knowt as a comprehensive learning tool that could disrupt traditional education with AI-driven solutions. This episode highlights not only the technological advancements of Knowt but also the entrepreneurial vision and strategic approach necessary to thrive in the EdTech landscape.

Fun Fact: Abheek Pandoh had a deep interest in technology from a young age, exemplified by his enthusiasm for standing in line for the first iPhone release, despite not being the one to purchase or own it.

Show Notes:

00:00 Took computer science, befriended teacher, developed project.

06:10 API project led to breakthrough in technology.

07:16 Improved college grades using helpful learning app.

10:29 COVID changed education, leading to AI growth.

15:03 Friend from high school, Ramya, now CMO.

18:36 Big companies build and promote brand. Impressive social media following growth with relatable content.

21:09 Mucker was crucial to startup's funding success.

25:39 Vision for all-in-one learning tool expansion.

28:01 Excited to share podcast story, first official.

More Quotes from [Speaker]:

Transcript:

Demetrios:

Welcome to the AI Minds podcast is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow built AI. First, I am your host, as always, Dmitri Ose. And this episode is brought to you by Deepgram, the number one text to speech and speech to text API on the Internet. Trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders, startups, and enterprises like Spotify, Twilio, NASA, and Citibank. Today, we're joined by none other than Abeek, the co founder and CEO of note. What's going on, dude? How you doing?

Abheek Pandoh:

Doing well. Doing well. How are you?

Demetrios:

Yeah. Well, I'm excited to talk to you because of the explosive growth that note has seen, I want to get all into your story. I know you decided to start note in high school. Can you walk me through the inception of the tool and being at such a young age, like, deciding to go on the entrepreneurial path?

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, definitely. I have always kind of been obsessed with tech. I stood in line for the first iPhone. I dragged my parents to it, even though it wasn't for myself. Like, I wasn't buying it, it definitely wasn't getting it. I always loved tech. It's kind of where I've been at. But the start of no is actually one that's pretty crazy, and it's like a long journey.

Abheek Pandoh:

I actually had taken my computer science class requirements, like, well, not requirement, but, like, it was something I wanted to do. I had taken a little bit earlier, so I'd taken it in my sophomore year. So I had been really sort of close friends with the computer science teacher. I would stop by his class pretty often here and there because I just love talking about all that stuff. And so in senior year, I actually ended up in his class because I was trying to start sort of a startup that would take pictures of multiple choice, like Scantron tests. I'm not sure if anybody remembers, but they would fill out the bubbles and so grade the test with your phone rather than buying, like, an expensive machine. So I had that idea, and I found somebody in that computer science class. His name was Dan, really, really smart.

Abheek Pandoh:

And our computer science teacher said, hey, maybe you guys should work together. And so we started working on this grading app. We found a few friends that wanted to help us, and we got a team together. We would meet, you know, at the library, and that's sort of the first kind of thing that we did. It never got off the ground. We never built it because Dan was working on a different app, which at the time was also still called note. It was basically a text box on an Android app that would turn your text into these multiple choice questions. At that time, I was a horrible studyer.

Abheek Pandoh:

Could not study for the life of me. I spent a lot of my time creating these handcrafted notes. I'd share them with my friends, but at the end of the day, I would do so bad on all of the different tests. It had gotten to a point where, being in a sort of indian family, my dad was sending me a bunch of articles about how to study better. He'd be like, hey, you should do a bunch of these practice questions. That's the only way you could do better. So I was kind of adjusting my studying strategy, but I wasn't really. I was kind of just going at it, and then I saw this and I was like, wait.

Abheek Pandoh:

I mean, this works really well. If I could just type in my notes or just take a picture of my notes and it creates questions for me. That's insane, right? And at this time, this is, we're talking 2016 for context. Like, there's no chat GPT. We're like seven years away, or like, what, six years away from that. So this was basically like magic to me. And when I saw that, I knew that, you know, every student had this. This could be really helpful because a lot of students spend a lot of time creating notes, creating flashcards, but they're not interacting with material.

Demetrios:

Yeah.

Abheek Pandoh:

And so that's really where it got started.

Demetrios:

You're scratching your own itch, in a way.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, exactly.

Demetrios:

And was that first iteration of the note that you planned on doing where you would take pictures of a test and then it would automatically grade it? There had to be some kind of photo recognition software or potentially machine learning back in those days. So I'm wondering how a few high schoolers were diving into some object detection or machine learning in 2016.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, I mean, luckily there's a lot of APIs that people had created, so I think Google had come out with some OCR at that time. Like, it was. It was brand new, so they had come out with OCR at that time, and we were trying to use that, though it was a little bit more challenging for the grading one. Honestly, we didn't really dive into it too much there, but where we were using it for note, it was a much easier sort of application of the API. So luckily that part was handled. But Dan had built, like, the original models to take that, whatever you scanned and make it into question. So, yeah, for him to be a junior and create those monos, I thought was absolutely insane. And we pretty much hit it off.

Abheek Pandoh:

And I think from there, I kind of just took control of making the iOS app. But, yeah, he sort of made these models on his own and, yeah, like we're saying six years before chatGPT absolutely crazy.

Demetrios:

Well, it just hits home that idea of how something or a product can be very, very cool and technically deep, but if it's not really solving a pain point for users, it doesn't make that much of a difference, does it?

Abheek Pandoh:

No, no, I think, yeah, at that time, it was just something I guess he was kind of having in his own, like, it was basically a project at that time and it wasn't really being applied and even the API. Right. It was out there for anybody to kind of use, but, you know, depends on how you use it. So we were able to find, like, legs for that pretty quickly and then get it into the iOS app and sort of get the ball moving and, yeah, I mean, when we first showed it to everybody, it was like, you know, pretty amazing for them to see getting a test instantly created from whatever they were putting in. So that wow factor was, I think, enough of a motivator to be like, hey, I think we have something special here. But obviously our journey was so much longer than we anticipated since 2016.

Demetrios:

And so you didn't like studying. Did having this app and this new companion help you with the studying? Could you write your dad back and say, I got it all covered now stop sending me these articles?

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah. So unfortunately, like, by the time we launched it, I had graduated from high school, so I wasn't able to use in high school. But I started at Rutgers that year and I did start using it for, like, my econ classes. And I, for the first time ever, actually did better in school. And I don't know if it was just the app because at the time it was, like, pretty early on, but maybe it was just being involved in learning better and finding a way to help other people. That was just kind of motivating me to also study better and find those tips. But, yeah, it changed the game for me at that time. Much better in college than high school.

Demetrios:

And so you had a bit more of a journey with Dan and him splitting off. You wanted to continue using it. You had amassed a bit of a user base. Right. But nothing like it is today. So can you explain how that transpired?

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, yeah. So throughout college, we were sort of working on it. It was more on and off because, I mean, going into college for the first time and kind of, you know, you have a bunch of different classes, you have a bunch of free time. So it was. I was able to work on it a lot more. And Dan was actually two years younger. I mean, it still is two years younger and he's still working on. He was still working on it with me at that time, but we had like, maybe, what, 10 00, 20 00, 30 00 people using.

Abheek Pandoh:

It was nothing really spectacular. We were still motivated, but it was more so just kind of like a project at that time. It wasn't until after college that I kind of realized I didn't really enjoy kind of working in a corporate world. Like, I wanted to create my own thing and I. You got a job? Oh, I did get it. So I did an internship at intel my junior year or sophomore year, summer. And yeah, that was enough. Like, I like intel.

Abheek Pandoh:

I love intel now. Hating. And since intel, it was great. It was a great experience. But I realized at that time that if I wanted to be happy and, like, for me, it was about building new things and seeing how people reacted with it. I was 100% sure about that. And that's really where the drive kind of took in to say like, hey, I don't want this to just be like a project. I want this to be a company.

Abheek Pandoh:

And so that's really where things started pick up in a sort of company format. In senior year, I was talking to investors in my dorm, trying to raise some money to get this off the ground because at this time we were sort of bootstrapping. We managed to get a check of $25,000 from a turkish investor by the name of Starters Hub. And they kind of got us the motivation of building this into a business. And they gave us a little bit of tips and tricks there. And then by 2019, we registered as a company. So this is a junior year of my college, 2020. I graduated.

Abheek Pandoh:

Then the world changed with COVID And actually it was a pretty big thing for us because education now moved completely online, right? So once that happened, everybody was looking for a tool to use this in the classroom, and we had this AI. And at that time, like I said, there's nobody applying AI in this way that we're applying it. So teachers were messaging us, hey, can you build something where I can put in my PowerPoints and get a quiz to give to my students? Right? So there are quests that started piling in. We were starting to get movement, but honestly, for us, it didn't really change too much. We got up to 18,000 people, which at that time was a huge mountain. Like, we go, go from 2000 to about 18,000 because of COVID But, yeah, up until 2022, basically, that's about the movement we've seen. And then now, I mean, we're talking about a whole different league. From 2022 to now, mid 2024, we went from 18,000 to 1.8 million users.

Abheek Pandoh:

So it's. Yeah, we're operating in a different sort of realm, but it's. It's been great. And, yeah, Dan, you know, had, you know, another job opportunity that he left for intel. No, he didn't go to intel. I think he went to a hedge fund in Citadel, I think in around 2021 or maybe early 2022. So he left right before this, you know, went bananas for us. Yeah.

Abheek Pandoh:

So, yeah.

Demetrios:

What was the catalyst that made it shoot up like that? Because I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that are thinking, I would love to have 18,000 people using my tool. And that when you're at 18,000, it's like, yeah, this is not a little. There's a lot of people. If you get 18,000 people into a building, that fills it up, and so it's got to be a big building. But there was obviously something that you did that made it just go vertical. What was it?

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, for us. So, at this time, we had found a new sort of co founder, Abhi. He's our CTO right now. So he had been working with us throughout Rutgers as well. But we had sort of this idea of, like, hey, people love going from notes to practice questions, but what if we could go from notes to flashcards? So we had been speaking to these 18,000 people, and, like you said, 18,000 is, like, now a small amount, but at that time, for us, like, it was so precious. Right? We were. We were talking to them, and we were like, you know, what can we do better? Like, how can we get this to more people? Like. And so they were telling us, hey, I use flashcards all the time.

Abheek Pandoh:

I use sites like quizlet. I use anki brainscape. Like, I use flashcards. So can you apply this AI to flashboards? And that's exactly kind of what we did. But on top of that, and this was sort of the. The crucial point, at this time, like I said, AI is not really a huge thing. So not everybody's, like, on board with the idea of AI. It's.

Abheek Pandoh:

It's also not, like, performing that great. So, like, you're putting in text and it's creating flashcards, but they're not, like, high quality flashcards that people are probably used to seeing now at this point, I. So there was definitely improvements needed in technology. And so at that time, we decided to add a feature where you could just create flashcards separately. And then one of our biggest competitors sort of started charging for their platform. It was quizlet. And then we said, okay, well, we don't need to charge for this. I mean, there's no reason that this feature should be paid.

Abheek Pandoh:

And we started offering it for free. And I guess from a tech side, from a product side, that was the spark. But I mean, the main sort of, I think, unique factor that we have a note is definitely our marketing capabilities. We were able to connect with the audience extremely well. And it's most likely because we were students, right? Like, we were students building a product for students. It was not something that we had to guess like, hey, what do other students like, what do other students. Not like we knew, right?

Demetrios:

What do they do in their free time? Where do they go? All that stuff.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, exactly. So actually, one of our friends, one of my friends from high school, so actually, one of my cousin's friends from high school, Ramya, she's our CMO now. She joined our team around then. And she has her own sort of food blog, if you guys may know. It's you called eats by Ramya. So she has, like, I think now she has over close to half a million followers across her Instagram and TikTok on her sort of food account. So she had been doing this for a little bit up until then. And we said, hey, Ramya, you know, we want to kind of show the world about note.

Abheek Pandoh:

And we started working together. And at that time, so like I said, August. Up until August of 2022, for context, we had 18,000 people in September. We put out a TikTok that got 6 million views. Didn't pay for this. It just went out. I was at a wedding at the time and I was literally seeing our phone blow up. And then at the end of September, like, fast forward to the end of September, we had 100,000 people using the site from 18,000 to 100,000.

Abheek Pandoh:

We're talking about an absolute immense jump for us. And it was getting to a point where a month later in October, we were at 200,000. And then I was like, okay, I'm getting emails basically every 2 hours. Like, hey, there's this issue. There's this issue. Can you fix this? How do I do this? And I was like, my job had become basically replying to, like, emails. Yeah, support. So that growth was really good.

Abheek Pandoh:

And, yeah, I mean, marketing has been our huge sort of, what was it.

Demetrios:

Just sending tiktoks and just for context or, by the way, I've seen you all pop up on my feed, and I got so stoked when I did because I knew you were in the startup program.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah.

Demetrios:

And I was so excited. It was like, wow, look at that. You all are killing it. Like, my random feed. I have no reason to be seeing this, but I am. And so I just remember it was almost like a how to video or it wasn't a how to video. It was a great hook to it. And I remember it was like, oh, yeah, I could see why this would blow up.

Demetrios:

But what were the things that you specifically did to make sure that it had that virality? And was it only through viral growth? Is that really what it was?

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, I mean, so far, like, just to give, you know, a precedent, we had spent, so we have spent over, like, close to very under $20,000 in about the last one and a half years to get to 1.8 million users. Right. For most companies, that's their monthly budget. Like, that's what they're spending monthly, and they're not seeing.

Demetrios:

Yeah, if you add up all the cost of personnel, too, it's way more.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, yeah. At that time, we were just bootstrapping it. We were putting out the TikToks. We kind of had this, I would say, obsessive nature to TikTok. Like, it was like we were looking at the numbers, and we were like, okay, this hook is losing people. This hook is losing people. And we obsessed over, like, the first 3 seconds because that's usually what most of the audience is watching. But at that time, for us, we, we kind of learned a few tips and tricks about, like, hey, it's not always about sort of shoving your product down people's throats.

Abheek Pandoh:

Like, that's not what every big company does. They, they build a brand, so they, they promote other things in that ecosystem that, that people in that audience would like, and then eventually, you sort of, you know, get more of a bigger audience. So I think right now, in TikTok, we're sitting at little shy of 200,000 followers and instagram, I think a little bit shy of 100,000. And what's crazy is if you look at the big brands in this space, they're around the same number, and they spent probably 100 to 200, 300 times, maybe more. But, yeah, for us, it was obsessing over the hooks, and it was building relatable content. So even if you go on our TikTok right now, you're going to see some absolutely crazy things. Like we just had a post about the Olympics and there was like a bunch of like crazy things that led up to the Olympics. Like there was this scandal about like, pooping, like, people pooping in the sea is the San river.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, yeah. So we are, we've become sort of this, like, I wouldn't say like news, news agency or like news delivery method, but like, we started connecting with the audience in such a proper way at this point where people are following us not just because we're a study account, it's because, you know, we resonate really well with that audience. So, yeah, now, you know, that's kind of the brand we've built. And I mean, it's all props to Ramya and her team and what she's been able to accomplish with such little sort of like sourcing of money there. But yeah, that's definitely a sort of our trojan horse in growing this large.

Demetrios:

And so after you raised that initial 25k check from the turkish fund, you didn't go out and raise more. Once you saw you're growing like crazy, you need to scale. I imagine server costs are starting to rack up. Everything is kind of racking up.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, yeah. So what basically kind of allowed us to do this transition in the first place was a check from macro Capital. So we got it, I think end of 2021, like tail end of 2021. We're talking 2022 until like the money hit. And that's what allowed us to kind of make this transition. We still were, it was like 100, maybe 25k or 150k. So it wasn't like a crazy amount. Like, it's like if you wanted to pay yourself that, like, you basically had no money, so we weren't taking any money out of it.

Abheek Pandoh:

So it just got us to sort of that transition. But what was great was Mucker is this kind of, everybody hears about YC, but I think Mucker is like one of the most underrated funds because YC kind of works with you for about like two to three months and then they kind of send you off to defend for yourself. But Mucker has worked with me up until we raised like our seed round this, this year, which was about, or, sorry, last year, which was about like 2 million. But that, like, they worked with me up until then. And so for them, for the most part, that was kind of the catalyst for that transition. And then, like I said, we had the next round of funding, but you know, we never had an excessive amount of funds. Like, the whole basis of the company is about saving money and doing things scalably. Like, even now, we don't spend a lot, you know, every month.

Abheek Pandoh:

But that, that's kind of what allowed us to get there. And I have an interesting sort of story that I'm sure a lot of other founders can relate to, but hopefully they can't. But in the end of 2022, that, as you can imagine, that 125 grand kind of went dry. Cause our server costs were insane. Like, our AWS bill in October was like $30,000, right. And at that point, you know, if you get a bill of $30,000, you're lasting four months. Right. And we had already spent a lot of money by then, too.

Abheek Pandoh:

So at that point, I had about, I'd say close to 130,000 saved up, you know, from working, you know, and I started paying the bills out of pocket for the next, say, six, seven months. I lived at home and I paid those bills for six or seven months until we could get our next round of funding because nobody and the market had gone to absolute shit at that point.

Demetrios:

2022. Yeah, of course, nobody wanted to fund anything.

Abheek Pandoh:

It was the, it was crazy because I remember I was like, we got 200,000 people in two months. Like, I'm sure somebody's gonna want a piece of this, right? Soon we were at 500,000. Soon we were at 600,000, 700,000, and nobody was willing to write a check. So, yeah, I just kept using the money that I had saved up and taking that gamble. And then luckily it has sort of paid off in one sense, and we'll see if it pays off later. But, yeah, at that time, super tough. Wouldn't recommend to anybody at that point. But we've had a crazy journey, I'd say in the last to one and a half years because of that.

Demetrios:

And so as you look ahead in the future, what are you thinking about for note? How is it going to evolve or continue to do what you're doing best? Are you going to do what your competitor did and just start charging for the product now and then create a competitor that will crop up?

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, the biggest thing I've learned throughout this journey so far, and I know I have such a long journey ahead, but the biggest thing I've learned, learned is that if you build a really good product, eventually people will come. Obviously, they won't come by themselves. You need good marketing, you need the good things. But at this point note has those pieces, and I can sort of go off and sort of lean on that. And for us, we want to continue to build a great product. And I think education is one of those places that's sort of ripe for disruption because I think a lot of people don't put much money into it now.

Abheek Pandoh:

Now people are putting more money into it because of the sort of forthcoming of AI. Like, an AI has become like a big thing now, but people weren't really investing in it before. So my dream for Knowt, for the last, you know, three, four years has been making or being sort of a disruptor in the space. Right. I want to continue to disrupt every single company that's ever been in this space, and continue to sort of challenge the values that they've kind of put in. Because if you look at some of our competitors, they've stayed the same since I was in middle school. Like, they, they look the same, they work the same. Maybe they have a little more bells and whistles here and there, but they're not really changing a lot of things.

Abheek Pandoh:

So, for note, my vision is to make this sort of the all in one learning tool for students and now for teachers. So we just launched something for teachers at the end of 2024, like the school year, and now we want to make this sort of that all in one tool where not only are the students that are studying here, but the teachers can come where students are studying and deliver content to them that they feel is necessary and build off of what their students are already doing. So I think there's a huge sort of potential there. And as we're charging, I think we're going to be a lot more smart about that. I think for us, we have understood where there's sort of a willingness to pay and where there isn't. And for us, it's about, I feel like when you're in that position where you can say that you want to disrupt businesses, you're never going to be sort of, like, sitting back and charging for things that you've already built, because that's what these competitors do. Right? They, they sort of charge for the features that have been there for the last ten years, and then that upsets people because they're like, hey, this was free, like, three years ago. Yeah, I mean, I used this, like, two weeks ago, and now you're charging me for it.

Abheek Pandoh:

So that part, I think, is what upsets people. And for us, I don't think that will be a problem because we don't like to sit still. We like to make new things, even if it comes at the expense of what we've built. And I think that's one of our biggest strengths. Like, that we've built into the culture is like, it doesn't matter if we spent two years building something, if we can recreate something in the next three months that will be better than that, we will do it. Like, we don't care. Like, for us, that's like, the biggest thing. So that's kind of the vision.

Abheek Pandoh:

That's our understanding. So if a new company does come, I think we will want to instruct them, too. So I think that's ingrained in our DNA. So it's a big part of best.

Demetrios:

Well, Abeek, this has been a pleasure talking to you, and I'm so excited for your success, and I wish you continued growth, success for anybody out there that is listening, that is note knowt, and I encourage everyone to check it out. It's been fascinating hearing your story and hearing the drive and determination behind it.

Abheek Pandoh:

Yeah, no, it's been a pleasure talking to you. This is actually my second podcast. I only did a podcast in college. I don't. It was just with another student, too. So this is, like, first official one. So it's great to kind of have that honor here. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to everybody listening to our story because we don't really go out on social media and share too much about it.

Abheek Pandoh:

So thank you for having me and for the wonderful questions.

Demetrios:

I don't know how I feel about being called official, but I'll take it. We'll end it there.