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Join us as we introduce each of the teams participating in our 2024 Summer Launchpad accelerator!
Insightflo transforms hours of customer videos into engaging insights in just five minutes and facilitates impactful presentation.
Team Members: Catherine Zhao (GSAS ‘24), Olive Liu (GSAS ‘24), and Sheena Garg (Tandon ‘24)
After meeting in psychology class, Catherine Zhao and Olive Liu bonded over classic student tasks like doing homework and research together. As CX researchers, they conducted numerous interviews and were tasked with analyzing the qualitative data and consolidating their findings into one report — a time-consuming task for already busy college students.
In response, Zhao and Liu began putting an idea into practice that could help them and other researchers avoid the task of manually analyzing numerous interview videos. What if there was an AI-driven user insight platform that could extract key insights from multiple interview videos within just minutes?
Zhao and Liu, later joined by fellow student and software engineer Sheena Garg, got to work validating their idea and participating in the Startup Accelerator Program. The result is Insightflo, a platform that transforms user interviews into ready-to-present reports with categorized themes, supporting quotes, and quantified numbers within five minutes.
Below, learn more about Zhao, Liu, and Garg’s entrepreneurship journeys and advice for student founders:
How do you describe Insightflo to someone new for the first time?
CZ: Insightflo is an AI-powered customer insights platform. We're targeting user experience researchers who need to do a lot of customer interviews on a daily basis to help them streamline this research analysis process after interviews.
How did you initially find NYU’s entrepreneurial community?
OL: We all subscribed to the Leslie eLab’s email list. A great thing about this program is that they give you an information session to learn more and connect with people. And then it's step by step. We joined the Bootcamp, then the Sprint, and through these processes, we learned about other opportunities.
SG: I'd say that the Female Founders Circle, and especially all of the community here at NYU, has been really helpful and uplifting in a way that at points when I’ve needed [support] with a few things, there were so many people who came forward to help.
What’s the biggest business challenge your startup has overcome so far?
OL: Our challenge came through the customer discovery process. When we talked to our users, some of them did not understand our tool or the concept, or their pain point was not big enough. At that point, we began to question our value. Then we realized, that's all very normal in entrepreneurship. Not all the users are here for you. It's about knowing how to segment to figure out who exactly is our target user.
What has been the most rewarding moment of your founder journey so far?
CZ: There are three significant rewarding highlights in our journey. First is when we finished the first version of our MVP. That was really rewarding for us because it took us from completely starting from scratch to having a functional product. The second highlight was when we received positive feedback from users. When we see people say that this is a revolutionary tool for them, that’s really rewarding for us and it keeps us moving. The third milestone is having Sheena as our CTO. With Sheena we can build features more efficiently than before. Having a CTO made a difference in our team.
What 3 words describe your founder journeys?
Wholesome, Fruitful, Resilient
What’s the biggest piece of advice that you’d give to aspiring student founders?
CZ: My advice is to just start. Talk to people and potential customers. That's a huge step forward, rather than thinking about the hypothesis in the mind. Don't be shy about reaching out.
OL: Finding a support system during your journey is very important. For example, the three of us are a small support system. When we are stressed, we can let each other know. It's very, very important because it's normal to feel burnout during the entrepreneurship journey, especially when you don't receive the outcome that you're hoping for. There’s a lot of ups and downs. You should talk to your friends, co-founders, and team members and seek help. Finding a support system is very important.SG: Take your shot. Just try to do it because you never know what would or wouldn’t work out. Don't be shy and ask for help. If there’s anything you need or anyone you need, just put yourself out there. You will always find people who are going through the same thing, or have gone through it, and they will be able to understand and help you out with it.
SG: Take your shot. Just try to do it because you never know what would or wouldn’t work out. Don't be shy and ask for help. If there’s anything you need or anyone you need, just put yourself out there. You will always find people who are going through the same thing, or have gone through it, and they will be able to understand and help you out with it.
What is your best college experience (either academic or social) at NYU?
CZ: The [mock NYU-Yale Pitchoff] that we just had was really memorable for me because I did the pitch. I remember that the whole team was helping me prepare for that. We had a lot of coaching meetings with the coaches here, and also the coaches from outside organizations. I remember when I finally delivered the pitch, I got the most improved prize from the judges. So that was very exciting and rewarding for me. That's very memorable because the storytelling part of our pitch is one of our milestone target goals that we wanted to improve during the summer. So having that prize really boosts our confidence.
SG: I would say the investor mentors that we have at the Leslie eLab are quite memorable for me because to get the opinions and perspectives of people who have been in this industry for so long, who have seen people go from zero to 100, is something that I will remember for the rest of my life.
OL: I would say I really appreciate the Leslie eLab coaching sessions. We have regular coaching sessions whenever we need. We can just schedule one with Rebecca [Silver] and all the other coaches. They're really, really supportive. They give a lot of guidance and emotional support.
Favorite NYU spot to spend time?
OL: Personally, I like the Kimmel Center because there's a Peet's Cafe. Our team has met there several times. It’s a great open space to talk and prepare for presentations.
Why do you think interviewing itself is important?
OL: Interviewing users is a big part of being a researcher. We are constantly doing it. Researchers spend 80% of their work in qualitative work, and largely, that is interviews. The interview itself is a really great way to understand more about the person, about their industry. You can understand deeper about the “why” behind something rather than just the surface level.
SG: I would say it is important because at the end of the day, it's data. In this day and age, data is of immense value. There's so much that you can get out of it, and there's so much that you can do with it. Being able to capture all of that and to be able to process all of it in a way that is not humanly possible is a great asset to have.
