Kroto

Hey hackers, I'm Kamal, a 20 year old builder from India, with a team of 4.

I was building an AI-powered course builder initially, and once we started getting some paying customers biggest problem that we encountered was teaching them how to use the product.

I wanted to create help centre but I couldn't, probably the procrastination, because I felt like it was a huge task.

So, me and my co-founder decided to make creating videos and guides for this help centre fast and easy.

This is where Kroto comes in, you just record a product/process walkthrough and it generates studio quality how-to videos with zoom-in and transition effects along with a step-by-step guide with GIFs for every action.

Here's the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmeeNmpNepY

I want to know if you guys also face similar issues, and want to get some feedback on the product.

Biggest issues right now: Publishing time way too long, editor not optimised, no way to remove or add more zoom-ins in the video.

Move Fast; Break Things.

In the startup world, speed is everything. Here’s how we transformed Kroto (Backed by 100X.VC) from an AI-powered course creation platform to a product documentation tool in 15 days and gained 11 pilot customers in the process.

We spent a month in Mumbai with 100X.VC and worked day and night on our course creation platform. Despite our efforts, growth was flat, and none of us were excited about the direction we were heading.

Conversations with marketing agency professionals who had worked with creators like Ankur Warikoo made us realize one critical thing: we were not the right founders for this market. We were solving the wrong problem for the wrong audience.

Creating courses wasn’t the problem; selling them was. And we didn’t have the expertise to solve that.

We wanted to pivot but didn’t have an idea. Until we spoke to Sanjay Mehta. He understood our strengths and weaknesses and said, “Course market is zero. Why aren’t you doing help articles?” I thought he was asking why we didn’t have a help center for our platform. But then it hit me. He meant we should create a tool to help others build their help centers.

It was a revelation.

We had honed our skills in using GenAI for content creation. Why not use it to solve a problem every company faces—creating help articles to teach customers and internal teams how to use their products?
I spent 18 hours researching, looking at existing tools, understanding the market, and mapping out the current process of creating help articles.

It was clear: we had to pivot.

I woke up Yasir Parvez in the middle of the night and told him about the pivot. He was shocked but I managed to convince the team.

Next was to get our investors on board. They had backed a different idea so we needed a prototype. Yuvraj Singh and I worked 19 hours non stop, no sleep, to build it.

We pitched the pivot to our investors and they agreed to back us.

With investors on board, we needed to validate the idea. We started talking to potential customers and they were super positive. This was the green light we needed.