Show HN: I’m 16 years old and working on my first startup, a study app
75 WilliamCranna 109 5/11/2025, 6:26:37 AM notiv.app ↗
As a student with a lot of notes I had a problem with studying fast for tests. So I created Notiv an AI study app that analyzes your notes and prepares you for test.
The first thing I learn about this app on the landing page - is that it's going to be a business and what it's pricing plans are.
This is before me being SOLD on the damn thing to begin with.
So the order the app introduces itself is:
1. Pricing (it's a SAAS)
2. Asks to create an account.
3. The user here closes the tab somewhere here, unless they apriori know they want whatever it is you're offering. Or they have been sold this from word of mouth.
The order it should be in:
1. Oh, wow, this is cool. I like this, this is exactly what I need. So lets create an account to save the things I've already created here while playing around.
2. As you create account, introduce user to pricing plans and extras you get from a paid account.
https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/business/20-jae...
Her product https://www.bulletpoint.app/
If i would be a VC, i would spend only 5 min on the product and hand them 500k without any discussion :)
I wish you all the best with your initiative!
(and unlimited may generate for you too high costs ;))
Otherwise seems nice, will test, good luck!
How are you analyzing and marking up the notes? Assuming it is with a partner/third-party AI, isn't this sharing my data with (for example) OpenAI?
There's still time left to apply to YC's 2025 summer batch: [0] You have 48 hours left until applications close on May 13th.
Who knows, maybe you could achieve fast growth like Scale AI (YC S16) [1] did.
All you have to do is to keep building.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20620578
Will try to give the actual app a shot later, but best of luck regardless!
to me the whole thing reeks of marketing ghouls. This reeks of a group of talentless marketing ghouls trying to launch an unoriginal vibecoded product but absuing our heartstrings.
not selling me on not being a bunch of old dudes using a kids image to sell a unsafe and poor quality product.
if you genuinly are a kid, i'd recommend not using your age as a selling factor. Thats something someone would do to appeal to other kids, but rarely to sell to a serious crowd. It would at best tug at heart strings and get attention but thats will work once, maybe twice. I'd make sure i have a really good product before i waste those free and easy marketing chances.
https://llrnghrthzeonfuakaew.supabase.co/auth/v1/verify?toke...
Hahahaha, I can't believe I found the meme in the wild!
Haven't used it but that's pretty cool!! This is something I struggle with as many of my topics don't have free/cheap practice tests.
You shouldn't also use the same image for the testimonial as the first image in your xyz users are using app.
I’m sure when you were 16 you might have made the same mistakes too.
the website advertises a product that makes use of web infrastructure signficantly more complex/sophisticated than webmail tied to your domain. It's a zero effort zero cost addon for most hosting services these days.
so either this whole thing is a LLM project, and the 16 year old just has their name and reputation as a biological human of young age propping up / hyping the llm based product, or its a scam.
bottom line. It's either unremarkable or untrustworthy, likely both.
It wouldn’t make sense for a scammer to make those mistakes either. So you’re not proving anything nefarious by pointing out those mistakes. All you’re proving is mistakes have been made.
You might be surprised to learn this, but people makes a lot of mistakes at the start of their career. And 16 is very early on.
I suspect there might have been some “vibe coding” going on, but that’s the worst criticism I’m willing to make. And even if I’m correct here, everyone has to start somewhere. I grew up with massive printed books, others on here learned from Stack Overflow. Vibe coding is only a problem if you don’t learn from it too.
It reeks of the marketing tactic along the lines of "my brother is autistic, here's my subpar contribution of "their" work to a subreddit dedicated to artisinal skills" and watch the karma roll on in for them, only to check their comment history and it being a clear case of karma whoring via lies.
this smells the same.
now, if i am wrong and its just a vibe coding thing, then the "im 16" part plays no role, it would be impressive if the 16 year old did this in a responsible way, but anyone can vibe code their way to such a product woth zero real skill or effort, making the "im 16" point lose the context underwhich it would be pertinent information.
Llm's have changed our world in many ways, this being one of them. Imagine someone asks some agentic llm framework a research question, and a series of unrelated tangents later this agentic framework solves a nobel prize worthy problem. Should the human get that prize? Of course not, it would otherwise recognize skills/brightness in a human who doesnt actually posses it.
If this isnt just a scam, then this would be no different.
last example. If someone posted, "im 16, here is my art portfolio" and its all AI generated content, would you care? Would it demand the same response as if this was a gallery of high quality and beautiful work, painted by hand? Of course not.
By that I don’t just mean the analysis of this specific submission but also your tangent points about AI. People have used tools to enable creativity for the entirety of human history. The definition of what tools are acceptable and which are cheating is a subjective one and often defined by the age of the person (ie what was the norm when you were in your 20s).
I’ve seen the same debates time and time again. Whether it’s Ableton vs vinyl (DJs), search engines vs directory listings (research), internet vs books (research), VSTi’s vs instruments (musicians), automatic vs manual shift (cars), Photoshop vs traditional photography effects, CGI vs animatronics (movies), I could go on and on.
Even dumb things like a central payment till in restaurants (eg McDonalds) was heavily criticised in the UK when it was new because the “correct” way to serve food was via table service…or so people over a certain age believed.
Most people hate change. I know because I’m old myself and have seen enough change first hand and how people react to it. But change doesn’t make a compelling argument for why this 16 year old shouldn’t be helped in their endeavours to build an app. Nor is it proof that this individual isn’t who they claim to be.
that being said, even if i shift my values in this way, one problem remains - the nature of creativity.
so, under this value system tool use is irrelevant, if it makes creativity easier cool, doesnt diminish it non.
so lets evaluate this purely on a novelty / creativity angle.
marketing wise: tactic / style taken from a youtuber they reference in their twitter account
product: idea contributes jothing novel to a saturated space of ai learning tolls
tool use: tools used, and the way they were used, is about as basic as it gets
insight: no real novel or interesting insights into tool use, or the problem being solved
wholisitc interpretation: all together, what appears novel in all this, is applying a particular marketing strategty to hn, one that is usually aimed at children. This raises a few interesting questions about shifting demogrpahics on hn among other things, but this post is interesting in a meta way, not a direct way.
as an example, writing text like this, in a digital way, is not special anymore, by anyones reakoning - and yet if you apply this skill creatively, be it a story or poetry or solving a novel problem etc. Then that comment still has creative merit, even if the skills underlying it are no longer noteworthy. The same is true here, the skills underlying what was done are no longer noteworthy, and so we must evaluate on content alone. The content is derivative. So it stands on nothing.
I really don’t see how a learning app for students who also frequent HN is a valuable enough demographic to target. And ironically, the red flags identified would be mistakes a scammer would know not to make.
Everything about this submission can be easily explained by inexperience but it’s a lot harder to explain why it’s scam.
You could apply Occam’s Razor here and reasonably say that this being an inexperienced 16 year old is the hypothesis with the fewer assumptions.
This sounds kind of fake, like a character playing a customer saying good things about your product.
Only God knows how much I needed better grammar when I was 16. Tbh I still do.. LoL
I'd say the hardest bit about running a business is not running the business. It's everything else - admin, figuring out what you actually want to do, reaching customers, retaining customers etc.
But also that's the bit you have lots of time to figure out. Focus on the bits you enjoy and try to learn as much as you can (unless you are really desperate for cash out of this, in which case focus on all that!). You can figure out the boring bits later.
It's very good that young people are engaged. It's encouraging for us grey beards interested in the future of technology and a healthy action for us old people to encourage younger people.
As my beard gets greyer so my pattern recognition library of samples gets bigger and it has recognised a "I'm 16" prefix to popular HN submissions!
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i%27m+16 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i%27m+17
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It's a serious question. Is the focus studying fast for tests (quoted from OP)? Or running a business? If the real goal were studying, the app could be banged out quickly and you could get back to studying. The business is a time sink - which at this stage OP would have presumably discovered - he's already out here spending time promoting it.
Because VC money doesn't invest in apps, and it's trendy.
Kudos, William, for putting this app together. Keep a thick skin when reading and acting on the comments and you’ll have a sweet project on your hands
From my point of view, for this not to be a scam: 1 - there should first be a video presentation of the program's operation with all functions, not a website with a bunch of promises and a PAY button 2 - You should definitely write your FIRST startup without any AI generation at all!
I can't see anything better from this site/ author...is there something I'm missing? Tried youtube to see it in action...nothing.
On a privacy note, item 4 of the privacy link states: You can request deletion of your data by contacting us at [email address].
So if, in the future, something happens...what then? Seems like a lot of info [for me] to give out, but no future, cast iron, guarantees. What if something happens to williamcranna2008@gmail.com?
https://vocal.media/families/this-is-not-your-way-story
Turns out I misread the Unicode, and it is actually "Tôi Là Một Con Lừa", which is Vietnamese for "I am a donkey", which probably makes it suitable reading material for yours truly.
Congrats on launching though, this is an amazing achievement and the dedication/skill set will take you far.
Yeah, no
The user has no background, and I couldn't find any info on the creator itself.