YouLearn: AI tutor with 200K active students and $75K MRR built in 8 months via social media

are live from YC download day 2025. Uh, book a wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Bring them on in. Go to wander. com. Hey guys, welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good. Good to meet you. How you doing? Good to meet you. Good to meet you.

Uh, why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourselves and the company you're building? Sure. I'm Somi. Um, and I'm autarn. It's an AI tutor for students. Very cool. Uh, what's the go to market? I I I buil I tried to build a edtech company back in 2012. It was actually the first company I applied to YC for.

It was a disaster. It was extremely hard. Never really made a dime off of it. I think I got like 500 installs on the iOS app I built. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not exactly one of these. Uh how are you solving that? Like it's notoriously hard to sell into education. We're seeing a change. Um especially with AI.

We have over 200,000 students active. There we go. thousand more than what I got during my YC. Thank you. Thank you. You got to keep talking. Okay. $200,000. We love it. Absolutely. So, so uh well, what is the channel? Is it Let me guess. You got Tik Tok. Okay. Tik Toks, YouTube shirts.

We have I think over 500,000 followers on Instagram. And how how long our Instagram build up? Um, we it was a side project for a while, but I think eight months is like like for the past few eight months. Awesome. And and how do you uh I'm picturing kind of like an LLM style chat interface. Is that the wrong Yeah.

So essentially like students upload their like learning material like textbooks and we give them like concise notes. Um like you can have a conversation with an AI tutor as well like you can have quizzes, you can create exams all the study tools. You create like podcasts based on Yeah.

So right now it's a conversational experience. We want to make it like more proactive. So you can listen. Yeah, I remember. And are you getting to the point where teachers and schools are are kind of asking their students to get on the platform and use it Yeah.

So we're talking to a bunch of school districts and stuff, but I think our main focus for now is students. Um we just want to like get the product down for them and then move up. And what what uh what what level are we talking? Middle school. Where's the option been strong? Yeah.

So undergrads um are like number one right now and then it's higher than that. And now we're seeing a lot of high schoolers as well. How are you are you monetizing yet? Are you Yeah, so we have a premium subscription. Um it's free for like a limited amount of time and then 20 bucks a month.

Idea search based pricing exam season right before exam $200. Yeah, we give a discount on exam season and it worked really well. Worked very well. Even post exam like there's always a summer sale this summer. It's really good. I think it just works out really well. That's amazing.

Wait, so how long have you actually been building this? I I missed that. Um so we started 8 months ago. Eight months ago. Okay. and then YC. Okay, great. So, have you been focusing on specific growth metrics during YC to kick off demo day? Um, yes. Just growing everything. Yeah.

So, MR is like our key metric and then retention as well. We want to make sure like um like a key part in learning is like retaining. Fantastic. Did you share an MR number today? Can you share anything with us? Yes, we can. Um, fantastic. Let's hear it. We are at $75,000. Let's go. Congratulations.

Well, I mean, honestly, I got to say sorry cuz just Yeah, I know. 83 83 would have been 1 million. You're close. Amazing. You're close. Yeah, you're close. Honestly, put another sale on. Go to every person in the back. Every Subscribe right now. Let's get to one mil. Let's get into one. Fantastic.

You actually We're not going to let you leave till you get to a million hours. Yeah. You got to stay in this room. I mean, last question. Obviously, tons of developments from all the foundation model labs. What's working? What's most exciting? What are you taking advantage of? Are you focused on cost optimization?

Looking for open source? Do you want to use the best? Are you a beneficiary of the 03 pricing drop? Are you a beneficiary of 03 Pro? 100%. Every model improvement benefits us directly. Um, yeah, we want to focus on accuracy the most right now.

We want to make sure everything that a student gets is as accurate as possible. Are students uh cooked by AI? Are you are you cooking them?

leveraging it more just to study smarter and that's what our vision is and also an interesting thing is they really like our voice mode so it's not just text based they can have a you know like a natural conversation is like you leave it open on your desk when you're studying type of thing yeah and it can like create mind maps for you it can create like flowcharts you can create whatever you want it's very cool how are you seeing the the the competition you guys drop out um in the process in the process legally legally Not yet.

School for you, but not for me. Uh, how are you seeing like the obvious competition between just like using Chat GBT 20 bucks a month that's right at the pro tier or like the the plus tier? Uh, there's a lot of Tyler Cowan's been writing about um I used to feed in a snippet from a book and ask ChattyPy about it.

Now I just say, "Hey, summarize this book. " And it already knows or you can just go out and find it. It that feels like the logical uh competitor.

Um but how are you differentiating in terms of actual UI design because it seems like as we move to the application layer narrative there is a world where aggregating demand around AI tools around a specific niche works but there's a lot of secret sauce that goes into the UI. What what are you doing to stay ahead?

So yes, definitely a UI is a big component but the main thing is we just ask our users why do they use us or chat what's the answer and they say like we have like a feature called the quizzes and flashcards and we create that like very accurately for them and what they can do is they can upload like a thousand page textbook even 2,000 page someone uploaded like the entire imagine imagine hallucinates and you just fail your exam I remember so so so I remember in in college I had a I had a textbook and I wanted a digital version I took it to a a scanning and they scanned it all and they were like, "Do you have the right to do this?

This sounds illegal. " I would try and download illegal PDFs. It was very sketchy. How was how are college students uploading 2,000 page documents? Yeah. So, if it's available digitally, they can upload it. Okay. Or anything. Yeah. So, I mean, they can upload anything they want, but it's on them. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

They have to figure out that part of it. Okay. Got it. But eventually, maybe you could do partnerships with We want to like partner with like ebook. That'd be very, very cool. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much.