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Torch — Use AI to simplify your work and grow your startup
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bryan s arnold
One would naturally be skeptical of something stating "it"not "who" would set up and manage their business on autopilot. So Torch, prove the skeptics wrong. Who wouldn't love to see it do everything you're stating its capable of doing?
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Wow, I expected this to be a pretty superficial product with just 'the offer of artificial intelligence' to stand it up. It's a complete suite!
However, with many of the other AI products I've seen written up lately, I am curious where that aspect of it comes in. How does it adapt and learn; is this primarily data visualization?
@afhill Hi Andrea, Thanks for your comments. We're not primarily focused on visualization (although you can do that in our system), but rather the automatic execution on the data itself. That's really how we're different. Many systems will give you a nice graph about your top selling products with what products they viewed or something along those lines and then let you go an execute on it. Our system will discover what products certain users are interested in, build an email to target that customer with a discount that expires in an hour and send it to them automatically. Then it will analyze the rate in which people ordered for that email and then it might increase the time to two hours and see how that performs. If that doesn't work, then it may go to 30 minutes or maybe it will try sending them 1 product instead of a list of 6. And so on until it finds the most optimal tactic. You really don't have to do anything. That's why we say it's like having a team of data scientists and marketers working for you :)
@rickats Hi Rick, I completely understand your comments. In today's world so many people overused "big data" and had very minimal solutions for it. It definitely was a "buzzword" and so seems to be AI. However, that's where we're really striving to change the game. We're actually using data and creating tangible solutions for people. Most people don't even really know what big data is much less how to act upon it. We're using that data to do things like the following for businesses:
- Automatically predict future sales and order inventory
- Automatically handle their email marketing by creating, building and sending email newsletters
- Over time it will answer support questions from their customers
- Build a completely personalized website catered to customers based on what their interests are. Example: If you're an outdoor store and it detects a user is a female who is interested in skiing equipment, it shows her pictures on skiing and shows her women's skiing gear all throughout the site. Male snowboarder? Same thing, but on the exact same website.
- A lot more
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Does it save businesses a huge amount of time, increase conversions, and help them grow? Absolutely.
Now what I've just described is called "weak AI", which is really more of using data to analyze and execute on single tasks. What we want to get to is something called "strong AI", where a computer can exhibit behavior at least as skillful and flexible as humans do. An example of this is when a computer would go out and read a bunch of articles online related to a subject and then write a blog post for you on it. We absolutely think it's possible, but we're not there yet. We're striving to get there. It is our mission.
I hope that conveys what we're trying to do. We are well aware of the 'gimmick' sentiments that surrounds AI. We're going to change that. Would love to personally give you a demo anytime.
Like the idea. If the makers see this, is there any chance you could make scrolling less 'heavy' on the site? It felt like hard work to read all of the information.
@ausonio I am glad to hear you like the idea of @TorchSuite! I really appreciate your feedback on our website and will work on fixing the scrolling as soon as possible.
This seems interesting, but is it designed to feed in all the external services or replace them?
@marietatibouet Replace primarily. One of the things that is really hard about AI and automation, is that you really need systems to talk to one another to get the full power and you need them to have all the data. That being said, we also have integrations and will continue to build more :)
Good to see an interesting start up from a U of O alum! A little more disclosure on your site of workflow would be helpful. Also, your SMB target seems to end at two users. That's the tiny of the tiny of the "S" in SMB. Interestingly enough, that happens to be the target market for Apple's Filemaker Pro and the cobbled together templates people use to build a business on top of it.
@lynnfredricks Hi Lynn, thanks for the comments. We have more packages on the admin area where you can get 5 users and we have enterprise packages for even more users. Should probably put that on the website. Go Ducks!
It is a great idea for simplicity but two suggestions:
1. Have a live chat- this is something that I would have loved two years ago but would want to chat to a human before jumping on board.
2. Checked out the video- needs some work. Use HD.