Launch HN: Thematic (YC S17) Customer Feedback Analysis

We are one of the handful of companies that got into YC through the Startup School, and the only company that signed YC itself as a customer during the program!

I have a PhD in NLP and Machine Learning and was consulting internationally from New Zealand, when two of the largest 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 is a common situation. Most companies collect feedback, but in reality, 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, and 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 both my PhD and new Deep Learning approaches. I also convinced my husband Nathan to quit his job to join me as a co-founder, and for the next year we learnt 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 start up. 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 14 days 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.