This smart personal assistant wants to get you Sorted and simplify your life
Sorted AI helps organise notifications, take notes, set up reminders, and automatically classify personal documents, so you can be more focused and productive.
Work smart and play smart, but how? Especially when the information glut threatens to drown you! All-in-one productivity app could be the answer to all your problems. The Gurugram-based startup aims to simplify your life so you can get things done faster and with lesser effort, and lead a more productive and fulfilling life.
Founded by Snehanshu Gandhi, Gaurav Shrishrimal, and Tamanjit Bindra in 2019, the app aims to “give back control of your time in your hands”.
How does the smart personal assistant do that? Sorted AI helps organise notifications, take notes, set up reminders, and automatically classify personal documents, so you can be more focused and productive.
The Founders of Sorted AI.
“We live in a world of information overload. An average user spends about 3.7 hours on the smartphone, dealing with hundreds of information pieces in a day such as emails, WhatsApp messages, SMS, social media feed, news feed, app notifications, documents, and more. This has cluttered our digital lives,” Snehanshu says.
His co-founders agree, stating that the clutter and distractions make us live “on someone else’s time table, not our own”.
“Along the way, we miss out on the important things; things that really matter. It’s common to not speak to a friend for long, forget a loved one’s birthday, be unable to spend time on your hobbies, or miss a premium payment. This leads to wasted time, possible financial loss, and a lot of stress and anxiety,” Gaurav and Tamanjit say.
Getting started
Snehanshu graduated from IIT-Bombay in 2007, and ISB Hyderabad in 2012. He has more than a decade of work experience across management consulting, operations management, and entrepreneurship.
Gaurav is an IIT-Kanpur alumnus with over five years of experience across investment banking and entrepreneurship. Tamanjit is an Army Institute of Technology Pune alumnus with over a decade of experience building tech and internet products.
Before Sorted AI, Snehanshu, Gaurav, and Tamanjit worked together at home services startup Tapp Me for four years (2015-2019). Snehanshu and Gaurav were the founders while Tamanjit was the CTO (and the first employee).
The idea for Sorted AI came about as a personal use case for Snehanshu. He often felt the need to “be more organised”, and tried numerous productivity tools but could not stick with them.
A medical emergency functioned as a trigger as he realised that his wife and parents were unaware of important documents relating to health insurance and investments.
Soon, he started exploring if technology could be leveraged to automate the process of “getting organised and making things easy” for the users. This was in early 2019. He confabulated with Gaurav and Tamanjit, and in July 2019 they decided to build Sorted AI.
The founders made an initial investment of Rs 1.5 lakh in the company.
Their aim was one: to create a personal assistant that takes care of every boring administrative task in users’ lives so “they can focus on what really matters to them”.
The problem with productivity apps
Users can choose from a plethora of productivity apps today: there are apps for reminders, notes apps, cloud storage, and calendars.
However, most of these apps have three things in common:
* They solve only one problem, be it reminders, notes, documents etc.
* They require a lot of effort from the user in terms of setting up and updating on an ongoing basis to help boost productivity.
* They become islands of information that don’t interact with other apps to provide real value to the user.
If a user wants to figure out his insurance policy premium payment, it isn’t easy. Chances are the document will be stored on a cloud or on their laptop/phone. A renewal reminder will be set up in a different app, and the policy number will most likely be stored as a note for quick reference when required.
So to manage just one document, s/he needs to use three products – that too, manually.
How can you get Sorted?
Sorted AI solves this problem by bringing all information on one platform and automating the effort by leveraging AI.
The app leverages AI technologies like Optical Character Recognition and Natural Language Processing to automatically understand any piece of information, be it a document, SMS, notification etc.
It can automatically do the following:
· Categorise documents/information: Insurance, warranty, personal ID, vehicle documents, employment papers, etc.
· Make it searchable: Search easily based on the content of the document, screenshot, or any image.
· Make it actionable: Allows intelligent reminders for important dates.
Initial users for Sorted AI were from the founders’ personal networks. The app was also launched on various beta testing platforms like Product Hunt to get initial users from across the world. This user base offered continuous feedback, which helped in the evolution of the product.
“Everyone wants to be able to easily find things, but very few people want to put in the effort to organise things beforehand. This user behaviour is the biggest challenge in getting adoption for any productivity app. We built Sorted AI on this core insight,” Snehanshu says.
The app is a freemium product. Most core features are free for users and “will remain so forever”.
Revenue and the future
Sorted AI is incubated at NASSCOM 10,000 Startups Gurgaon. It is also a part of Axilor Ventures Accelerator Winter 2019 cohort.
The company claims to have over 10,000 users right now, and is currently in the pre-revenue stage.
The founders’ current focus is on user engagement and growth; monetisation will come in later. They are looking at two business models for revenue generation in the future.
Subscription model: The company will offer value-added premium features soon, including a financial dashboard, an insurance dashboard, and a Zen mode. These features will be available with a subscription.
Service facilitation model: Sorted AI plans to help users in not just organising documents and other information, but in managing the complete document cycle. This means that it will facilitate transactions such as insurance policy renewal, paying bills, or booking an appliance maintenance service. The app will leverage the information available to facilitate this transaction via partnerships with various service providers.
Sorted AI competes with apps such as Evernote and Google Tasks, but believes it stands apart as it brings all aspects that need “sorting” on to one platform.
“We are focusing on refining the product so that it can offer more value on a daily basis. We want to reach over one million users in the next 18 months,” Snehanshu says.
(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)