Vaillancourt: Howdy could have used LLMs as automated facilitators before shutting down
Darius Vaillancourt · He raised $250K, had thousands of users—but here's what he'd do differently next time. | Darius V... · PMF Show · Jan 16, 2025 · at 22:40
Darius Vaillancourt, founder of edtech startup Howdy, discusses what product pivots he could have executed in hindsight before ultimately shutting down the company in 2023.
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“I could have pivot now, like right around a year before we shut down the company, we could have integrated large language models into the peer-to-peer sessions to basically be an automated facilitator for these different topics.”
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“These companies are still charging the same amount, 10 K for a coding bootcamp or whatever, but the experience is like significantly degraded.”
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Vaillancourt: Howdy should have cut off non-paying elite university pilots sooner
“In retrospect, we should have pulled the plug, like, maybe taken the device out and said, hey, listen, sorry, like, you see the numbers going down. We really love to support you, but we also have a business to run.”
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“At the end of the day, their priority is their traditional business, which is the core university, the people that are going there, you know, spending 80,000 dollars a year to get a degree, undergraduate, whatever, like, that's really their core constituency.”
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“There are certain industries, education, I know some people that have built in healthcare that share this, is that because of the regulation, in the way, like, some of these universities or institutions have existed for, You know, a hundred hundreds of years i…”