We are one of the handful of companies that got into YC through the Startup School, and (I have to say) the only company that signed YC itself as a customer!
I have a PhD in NLP and ML and was consulting when two large media companies came to me with a problem: They collect tons of customer feedback in free text as part of their NPS surveys, but don’t have the time to sift through the responses.
This turned out to be common. Most companies collect feedback but, especially in large companies, nobody reads this data, and definitely not people who are in charge of strategy. Customers are screaming what’s wrong and what they want, but nobody is listening.
I tried a few open-source packages but found that none worked well. Developed on canonical text like news article or Wikipedia, they either failed to understand the variety of expressions, or were too hard to explain. I wrote a new approach capitalising on my PhD and new Deep Learning approaches. It's completely unsupervised: just needs raw data but, unlike topic modelling, produces clear and specific themes. My husband Nathan joined as a co-founder and for the next year we learned how to solve this problem in a way customer insights professionals find valuable.
Those media companies became customers and we quickly bootstrapped into a profitable startup. This is when Nathan signed up for YC’s Startup School. We grew 20% in those 10 weeks, loved the accountability and the focus. Our mentor suggested we apply for YC, which seemed like a crazy idea, but we gave it a go.
Fast-forward another 2 months, and we are just before Demo Day! Thematic grew 3x in that time, and we are working with brands like Vodafone, Air New Zealand, Stripe, Ableton, and Manpower Group.
Hope you found our story interesting, and happy to answer any questions.