Welcome to our blog series, “Meet a CoMotion Labs Member.” These posts offer a peek into the groundbreaking work CoMotion Labs startups do and why they do it here. Stay tuned for profiles about startups innovating in software, IT, fintech, life sciences, biotech, medtech, hardware, prototyping, and nanotechnology. They all work in one of our two physical locations on or near the UW campus — at Fluke Hall and Startup Hall.
Beewriter
Where: CoMotion Labs (Startup Hall)
Joined: January 2020
Who:
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- Ron Fan, Founder
- Chase King, Developer
- Jiarong Zhang, Developer
What is your startup all about?
Beewriter is a writing tool that helps people brainstorm better ways to express themselves. It can correct grammatical mistakes and give tips to improve a person’s writing style, and more uniquely, it also gives ideas for different ways to phrase things. Using patent-pending Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, Beewriter typically provides several coherent suggestions for any given sentence and excels at dealing with unusual grammatical mistakes.
What problem do you solve?
By providing numerous suggestions even for technically correct sentences, Beewriter greatly streamlines the revision process in writing. For those who have ever looked over an important email or article and thought about whether they were happy with the exact wording, Beewriter isaves writers the trouble of thinking of different phrasings on their own.
Beewriter is particularly helpful for non-native speakers whose writing mistakes are often not detected by existing writing tools due to the limitations of older grammar-fixing techniques. Using its modern technology, suggesting corrections for unusual mistakes – or even something that’s grammatically correct but just sounds a bit unnatural – is no problem.
What’s the latest?
We’ve just finished our browser extension and we’re now wrapping up some updates that will allow Beewriter to operate in several different languages, making it the first high-quality writing tool available in many of those languages.
Startup Advice:
Some quick tips:
– Set realistic and measurable short-term goals and be prompt about addressing anything that causes you to miss those goals.
– Figure out your numbers (especially if your product has non-negligible costs) and know what thresholds you need to hit to be successful.
– Clearly identify what sets your product apart from the competition – this should be something that they won’t be able to quickly copy.
– Start thinking early on about how you’ll get users and test your hypotheses by trying to drive traffic to a landing page or even an incomplete minimum viable product (MVP).
– Talk to your users often to build a strong understanding of exactly how your product provides value to them.
Beewriter user interface
Connect with Beewriter
About CoMotion Labs: CoMotion Labs, a self-sustaining membership-supported program of UW CoMotion, provides a multi-industry incubation environment for early-stage startups with a focus on UW spinoffs. From critical infrastructure (desks, dry benches, wet lab space, and prototyping capabilities) to just-in-time learning, mentoring, and networking, CoMotion Labs nurtures company growth and enables success. Our labs are currently home to over 100 startups and operate in two locations on the UW Seattle campus.