Product Review: Paperade
It’s like having a PhD in startup ideas
Disclosure: I am a strategic advisor to Paperade AI, but more importantly, I am a researcher, subscriber, and user who shares their mission and vision, and fully supports the pain point and unmet need their platform addresses.
Paul Graham’s famous advice on how to get startup ideas is to not think of startup ideas, but rather to search for problems. Sam Altman suggests tackling hard problems to produce world-changing solutions. It’s no coincidence famed accelerator Y Combinator itself hosts a longstanding webpage requesting submissions for startups addressing high-tech unmet needs. The question, then, is: how does one approach this?
One approach might consult research. While there is an endless supply of existing research, which contains a wealth of data, followed by respective analyses and conclusions, too often it is inaccessible due to length, expense, jargon, scope, and other restrictions.
Individual studies — comprising text, charts, graphs, and other information — can range from a few dozen paragraphs to several hundred pages, and can take hours to not only read but properly understand, even for academics. Despite best attempts, summaries themselves can span lengths most cannot reasonably digest and distill.
Expense is another issue: incumbent publishers impose high tariffs in the form of paywalls, requiring substantial payment subscriptions. Granted, open-access journals do somewhat address this issue, but the majority of highest-impact publications are either partly or wholly controlled by a handful of corporate imprints, whose own needs for growth demand revenue generation through memberships, which limits their potential audience.
Jargon is yet another obstacle: readers often complain even abstract discussions, long considered the “ELI5” simplified sections, to be needlessly verbose, technical, and esoteric, presenting additional difficulty in the consumption and synthesis of current research, particularly when communicating breakthroughs to decisionmakers with real-world application.
Finally, there’s scope to consider: given most academics and authors specialize in exceptionally narrow subspecialties of subspecialties across various domains of knowledge, this concentration presents increasing difficulty for outsiders to grasp the implications of groundbreaking findings and the corresponding impact on industry and business outcomes without the requisite decade-plus of higher education and training.
Enter Paperade. Paperade is an AI-powered discovery assistant which parses over 100M+ academic papers and research studies to glean potential use cases for commercial application and facilitate generative ideation. It’s much more than a summarizer.
For example, a quick search for the term “blockchain” found results from 54822 papers, each with an abstract and Paperade’s Smart Insights, containing ideas for blockchain-enabled platforms and technologies to address challenges and needs. Further exploration of Smart Insights shares possible business names, market potential, competitor analysis, scalability and risk assessment, execution strategies, legal considerations, and potential M&A/exit strategies.
There are two plans available today. For $10 per month, the Starter plan offers 1,000 monthly credits, generation from over 20 categories, and access to the full library of 100M+ academic papers and research studies.
For $30 per month, the Premium plan offers the same features plus an increased 10,000 monthly credits, and access to Paperade Smart Insights.
There is a risk-free 3-day trial period offered with either plan and a current promotion coupon for 50% off the Premium plan with code PHFRIEND506 for all new sign-ups today, March 1st, 2023.
Sign up now and get started today!
With Paperade, it’s like having a PhD in startup ideas.
