FOUNDER
Who is Aidan Lee?

Aidan Lee is the Founder of Aftercare, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in Brooklyn, NY. After growing up in New Jersey, Aidan attended the NYU Stern School of Business and majored in finance.

After NYU, Aidan went to work in investment banking for a year and a half at Barclays in NYC with a focus on Global Communications & Media. However, like many tech founders who make the switch from competitive positions in finance, Aidan was not a fan of investment banking. 

“It’s really grueling. I personally wanted to make something that someone could use. And that really drove me more toward the startup path.”

After Barclays, Aidan moved over to Datadog as a member of their growth strategy team. A lot of the work there was more focused on internal consulting for different teams. Aidan explained to me what the growth role is like, “It’s really great. A lot of folks from the big three or other investment banking firms were on that team and there was a lot of great impact. I definitely learned how a SaaS business works, but again, I really wanted to get closer and build something.”

Enter the Entrepreneurship Era

It was around this time when Aidan was living with his current co-founder, Justin May. The two were friends in high school and have known each other for over 18 years. 

“I've known both of my co-founders for over 18 years. We grew up in the same hometown and lived five minutes away from each other.”

Aidan laughed, “My co-founder is literally downstairs right now and we're pushing out some new features this morning. We both flew over from SF and decided to work together this morning. It's awesome working with the homies.”

The Importance of a Co-Founder

“I think that's one of the greatest parts of this journey. Going back to when we were living together in New York City, we were just playing video games and living like regular 24-25 year olds.”

Aidan and Justin would go on to start their company with another childhood friend, Anand Nanduri. Having grown up together in New Jersey, the group split off and attended different colleges before reconvening in March of 2023 to work on their startup together. Justin went to Rutgers and Anand went to Yale. Aidan emphasized to me the importance of having these two on his team as they consistently code to push out new features.

The Power of Persistence

“Over the course of the next few months, we took it more seriously. We applied to YC for the first time, for the S23 batch, and didn't get in.”

Aidan explained to me that they didn’t let this stop them. “We consistently gave YC updates and applied to other accelerators. We worked really hard and for the winter 24 batch, we were able to get in, which was super exciting.” 

Since the winter 24 batch, Aidan and his team have pivoted through a few different business ideas.

The Birth of Aftercare

In the beginning, the team was exploring the ecommerce space and was building a post purchase survey for ecommerce brands. “It was a Shopify app where after you buy something on Shopify, a widget would pop up and ask ‘How did you hear about us? Is there anything we can do to improve our product?’ The widget captured zero-party data for brands so that they could improve their marketing messaging.”

“While we were working with customers in that industry, we realized that the features we were building for these brands allowed them to ask follow up questions that allowed them to really dig deep into open ended feedback. This kind of feature was really useful, and it was also generalizable for all different kinds of survey use cases. It wasn't just for ecommerce.”

Don’t be Afraid to Pivot

After Aidan and his team realized that the software they had built had multiple use cases for various end markets, and the fact that they weren't growing rapidly enough in the ecommerce space, they decided to pivot and expand their product offering to a broader range of customers.

Moreover, they made an important early distinction that the Shopify TAM wasn’t big enough. Ultimately, the team decided to build a more general use survey tool. 

COMPANY
What is Aftercare?

Aftercare is a platform that uses AI to dig into responses with intelligent follow-up questions, collecting deep insights that traditional surveys cannot gather. The startup is backed by Y Combinator (W24), Startershub, and more.

“You can think of Aftercare like a conversational AI survey that digs deep. Number one, it digs deep into open ended questions and feedback. Typically for the first open ended questions you might not get a great response, but you can ask follow up questions dynamically and dig into that important feedback, which you can later use.”

“Typically, if you ever use a Google form, you get a data dump of open ended responses: lines and lines of data that you have to sift through, parse through, and categorize yourself. We also use LLMs to categorize all of it and surface that to the user so that they can save hours of time- especially if they have hundreds or even 1000s of answers.”

“One thing we're doing right now is trying to work with a market research company. We just launched an API so that they can use their existing survey tool and ask intelligent follow up questions to the respondents in their existing infrastructure. So those are a few things we're doing. Super excited about it, and think there's a ton of opportunity here.”

The Future of Surveys

“There's a ton of progression in how surveys have evolved over the years.The first thing was surveys over pen and paper. Then in the early 2000s, there was SurveyMonkey with a basic UI that asks questions and digitizes that. Keep going into the mid 2000s and we had Typeform and a beautiful UI with all the core survey functionality.”

“Now, there's a new era, now that we have LLMs, where we can ask intelligent follow up questions and combine them together with the power of an interviewer who's there asking good follow ups and digging deep, but that’s also able to send surveys at scale. We really think that there is going to be a winner here and we’re trying to build to be on the bleeding edge of that.”

How does Aftercare work?

“We're building out a new UI right now. Currently, it's more of like a Typeform, where it will show you a question one by one. We are building it to where follow up questions are asked and then questions are generated underneath it, so it's more of like a chat back and forth interface. You can see the AI considering your answer and then responding with a follow up question. This makes it more engaging for the user.”

PROBLEM & SOLUTION

The Problem: “Folks using traditional surveys can't get to the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ for answers. So the why is missing, especially for open ended responses. And there is also a ton of data that takes a long time to make sense of yourself. That's the problem.”

The Solution: “The solution is combining the scale and the nuance of an interviewer so that you can ask those good questions and make sense of the data.”

OUTREACH STRATEGIES

Product-led Growth:

• “For product led growth, you do need some sort of virality. So thankfully for us, surveys are inherently viral. So when folks fill out a survey and they're sending it out to different people, people are curious about what type of tech it is. We have a very small logo at the bottom left of the survey widget that people are filling out so people can discover us that way.”

Social Media Marketing:

• Aidan is currently leveraging social media by documenting his founder journey on LinkedIn.

Product Hunt Launch:

• “We did a Product Hunt launch recently. So that was super exciting. We got the number three SaaS product of the day. So that was a nice win. We got around 100 signups from the Product Hunt launch. We're really excited about the new folks that are joining our community.”

Leveraging Your Network:

• “We're doing some outreach to YC companies to see if they are interested in using it to collect feedback. So reaching out to more low hanging fruit connections.”

SEO:

• “We’re also building out our SEO channels. Getting backlinks and also building out a template library so that we rank well for SEO. This allows people who find us to receive value immediately.”

• “With SEO, we’ll definitely cast a wider net on building templates for all kinds of different industries, using all of the data that we've gathered from running hundreds of surveys.”

Landing Pages:

• Aidan’s co-founder is currently building a survey generator. This effectively is a landing page that allows users to type in what survey they want to build (in a few sentences), and the generator will automatically build an entire AI survey with follow ups for you. This is a simple way for users who find Aftercare to immediately receive value from the software.

B2B Motion:

• “Anand is going to be more focused where he might go into certain Reddit communities, or find communities online that have a specific use case, and explore that more like a B2B motion, where you're reaching out to someone, building a relationship, understanding their use case.”

• Aidan explained to me that he believes both SEO and B2B are important for product led growth, “Having both these motions and making sure they mature healthily is really important for us.”

IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE (ICP)

“We have some people using Aftercare that are running newsletters to get feedback from their readers.”

“We also have SaaS companies gathering user feedback from their customers, sending out the surveys through whatever channels they need to and embedding the survey on their landing page for a lead generation form.”

The feedback Aftercare gathers helps their ICPs find where their customers are coming from, what those customers are using their product for and also what competitors they're using.

Aftercare also has users from universities that are using the product for event feedback. “So you can imagine after a big club event where there's like 200 folks asking what they could do better or advice on what speakers are coming in. So really a wide range of folks are using the survey right now.”

Aftercare is also continuing to serve the ecommerce space, however it’s not the sole end market anymore. “We have some folks who are currently implementing running surveys after purchase as well. That's another big use case that we have.”

“So yeah, you could probably see a pretty wide range, but that's definitely the play here for us. We are growing through product-led growth. People are finding the application and doing a self-serve motion just to get value immediately out of the product through the free version that we offer.”

WHERE DO YOU SEE AFTERCARE IN ONE YEAR?

Aidan and his team have a clear vision of where they’d like to see the company in a year’s time and are working to build multiple use cases to serve multiple end markets.

“It's a good question. Getting to the point where the API is used in larger companies with existing surveys and we have a consumer app which people can walk up and use.”

“Ideally, we have both of those motions in a really good place. We have 1000s of consumers using the Aftercare app from day to day, especially if surveys are a big part of their job.”

“And then we have a great community of more business type users who have connected with our API and are using that successfully. So a year from now, it might be a little ambitious to dethrone some of the bigger companies, like SurveyMonkey and Typeform, but definitely pounding down the road to become the largest survey tool on the market is what our goal is.”

TL;DR

Aidan Lee is the co-founder of Aftercare, a startup building a conversational AI survey tool that allows users to get deeper insights from open-ended feedback by asking intelligent follow-up questions.

FOLLOW AIDAN
I WANT TO BE FEATURED
FOLLOW FOUNDERS BRIEF