- To avoid losing what we find on the internet, we keep dozens of tabs open in our browser and save hundreds of notes. But then we don’t use them at all—because we’ve already forgotten what and how we saved it 😉
- Overall, the market for link and note-taking apps is insanely huge. As Evernote once demonstrated, growing to 200 million users, although it later deflated. But the potential of the market itself doesn’t negate that!
- All that’s needed is to create the right tool for this—perhaps one that leverages the new capabilities of AI. And for this, we can start with the idea of this startup:
Project Essence
Zenfetch positions itself as a tool for “acquiring digital wisdom” 😉
Wisdom comes with acquiring new knowledge and experience. However, let’s set experience aside for now 😉
But new information is something we gather from the internet every day—specifically searching for it or stumbling upon useful articles, guides, videos, and other documents. We save this information in notes on our phones or computers, create bookmarks in our browsers, or leave these tabs open to read later.
The problem is that all this information often accumulates and sits like a dead weight—because we rarely refer to it. Because we forget exactly where we found useful information. Because sifting through hundreds of notes is tedious and time-consuming. And the more notes and bookmarks we accumulate, the more daunting it becomes to dig through them all ☹️
Zenfetch aims to solve this problem.
Zenfetch has a browser extension. As soon as we come across a page with useful information we want to save, we just need to click on the button of this extension—and the content of that page will be saved in the Zenfetch database.
Actually, there have been plenty of similar browser extensions before. The trick is how we can use the information saved with Zenfetch.
With Zenfetch, you don’t need to search; you can simply ask it, “What have I recently read about such-and-such topic?”—and it will provide a list of saved links or documents on that topic.
When encountering useful material, you can ask Zenfetch, “What similar content have I read before?”—and it will provide a list of saved materials similar to the one specified.
If the material is too lengthy and reading it all feels lazy—you can ask Zenfetch to provide a summary of the long text or even the video.
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Thus, the database of saved materials in Zenfetch is not just a simple list of links or even a database—but rather a collection of content that trains your personal AI archivist responsible for managing the library of links and documents you’ve saved.
You can interact with this AI archivist in a chat format, asking it questions—to which it will respond using the content you’ve saved, occasionally providing you with information you once saved but have since forgotten. Or haven’t even read to the end yet 😉
You can not only ask questions to this AI archivist but also request it to write a full text on the desired topic. Which, in many cases, may be more useful for you and your readers than using a universal AI assistant like ChatGPT.
For example, if you need to write a review article on a certain topic—but from your specific perspective. Then you first search the internet for materials on the topic—but only save those that quickly align with your views. Then you ask the AI archivist to write a text on this topic—which it does.
But primarily based on the documents you’ve saved—not on the “generic wisdom” of a hypothetical user asking ChatGPT to write a text on the same topic.
The Zenfetch extension can save various types of content in its database—website pages, article texts, posts on social media and forums, documents in Google Docs and PDF format, as well as videos from YouTube.
The cost of using Zenfetch is $14.99 per month.
Zenfetch went through Y Combinator in the winter of 2022, where it received the deserved $500,000 investment for this. However, they rolled out the current product just 19 hours before starting to prepare this review.
What’s interesting
And what—has Zenfetch been developing its platform all this time? No, of course not 😉
It emerged from Y Combinator with a completely different product—an AI-powered tool for sales departments that used AI to assign ratings to potential customers based on their interaction history. But then it pivoted—and now it’s started promoting another product.
From previous FastFounder reviews of projects that went through Y Combinator, it seems that most of them change their startup ideas—even if those ideas were deemed worthy of acceptance by Y Combinator.
And that’s the way it is. And it’s absolutely right. Because the only criterion for the “goodness” of an idea is its demand by potential users. And one of the important things they teach at Y Combinator is to ruthlessly discard ideas that don’t pass the filter of real demand. Something all other founders should learn 😉
Now, returning to Zenfetch’s current idea, the problem they want to solve does indeed exist. We see too much interesting and useful information—but remember too little of it, and therefore don’t use it ☹️
Because this problem is real, other startups are also working on solving it.
Among them is Rewind, a startup that raised $16.4 million in investments in November 2022, and another $17.9 million in July 2023.
They’ve created an AI assistant that quietly monitors everything a person does on their computer—recording the screen and voice, including during online meetings and conferences. But then you can ask this AI assistant to remind you of what you saw, what you did, and what you talked about.
In general, we’re all constantly saving something on our phones and computers to remember—either in regular notes or in more sophisticated applications. So, in reality, this is a very large potential market if the right product is made for it.
At one time, Evernote almost succeeded in doing this, making what seemed to be an ordinary note-taking app. From 2008 to the end of 2011, it grew at a furious pace—starting from scratch and reaching 13.6 million users. In the fall of 2011, it was adding 40 thousand new users daily!
By mid-2016, Evernote had reached 200 million registered users. However, then many things went wrong, and it deflated. But Evernote’s market potential was demonstrated very convincingly.
Where to go
The first direction is to try to replicate the initial success of Evernote in the vast and enduring note-taking market.
But on a new level—with the use of new AI capabilities and new concepts that could arise from this. Following the example of Zenfetch, Rewind, rethinking and developing these examples, or coming up with some new concept.
The second direction could grow from the side functionality of Zenfetch for generating texts from saved documents.
To some extent, this can be considered the opportunity for personal assistants that are a “reflection” of you. In this direction, the startup Personal AI, which raised $13.7 million in investments, went. With the help of its platform, you can train AI on your texts, and then AI can quite well communicate instead of you in messengers—responding to messages and questions as you would have answered them yourself, but without spending your time on it.
However, this task can be generalized. I might need not only a digital copy of myself 😉 Maybe I need an AI conversationalist of a certain type, reflecting a certain set of views—with whom I want to argue or discuss something.
This is where the startup Dopple, which I wrote about at the end of 2023, comes in—which created a marketplace for AI chatbots that are digital analogs of historical figures or fictional characters.
But a “person” or “character” is too static a thing. What if in Zenfetch I could save documents in different folders to analyze or write documents based on the content of different folders—this would be a more “synthetic” and “dynamic” thing. After all, in one folder, I could then place content from different authors, and in different folders—content on the same topic, but reflecting different viewpoints on it.
In general, in the realm of notes and “personalized” AI, there are still many opportunities to come up with something new or find new ways to develop what has already been invented. And what could be useful specifically for you?
About the Company
Zenfetch Website: zenfetch.com
Last round: $500K, 05.04.2023
Total investments: $500K, rounds: 1