Howdy from Durham,

My co-founder and I have made the decision to shut down our startup.

In keeping with the ethos of The Build, I’ll be publishing future pieces on what I’ve learned from the experience.

For now, here’s the announcement that we sent to our users this morning.

🪶 Feather AI is Shutting Down

Here’s the bottom line up front: AI products are moving so quickly that Feather AI is no longer needed.

More on all of this below, but before all of that we want to say this - thank you.

We deeply appreciate your willingness to give us a shot, and we’re going to steer you towards the proper tools below to ensure that your summarization needs are met.

What happens next.

To our monthly paid users: your last month of billing will be June 2023.

To our annual paid users: we’re sending you a prorated refund for the remainder of your 12 month plan that won’t be active.

To folks still in need of audio/video summarization services: 

1. Sign-up for Google Bard (it’s free)

2. Prompt it to summarize any YouTube URL

3. Ask Bard follow-up questions on your summary in real-time

More info. on why we’re shutting down.

AI is getting commoditized, and we can’t keep up.

Here was our process at Feather:

1. Create a transcript of your audio/video file

2. Summarize the transcript with a Feather-specific template

3. Send you this summary via an email service provider or via Notion. The automated process took 2-10min (depending on our system’s usage/the size of the audio file).

We uncovered that users primarily used Feather to summarize YouTube videos. So, when LLMs like Google Bard got access to the open internet, our main use case had been solved for.

Now, you can use an LLM to access YouTube, pull transcripts, and generate summaries of videos in real-time.

Are the summaries that LLMs generate perfect? No, but here’s why summarizing audio/video with Bard is better than Feather:

1. Faster processing time

2. You can ask the chatbot follow-up questions about the summary

3. And the most important point - it’s currently free (and will likely be low cost if they decide to charge in the future)

The commoditization of AI is a good thing. It means that the capabilities at your fingertips are going to continue to increase, and the costs are going to get driven down.

This also means that Feather is no longer needed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Our goal was to build a product that users loved, and we achieved that.

150k+ watched our demo video. 2.5k+ of you became Feather users. We proved that the world needs audio/video summarization. Plus, we learned a whole bunch too.

So, thanks for giving us a shot. We had a lot of fun, and we’re grateful to have had the opportunity to serve you.

🪶 Wishing you the best in your summarization journey,

Dave & Josh

Thanks for reading

Here’s to more whacky ideas and ventures down the line.

I’ll see you next Thursday with a mid-year update on my 2023 goals,

Josh

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