Apply HN: Jam, every student's personal assistant

[pforpineapple]

We are building a text-based supervised A.I. designed to help French students in their daily lives.

Jam was born last year. It only speaks French and is available via Facebook Messenger, Twitter DMs and SMS. 50.000 people have already texted Jam.

Ask us anything

[skelzor]

Students ask Jam pretty much anything. For instance, we get a lot of bar recommendations, job-hunting, miscellaneous advice (love tips, etc.) and a bit less restaurant recommendation, meal/cocktail recipes, or shopping.

I think it would be interesting to develop the way we handle holiday requests : For example, Jam could help a student get a train ticket to Amsterdam (and an airbnb), and once the user is at destination we could guide them through the city.

Jam should be a "background-tech" type of product, avoiding the cumbersomeness of interfaces.

[ramk]

Thanks for explaining what Jam does. Could you please talk a little bit about user engagement (how often does a typical user use Jam) ? Also how do you (or plan to) generate revenue ?

The potential travel related feature you describe seems more widely applicable than just for students. Perhaps it may be better to focus on other features for the student user base first before expanding (if students are the current focus for your product). ?

[pforpineapple]

A considerable part of our base does not come back after the first two weeks. However, we are noticing an increase of the segment that comes back more than twice a week. They seem to use Jam as a way to get rid of tasks that demand little reflexion/benchmarking (eg. "What's the best oven for <150€", "Where can I eat brunch right now at République ?"). Our ideal user should ask 3 things per week.

About the travel assistant feature, it is indeed a feature that many could use. I have personally discovered this use-case and found it truly powerful.

This week, we have put a lot of effort into making the experience around bars as delightful as possible (put some interpolations and randomness in our wordings, put a few jokes in there, etc...).

About the business model : So far, we have tried to help companies hire talent using Jam. We signed 3 contracts in one month (25k€) but abandoned the idea eventually because we felt the product was not ready for that. Right now, we are interested in helping brands grow in the student market. Say Uber is looking for ambassadors, we can find them rapidly as our user-base is cash-poor and time-rich and there is already a high demand for student jobs. Here's a repartition of our requests received in the last 7 days (878 "student jobs") : https://infinit.io/_/BHZzvHE

[ramk]

Sounds interesting. I don't know French, so could not try it out, but can you please elaborate a bit more on how it helps students ?

[Gargoyle]

What are the most common use cases for Jam so far? What are some others you'd like to grow?

[pforpineapple]

If your French is not too rusty, feel free to check out hellojam.fr

[jakerockland]

Why only in French?

[pforpineapple]

We are based in Paris and the entire team is French (some of us work remotely). We could either translate it into English or more "rare" languages (ie. where text-based training sets are rare)