Linguix's Co-Founder Alex Lashkov on Empowering Writers Through AI

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I have over 10 years of experience in marketing. For a long time, I was building boutique content marketing agencies that helped startup companies kick off their sales and user acquisition. My passion for content creation led me to co-found my current startup.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

It is called Linguix, an AI-based writing assistant and text rewriter. It gives two values at the same time. First, you get corrections for your writing mistakes. Second, the tool spots the patterns of your errors and offers tailored language training sessions, which improves your language skill in the long run.

What is the origin story?

Linguix is all about scratching your own itch. As a non-native English speaker and content marketing agency owner, I had to write a lot myself. However, my language skills were far from perfect, though. This is why I decided to find software that could help me with my content and writing skills. I’ve tried a bunch of tools and all these solutions turned out to be inefficient for me.

These apps could correct mistakes I made, but they did not prevent me from making the same mistake again and again. I just typed and clicked “accept” for all corrections and making no actual progress with my language and writing skills.

In turn, the language learning apps I used promised results somewhen in the future, and could not help me right away with my business tasks. This has also negatively impacted my motivation as a language learner.

Finally, I decided to fix these issues and create the tool that will give me both values I needed: instant help with my writing and language skill improvement in the long run.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We have a perfect combination of marketing experience, understanding the roots of the problem we are trying to fix & the audience we work for, and technical skills and background in EdTech. Our CTO has built a bunch of brain training software apps with hundreds of thousands of users and key engineers worked on a language learning app with 5M of users before.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Chances are I'd be working in marketing, helping companies worldwide to find their way to people they need and get some traction. I would experiment and test hypotheses to find the most effective ways of solving the exact problem.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We have several metrics to track:

• Revenue
• Churn
• NPS
• Highly-engaged users
• MAU/WAU/DAU

Also, we have usage-based metrics for every feature of the product. We need to get a clear picture of whether people understand our offering, like it, are ready to pay for it and are happy enough to keep using it.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

For the past twelve months, our growth exceeded 100 thousand new users. The product turned to be in demand, we have people that use it and support our progress, cheer us every day. For me, seeing when the person who is submitting a support request to resolve a specific issue adds a P.S. stating that they love the product a lot is the most exciting thing I've seen for a long time.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

We are excited about artificial intelligence and machine learning in education. Our primary goal is to create the perfect algorithm to generate the most personalized and tailored language training based on the user's mistakes for higher efficiency and progress.

For the worries, there are none! The tech is booming, and we're happy to see many AI startups emerging here and there that will give us all a better world to live in very soon.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I like that the platform gives equal access to an audience and knowledge for people no matter where they live and who they are. This is not something you could expect from a major media outlet several years ago. And this is why I am an author and reader of Hackernoon myself for several years In a row.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Don't wait to start something because you do not have relevant experience. You will never get it unless you go and break things yourself. That knowledge would save me years of career, I assume.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

The biggest lesson I have learned as a marketer is that marketing can't be separated from the product. You can create the best landing page, craft perfect illustrations, and explain why people need your product. However, it won't work out if the product doesn't provide an easy way to use the features that provide real value.