Discussion
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Rami Ghanem — Founder, Summize
Thanks for the hunt - we're super appreciative!
We launched Summize as a simple tool to help students get more from their textbook pages (and news articles). Our newest version introduces concept, keyword and bias analysis, along with a re-written summarizing algorithm.
Some background - I'm 18 years old, have done some startup work before but this is my first serious project. I'm the Founder, and along with me on my team are Carter (18 years old) and Aiden (16 years old), both of whom ran the brains of the marketing campaign. 🙌🏻
We launched the new version about 23 hours ago and we are now the #1 top paid app in the USA (#5 in Canada, #7 in the UK).
Lots of opportunity to continue building Summize, and maybe some new AI-based apps in the future.
We launched Summize as a simple tool to help students get more from their textbook pages (and news articles). Our newest version introduces concept, keyword and bias analysis, along with a re-written summarizing algorithm.
Some background - I'm 18 years old, have done some startup work before but this is my first serious project. I'm the Founder, and along with me on my team are Carter (18 years old) and Aiden (16 years old), both of whom ran the brains of the marketing campaign. 🙌🏻
We launched the new version about 23 hours ago and we are now the #1 top paid app in the USA (#5 in Canada, #7 in the UK).
Lots of opportunity to continue building Summize, and maybe some new AI-based apps in the future.
Ben Tossell — Community Manager, Product Hunt
@rghanem1 Awesome, congrats :)
I feel like I save a million articles to Pocket each day but rarely get around to actually reading.... I'd love to see summarised text of what I've saved the next day.
So I get the Mattermark daily or save 5 articles to pocket today... I dont get around to reading them, but Summize just sends me a summary of these... this would be 💯
I feel like I save a million articles to Pocket each day but rarely get around to actually reading.... I'd love to see summarised text of what I've saved the next day.
So I get the Mattermark daily or save 5 articles to pocket today... I dont get around to reading them, but Summize just sends me a summary of these... this would be 💯
Sajeesh Philip — Product maker, Designer & Traveler
@rghanem1 Looks like an awesome concept. Do you have the Android version?
Michal Acler — Product Design @HiDraft.com
@rghanem1 Like the app! Are you familiar with Summly? Was it an inspiration for you?
I'd also love to hear what marketing tactics did you use to get to #1 on App Store...
I'd also love to hear what marketing tactics did you use to get to #1 on App Store...
@rghanem1 Impressive functionality and well worth buying. That said, this seems like something you may want to mention in the description...
"This app will not work with religious texts, novels or poems. Please only use textbook pages and or news articles."
... simply to avoid the brief twinge of negativity it made me feel before actually trying it out.
"This app will not work with religious texts, novels or poems. Please only use textbook pages and or news articles."
... simply to avoid the brief twinge of negativity it made me feel before actually trying it out.
Nick Frost — Editor & Marketing @ Mattermark
@bentossell @rghanem1 that would be awesome. I'm gonna check this out!
Ryan J A Murphy — Student?
@rghanem1 ugh stop being so young
(kidding. Way to go! Where'd you learn to think and do/design and code at this quality so early in your lives?)
As an aside, @rrhoover/@bentossell – y'all should be proud too. I know you know it, but without PH Summize would be just another app reaching the top of the charts. Here we get to see the background story and talk about the implications with the (way too young) founders themselves. So neat.
(kidding. Way to go! Where'd you learn to think and do/design and code at this quality so early in your lives?)
As an aside, @rrhoover/@bentossell – y'all should be proud too. I know you know it, but without PH Summize would be just another app reaching the top of the charts. Here we get to see the background story and talk about the implications with the (way too young) founders themselves. So neat.
Robleh Jama — Founder, Tiny Hearts / Next Keyboard
@rghanem1 🙌🏾 Congrats guys! Looks like an amazing app and equally killer marketing strategy.
Fred Rivett — One half of @wecontrast
Huge congrats on the launch guys. So whens the Product Hunt AMA?
stephentbiz — Founder, Flipmass
The app itself is fun to play & experiment with on different readings.
It would have been very useful in middle school/high school for accelerated studying :)
However, the real magic behind this app is the team: @rghanem1 (developing summize), @cartermichaelb & @aidenvibes (marketing summize). These guys took this app from an idea, to number 1 in the app store, just a day after deploying a brilliant social campaign.
(The app is currently #2 paid as I post this and will be #1 within the next few hours/tomorrow) 🚀🚀🚀
Cheers to the guys over @summizeapp
It would have been very useful in middle school/high school for accelerated studying :)
However, the real magic behind this app is the team: @rghanem1 (developing summize), @cartermichaelb & @aidenvibes (marketing summize). These guys took this app from an idea, to number 1 in the app store, just a day after deploying a brilliant social campaign.
(The app is currently #2 paid as I post this and will be #1 within the next few hours/tomorrow) 🚀🚀🚀
Cheers to the guys over @summizeapp
Yann — User Experience Design
@stephentbiz @rghanem1 @cartermichaelb @aidenvibes @summizeapp I missed the campaign. Can you summize it for me? 🙌
Niv Dror — Social 🔑 @ProductHunt
Looks like an awesome concept! Wish I had this while I was in school...
Would like to congratulate @rghanem1 (who it was fun to run into at SXSW) and the team on having the #1 paid app in the App Store right now!!!
Would like to congratulate @rghanem1 (who it was fun to run into at SXSW) and the team on having the #1 paid app in the App Store right now!!!
Mauricio Ramos — Founder, EditorsDepot
The latest updates seem to have taken this app to the next level, good luck guys.
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
have not tried it yet but reviews seem ++
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aiden — Aiden from Summize
@ourielohayon Definitely recommend you go check it out! The new app update was a massive expansion. While including our signature "Summarize" feature, we also added the following: Concept Analysis, Keyword Analysis (my personal favorite) and Bias Analysis. Really excited to see what partners we can bring in and what the future has to offer for Summize.
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
@aidenvibes actually tried to picture a text on computer. i guess not ideal?
Darren Lee — Darren Lee Network
I really like the concept. It will be really cool if it has some aspect of social and collaborative eg sharing summaries and notes among students for each unique page/snapshot taken. Nice.
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Rami Ghanem — Founder, Summize
@darrenlee Sounds like a neat suggestion. Will definitely consider :)
Looks great. Are you going to add other languages? I'm interested in Russian.
Ryan Hoover — Product Hunt
Ahh, 2 days later, @rghanem1 and team decided to remove it from the App Store to "iron out the issues for the next update".
I haven't had a chance to play with the app yet but I'm surprised to see it removed when it's #1 in the paid App Store. That must have been pulling in some decent 💰. Can you share more details, Rami?
I haven't had a chance to play with the app yet but I'm surprised to see it removed when it's #1 in the paid App Store. That must have been pulling in some decent 💰. Can you share more details, Rami?
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Rami Ghanem — Founder, Summize
@rrhoover Once we started reaching critical mass (10pm MST, 2 hrs before reaching #1) - there were way too many users installing & using the features (15K scans/hr) - that a subset of the servers actually crashed and didn't operate for a large number of users. In order to mitigate a crisis, we took the app down to work out the issues instead of keeping it live (for obvious reasons). Obviously a bummer, but we'll relaunch soon and be #1 again in no time.
Charlie Hinojosa — Founder, CEO at Sightbox & Tapp That App
Chris Messina ✁_____ — Developer Experience Lead at @Uber
Andrea Hill — Manager of Innovation Strategy-ReadyTalk
Great job, guys! Way to find a problem, solve it, and monetize it!
Jake Mor — Student Dev
@rghanem1 Very interesting. I've got some questions. Have you heard of volley.com? They are in a similar space. I'd love to learn more about the underlying tech. Do you have any white papers? Are you using StanfordNLP?
Johnny Quach — Director of Product @ Rocket Internet
Congrats guys! I keep hearing the marketing effort is one of the bigger accomplishments but I don't see any mention of marketing specifics. Can you share with us what exactly did?
dennis hegstad — co-founder, Exposely
@johnnyquachy the power of influencer marketing, social media and worth of mouth recommendation. see https://twitter.com/search?q=sum...
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aiden — Aiden from Summize
@johnnyquachy We created a mix of in-content ads for Summize and then pushed them with influencers (who we do business with regularly). I personally spent a ton of time getting creative and coming up with formats for ads that ended up taking off with as much as 15K+ likes on a Twitter ad post in 1 day. All of the installs (at least initially) we're driven purely from Twitter and Instagram.
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
Last time a company was called Summize it was acquired by Yahoo. You did know this right?
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Rami Ghanem — Founder, Summize
@ourielohayon it was acquired by Twitter. It's a dissolved company now.
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
@rghanem1 twitter sorry (wrote too fast). Sure but they still may own the brand...just saying
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
@rghanem1 good then. any insight on how you used influencer marketing?
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
Chris Messina ✁_____ — Developer Experience Lead at @Uber
@ourielohayon it was acquired by Twitter, wasn't it?
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Carter Bjorklund — Carter from Summize
@ourielohayon @rghanem1 we created a mix of in-content ads for Summize and then pushed them with influencers. Aiden and spent a ton of time getting creative and coming up with formats for ads that ended up taking off with as much as 15,000 likes on a Twitter post.
dennis hegstad — co-founder, Exposely
@chrismessina @ourielohayon Yes, Summly was acquired by Yahoo and Summize was a huge core of twitters search product.
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
@chrismessina Correct. Wrote too fast (confused because of the news summary app Yahoo acquired)
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
@cartermichaelb @rghanem1 very interesting. did you reach out directly to influencers? how did you find the. Good approach!
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Carter Bjorklund — Carter from Summize
@ourielohayon @rghanem1 We are influencers ourselves! We have a lot of influencer contacts so it wasn't hard to reach out.
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Ouriel Ohayon — appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
@cartermichaelb @rghanem1 please reach out in DM> have a few questions for you
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aiden — Aiden from Summize
@ourielohayon @cartermichaelb @rghanem1 It has been wild seeing the progress on this. Between the millions of followers + creative ad formats we have, it has really turned out to work in our favor.
Taylor Cohen — CEO & Co-Founder - Backpac
This is something I can get excited about! Amazing work guys. Totally necessary and 100% a real problem for college students. I just sent this to about 12 of my friends and they are freaking out about how this really works. Can't wait to follow your story and see how things pan out with this app. Congrats!
Niv Dror — Social 🔑 @ProductHunt
Three teenagers conquered the App Store in 24 hours — here's how http://www.businessinsider.com/h...
(cool about the rise of Summize)
(cool about the rise of Summize)
Shashwat Pradhan — CEO/Founder @emberify
Nice idea! What technology/API are you using for text recognition?
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Rami Ghanem — Founder, Summize
@shashwatpradhan We're using ABBYY for OCR, and for the summaries + analyses we're using licensed + proprietary tech.
Tyler — Writer
I wonder if there's a way to get around the small amount of text from a picture or screenshot? Is it possible to paste a link in the app and then get a summary of the whole article?
Cody Lynn — entrepreneur
awesome execution, how did you market this and have it blow up so quickly?
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Carter Bjorklund — Carter from Summize
@codylynn33 We put a lot of time and effort into creating a unique campaign that we could blow up in one day. We marketed the app in way where once influencers started pushing our advertisements on social, we saw even more organic engagements.
@aidenvibes @rghanem1 www.colorlabcreative.com is doing videos for the number 1 product on PH each day, hit me up for more info.
Josh archer — Co-Founder, Scope
@rghanem1 Do you all have plans for college?
Saadat Qadri — Data @FreshBooks
I actually think this is brilliant, great use of NLP. As @bentossell said, would love to see an API that can be used to summarize articles from Mattermark daily or The Economist.
Tejaswi R — Growth Hacker @Pipe_monk
Super useful for engineers :D Does it summarize only books or website links/pages as well?
Cole Mercer — Product @ SoundCloud
Seems like there's now someone on the app store that took advantage of the app being away for a bit and created a cashgrab clone: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/...
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Rami Ghanem — Founder, Summize
@colemercer Dealing with Apple legal. I bought their app and it's a sneaky camera app. I have no idea how Apple approved that.
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