Audemic business growth — A loyal B2C base, and nowhere to grow
A B2C product with a loyal base and a structural ceiling: students graduate, so the users you win you lose on a schedule. The question was never how to make Scholar better. It was who else reads research for a living, and whether they'd pay.
Role: Senior Digital Product Manager
Contribution: Product strategy, Discovery research, Journey mapping, Growth experiments, Roadmap prioritization
Audemic Scholar is a web app that allows university students to listen to the full text research paper and reports. Since 2022, Scholar has established a loyal user base in the B2C market, generating $8,000 per month in revenue.
But investors raised concerns about the product's scalability due to the lifecycle of undergraduate and post graduate students.
The user need was tools that cut the workload of finding and organizing information. The business need was new markets from the insights we already had, and a clear ideal customer profile. Early hypotheses pointed at the social sciences, because 60% of Scholar users came from that field.
Both roll up into one product vision: streamline access to critical information for professionals in fast-paced industries, so they can spend their time on the work that has impact.
Three changes came out of it. Summaries iterated against OpenAI and Claude models with survey and interview feedback between rounds. A redesigned audio page that puts the summary on the full-text paper, so a researcher understands new work without reading all of it. And in-app feedback that collects insight passively instead of stopping someone mid-task to ask.
By interviewing UN analysts and vaccine researchers, we discovered researchers lose 20 hours a month searching for information, costing organizations like NIH nearly $10 million monthly in lost productivity.
Every interview was cut into four columns: the job as it stands, pains, current solutions, and the motivation underneath. The pattern only shows up when you can read one column straight down.
After mapping the as-is customer journey, we launched a Beta 24/7 junior analyst solution to help researchers stay informed. Within a week, we captured 20 quality leads through paid ads.
Stage one is where the time goes. Scanning dozens of reports from 70+ analysts, reading external publications alongside their own research, skimming summaries selectively — across company databases, analyst reports, subscriptions like WSJ and Foreign Policy, and Ground News for bias checking.
We learned from users that summaries lacked critical context, such as societal impact and effects on studied groups, limiting deeper understanding. Users struggled to move beyond a superficial understanding.
We aligned beta-user feedback with our roadmap, prioritizing pain points to position the product for B2B clients. Equation for prioritization: Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort.
Mark-read-on-papers scored 11160, renaming boards and files 7440, drag-and-drop upload 5115, the note-taking MVP 4133. Writing the arithmetic on the sticky note is the point: an argument about whether renaming matters more than uploading goes nowhere, an argument about whether its reach is really 620 goes somewhere.