Aftercare (YC W24)

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.

How we got our first Aftercare (YC W24) customer as a newly pivoted startup. We were in the thick of a pivot and went to Group Office Hours at the Y Combinator office in SF, where we meet with 6 other companies regularly to support each other and strategize. It was a long night, so we were at the coffee machines making espresso and we saw Anton Otaner. If you don’t know Anton, he’s a YC founder building Clarum (YC W24) and also training for a 50-mile ultramarathon (Here’s a pic of him at our weekly founder dinner). Anton wasn't drinking the coffee – he pulled out a pack of Strps. They’re caffeine strips that give you energy and focus instantly. Anton said this stuff tastes good and works amazingly well for late-night grinds. So we also decided to buy some off of the Strps. Shopify store. Anton is right (of course), and we started using it during workouts and building. Lucky for us, the founder of Strps. is Anton’s hometown boy from Montreal, Gabriel Di Re. He’s a self-made entrepreneur, and has built his product, team, and marketing from the ground up. He's grinded to get his product into multiple physical store chains in Canada and built up his eCommerce channels to bring his product state-side. We met, and after he saw our vision, he downloaded Aftercare and used the surveys to collect product feedback and learn where customers are coming from. After finding out a large number of them are students, he created a successful Klaviyo marketing campaign specifically targeting this demographic. Aftercare also displays a discount code so he can increase the lifetime value from his current customer base, and he gets a ~40-50% response rate on his purchases ?? If you’ve read this far, just like Gabriel hooked us up with Strps. discount, he’s got you with the homie discount too (use FOUNDER20, and I’ll post the Strps. Shopify store in the comments).

If you haven’t noticed, there’s been a lot of hype around AI recently ?? Even though AI is core to our product at Aftercare, listening to our customers and solving their needs is our biggest priority. The first version of Aftercare only offered open-ended questions. But we quickly learned from our customers that open-ended questions weren’t the best experience for question like “How did you hear about us?” or “What other brands have you shopped at?” As soon as we heard this feedback, we built out options for multiple choice followed by checkboxes and ratings scales in less than a week. The multiple choice and checkboxes question types have the option to include a free text “other” field. Our twist is that we still use AI on the backend to group together similar responses including abbreviations and misspellings. So for example the responses “instagram”, “insta”, and “isntagram” would all be automatically grouped together. The full suite of question types including open-ended, multiple choice, checkboxes, and rating scales is out now, and we’ve already gotten some great feedback from our customers!

This week’s Company to Watch: Aftercare founded by Aidan Lee, Justin M., and Anand Nanduri. ?? Aftercare helps eCommerce stores capture zero-party data through conversational post purchase surveys. AI is used to collect and analyze open-ended customer feedback and marketing attribution data. You can check them out here: https://getaftercare.com/ #ecommerce #postpurchase #marketingattribution

Nothing beats a home-cooked meal among good friends. At Aftercare, we’ve been keeping up the YC tradition of Thursday night dinners with other startup founders (and luckily it’s not that hard when you have a head chef as good as Justin). It’s been a great way to stay connected to the startup community and force ourselves to set aside some time to socialize and decompress. Along the same vein, these are some traditions we’ve kept up to help keep us sane and prevent burnout: - Doing some physical activity everyday - whether it’s the gym, playing tennis, or going for a light run, getting outside in the sun and working up a sweat keeps really helps relieve stress. - Spending time with other founders. Between talking shop and trading sales tips, sharing stories, or simply commiserating together, knowing that there are others going through what you are can keep you grounded. - Taking some time off every week. Even though it’s tempting to keep working, we’ve found that unplugging for up to an entire day gives you a boost of energy for the coming week and keeps the creative juices flowing. Shoutout to Ayman Nadeem for taking this picture of us trying to be candid and joining us for dinner! We’ll have many more dinners to come and memories to be made. After all, it’s about enjoying the journey ??

There’s no better data than zero-party data — hearing feedback straight from customers is invaluable for eCommerce brands. In the past, asking open-ended questions was very useful to gather anecdotal data, but it was difficult for brands to aggregate and analyze at scale. We’re able to do this seamlessly with Aftercare. Whether it’s misspellings or different answer variations, they’re all collected and analyzed instead of manually categorizing them. This is just a small way we're incorporating AI, but bigger and better AI features are on the roadmap that we’ll drop soon.

Another Aftercare product release coming your way! After talking to customers using our post purchase survey we’ve released the Split node! This will let you split traffic between different branches of the survey workflow. This way you can: - Ramp up customer traffic that sees the survey on your terms - Run A/B tests to experiment with different questions flows to see what gets you the best responses - Expose a certain percent of your customers to an offer to see how much incremental revenue the offer is driving In an industry that moves as fast as eCommerce, being able to iterate quickly is essential, and offering the Split node is one way we can help our customers achieve that. More product updates to come. Next time on the analytics front.

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!