There is no getting around the power of customer feedback in building a successful startup. In this episode of Startup Success, we sit down with Luke Kim, founder and CEO of Liner, an AI-powered search tool revolutionizing the way researchers, students, and knowledge workers find reliable information. As a child during the dot-com boom, Luke dreamed of one day starting his own company. Right out of college, he turned his dream into reality by founding Liner, which is now one of the top AI search tools in the world.
Luke shares his incredible journey and highlights his team’s successful strategy for harnessing the power of customer feedback to build a highly engaged and passionate user base that drives growth organically.
We discuss:
- How his team maintains a close connection to customer pain points and heavily relies on user feedback to drive product development
- Liner’s recent $22M Series B funding and their strategy for scaling globally
- Their quick pivot to AI search within a week of ChatGPT’s API original release
Luke’s insights into building a 100% customer-centric team provide invaluable lessons for startup founders at any stage.
This discussion with Luke Kim of Liner comes from our show Startup Success. Browse all Burkland podcasts and subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts.
Intro 00:01
Music. Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here, you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world, stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now. Welcome
Kate 00:17
to Startup Ssuccess today. We have Luke Kim in studio, who is the founder and CEO of Liner. Welcome Luke.
Luke Kim
Hi Kate, thanks for having me.
Kate
Thanks so much for being here. I’m looking forward to our conversation. Before we get into Liner. I’d love it if you could share with the audience, kind of a brief overview of your background, and then what led to the founding.
Luke Kim 00:47
So I majored in computer science in Seoul, Korea. The reason I majored in computer science is because I wanted to start a startup, even like when I was in elementary school.
Kate 01:03
Oh, wow. That’s a first. Good for you.
Luke Kim 01:05
So my dream was being a computer programmer and also becoming an entrepreneur, even from when I was 9, 10, 11. And the reason is because I lived in Boston when I was in elementary school, and those times were something like dot com bubble era. So, everybody was talking about venture, startup. And, of course, I was just a kid, so I didn’t know anything, but my parents told me, so Jinu is my Korean name, so they told me, Jinu, to become an entrepreneur, this is the way. (Smart parents.) So I didn’t know anything about venture, of course, but I just this was kind of an inception for me. So I was always into learning things related to entrepreneurs, business guys and computers. So I went to major computer science in Korea, and then I was looking about some problems that I would focus on. And so I actually didn’t work in other companies. So becoming CEO is my first job title.
Kate 02:18
Wow, that’s impressive.
Luke Kim 02:21
And actually been doing this for 10 years right now.
Kate 02:23
Okay, that’s really interesting. So you basically, this is new, I haven’t heard this before. I totally understand why being in Boston during that time was a really exciting time. So yes, I get why that would, you know, make you and your parents say, like, that’s something to pursue. So basically, you’re saying you went to school and you got this idea for Liner in school, and this has been what you’ve been doing since you’ve been graduating. (That’s correct.) And we should tell people to kind of prove that you know what you’re talking about. You’ve raised your series B, right? (Yes.) And what that was pretty significant. Series B. What was that? How much did you raise?
Luke Kim 03:08
in terms of dollars, it’s $22 million.
Kate 03:13
Wow, congratulations.I mean, it’s no easy feat in this market to even get to Series B. So to raise such a strong Series B is an accomplishment right there. So congratulations. So tell us now that we’ve kind of shown the audience you know what you’re doing, tell us what Liner is and kind of what inspired you.
Luke Kim 03:38
Yeah.So Liner is an AI search for researchers, students and knowledge workers, finding reliable information for their work. So as a student myself, I had a lot of frustration while using Google for my homeworks, projects and writing essays, because when I visited the top links that Google gave me, not always there was an answer. So I had to search again and again and visit other websites again and again and read it all. So I thought that this might have a better way. So Liner was always trying to figure out a way to provide people with more reliable information faster. So starting from 2015, obviously there was no large language model then, so it was slightly different. So until 2022 what we were doing was we recommended high quality articles, and we provided a highlighter pen productivity tool for the web. So that highlighter product was some kind of a source of reliable information, and then we use that information to recommend reliable, high quality documents to people. And then when we saw ChatGPT, we thought that if we use this technology and the high quality, reliable sources that we are accumulating, maybe we can build some kind of search experience that’s better than Google, which we’re trying to solve from the beginning. So we’ve just launched an AI search using the data that we gathered for like 80 years, and then saw some real good usage around university students, graduate students, researchers, I think they had some kind of problem that I had in 2015 till like 2022 so people just started using Liner, and now Liner is like one of the most used AI products in the world, on the top 10 in terms of AI search, it’s in top two. So I say Liner is quite doing well these days.
Kate 05:56
Those are some very impressive stats. Yes, I would agree, it’s doing very well. There’s a couple things that stood out to me in your story. First of all, you were very close to the problem you were trying to solve, right? You felt the pain of what you were trying to solve. And I’ve interviewed a lot of founders, and I feel like the ones that are really successful a lot of times they’ve experienced the pain point firsthand. So they can really solve for it, be passionate about it, evangelize. It sounds like you went through that. And then the second thing was that you used AI when that was further developed, you know, as a huge enhancement to what you were doing. We keep hearing, you know, as people, when we read about AI, that that’s going to be happening more and more. You’re the perfect example of that.
Luke Kim 06:57
Yeah, that’s correct. And one of the reasons that we could, we were very confident in using AI as the core technology, and like pivoting a bit to AI search rather than recommending high quality articles, was because our team is really into our mission and vision. So even from 2015 what we were trying to do was just help people get smarter faster by providing reliable information, adding more access to reliable information. So just looking at the technology, it made total sense for us to use it and create a product that helps this mission and vision. And I’d say we were quite fast in doing this, because most of this kind of generative AI products were enabled after March of 2023 because that month is the month when ChatGPT API was released. Yeah, and we’ve launched our AI search product in early March. So we were like, totally ready, and then when we saw the API was released, we launched our AI search within a week. So I think this kind of swift move made a difference too.
Kate 08:09
Absolutely. Super swift move. How are you so ready and prepared?
Luke Kim 08:15
That’s a really good question. You know, our company was always just looking at a lot of technology that could help people access more reliable information, faster and easier. So obviously generative AI was one of them. And even from GPT-3 era before ChatGPT, we were looking at the technology, and actually we had a prototype of AI search internally. So what we had to do was just switch the GPT-3 API to 3.5 Turbo, which is ChatGPT API, and then get ready to launch this. And then just launched it. So we were able to launch it really fast. We were ready for it.
Kate 08:55
You were beyond ready. That’s a really impressive story. What an innovative team you have. I don’t think others were that quite I mean, you were like, primed ready to – how did you get there? Did your team help you? Do you have a good team of people around you that kind of helped you pursue this?
Luke Kim 09:17
Yeah, our team is great. So our engineers are very keen to looking at new technologies always. So I think their sensing of this technology advancement was really helpful. And most of the team members, like not most, like 100% of our team members know why I started Liner. I started Liner because of the frustration of finding reliable answers on Google. So I always told them that we are going to overcome like Google search experience in finding reliable information. If we find anything that can help us accomplish this vision and mission, we are going to do that. So everybody knows this, so that is one of the reasons that we were able to do this.
Kate 10:03
You know, for jumping right into a CEO role. That’s impressive leadership. Because I think when you like, galvanize a team like that and empower them around an objective, and everyone’s bought in, and your story is a perfect example of how well that type of leadership works like obviously, everyone was very committed. Were a lot of these engineers, people you went to school with, or was it just general hiring that you came up with such a great team?
Luke Kim 10:36
That’s a good question also. So some interesting thing about our team is that they are people who we met as, like general hiring, but they were Liner users, or they knew about Liner’s mission before, like joining Liner. Like very key roles that we have in our team, it’s very interesting that we didn’t go outbound. They came to us. And I think your vision and mission is really great. I agree that the world should go that way. Is there a role for me? There are this kind of people who were really doing well in large companies or great startups in Korea and the US. We were very lucky in that way.
Kate 11:21
That is a huge compliment to your vision and mission. Yeah. I mean that’s like the ultimate recruiting story, right? That you are creating something that people are so passionate about, you know, wanting to see succeed. They want to join and help, you know, bring it to success. That’s great. So, from my understanding, the product and the early days of the company, you were based in Korea, and that’s where you had your early wins, and then you had to bring Liner to the United States?
Luke Kim 11:56
So actually, I started Liner in the United States.
Kate 12:00
Oh, you did start it in the United States. Okay.
Luke Kim 12:04
So it is like the fifth product that I built during university. Okay, so the first one, second one, third one, it quite had a business, and it did have users in Korea. You know, I lived in Boston when I was young, so I kind of am fluent in using English, so of course, I translated all the UX writing into English, but we saw people from other countries having trouble using like our products before Liner. So me and my co-founder thought that there is something that we don’t understand here. If we want to create some kind of a global product, we should go to the United States and build there. We had that we wanted to solve that problem of finding reliable information, but while creating the solution, we thought that we should be in the United States and like Silicon Valley to create a solution that works globally, outside Korea. So we started Liner in San Jose. And we came back and forth from Seoul and Silicon Valley till, uh, before COVID era. During the COVID era, of course, everything was closed, so we could not come here, but after COVID, we came back to San Francisco and started meeting our users again, since our user base is mostly in the United States.
Kate 13:33
Okay, so I see that’s the trajectory. You knew to scale globally, the United States was where to start, but then COVID prevented you from being here, so you had to do workarounds. Now you’re scaling globally, and one of the ways that I think is so impressive is you have these partnerships with these huge universities, which is so smart. Can you share some details around that and how that happened?
Luke Kim 14:07
So partnerships that we have with great universities here in the United States are mostly partner shares that went bottom up. So since we have a lot of users using Liner in Berkeley or like universities in LA and Santa Barbara, we were able to meet students who are attending those schools. And then they introduced us to some clubs, and they introduced us to some people working there. So everything we do, we are a 100% consumer oriented company, so it came organically.
Kate 14:46
Interesting. So the students adopted Liner and then, through their efforts, they helped bring it to their universities. (Yeah.) That’s a really powerful example of organic growth.
Luke Kim 15:02
Yeah, so I think Liner’s growth it could be said is something similar to Dropbox’s story, because Dropbox, there’s Dropbox and Box, which are both amazing companies. But Box started out as an enterprise software. Dropbox started out as a consumer product, but eventually Dropbox also did some enterprise things because their consumers were evangelizing their product to like their team members, Let’s use this together. So they grew organically. I’ve heard that they grew organically even in the enterprise side. Of course, they do have salesmen, but mostly. So, I think Liner’s growth is some kind very similar to, like, early growth of Dropbox.
Kate 15:48
That’s a good parallel. And how, how did you reach students? Like, were there organized efforts that you undertook to reach the students?
Luke Kim 15:59
So before AI, what we were doing was providing a tool while you read, and providing what to read. So people who were in university were already our users. Before AI search, they were already our users. And then after AI search, what we were trying to solve were problems that they had, so they just went on using Liner. And there are some strong Word of Mouth for students, because they are always meeting their friends, peers and looking at what they are using to do their essay, homework, projects. So I think this target customer segment has a very high virality, so that helped really well. And other things is we were very focused on meeting our customers like even in offline and other online channels. So we ran this kind of ambassadors in schools, and we did some like PR or marketing that our target customers, who are in university, they are going to see. So we try, we try to at least be seen once a day for our customers. Yeah, that was our focus.
Kate 17:19
Once a day. I like how you gave yourself a goal like that. That’s very smart and savvy as a marketer. The other thing that jumped out at me is, you know, a lot of founders on here, the ones that were so focused on the customer, and, you know, being in front of the customer and just customer centric, customer centric, the success right that you find. And also, did you take feedback at times from customer students?
Luke Kim 17:53
Yeah, 100% so even after pivoting to AI search, honestly, we didn’t know why people were using Liner rather than ChatGPT. So we were very curious to know why they are choosing Liner. So that is the initial reason we’ve opened up an office in San Francisco. We are not a B2B, like sales company enterprise thing, so we don’t have to open offices for sales, but we’ve opened up our office in San Francisco to just, like, meet our users. So we went out and started meeting our users, and most of the time, what they told us is that they don’t trust ChatGPT, and the reason was because they sometimes hallucinate and they don’t give the references, and they don’t show the thought process, so they are not confident in using the information that ChatGPT gave. But what Liner did was we provided references for each sentence that Liner generated. So this sentence came from this web page, this part, this sentence came from this web page and this part. So this kind of backchecking for each sentence and associating it with web pages that are reliable, this was the key thing that users chose Liner over other things. And this kind of stuff, if we didn’t do user interviews, we might not know to even maybe now.
Kate 19:21
That is so brilliant, what an incredible way to differentiate yourself, right or your product. And then another powerful example of talking and listening to your customers and customer feedback loops. We hear that again and again on startup success, so I just want to key in on that for everybody listening that customer feedback loop in the early days to learn what they like, why they’re, you know, choosing your product over something else, and kind of hone in on that and use it to differentiate yourself, improve, pivot whatever you need. To do that’s a great story.
Luke Kim 20:02
Yeah. And even these days, we are trying to meet a lot of users and then start building products from their feedback. Actually, internally, we have something called L2-D2 you know, my English name is Luke, and it’s because I like Luke Skywalker.
Kate 20:19
Oh yes, yes. I grew up watching Star Wars.
Luke Kim 20:23
And Luke’s best friend is R2-D2. So, internally we built L2-D2.
Kate 20:30
I love that.
Luke Kim 20:33
It’s an AI. It’s an AI that answers questions related to user feedback that we’ve gathered. If you ask L2-D2 about like, what kind of academic papers do people trust, or what are some aspects of reliable information that our users think? And then L2-D2 will go through the user interviews that we’ve done so far, and then retrieve the parts of the entire interview, and then A told this is reliable information, B told this is reliable information. According to these, our users think reliable information is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We internally, we have, we even built this kind of stuff too.
Kate 21:16
Okay, that is so powerful. I love it, okay? I love first of all, the name and where it originates, and then the fact that is really, really powerful. I mean, you can glean a lot of really relevant, important information. (Right, right? It helps a lot.) Yeah, it really helps with the customer feedback. We’re coming up on time. You’ve shared so much. I mean learning about Liner and your journey, super impressive. Do you have advice for early stage startup founders listening? We always wrap up the show this way, but as someone who you know just completed a successful series B, and who’s made all these incredible product innovations, any advice you can share?
Luke Kim 22:08
Yeah, so I think this is repeated today, but like focusing on customers will be the most important thing I think. Building a team, creating a product, doing marketing, everything has to start from customer’s problem. Actually, during the COVID era, when I couldn’t come to the United States and meet our users, we had some toxic time. But like just looking at the numbers and adding features that just grew the conversion rates or retentions, we didn’t know why they were converting or using Liner more frequently, longe. And after COVID, what we’ve internally realized is that we were not able to explain what Liner is to our customers because it added so many features for it was covering too many use cases. So when we came back to United States and met our customers and told about the product, they didn’t understand Liner, so we thought that, oh, one thing that Liner did really well was hearing user voice and even maybe coming to United States from Seoul to just meet customers and then build product upon the user’s feedbacks, we were just looking at data and numbers and built it, and we’ve kind of screwed it up so we were very frustrated. And then it took about a year, I think, year, to fix this kind of internal culture just looking at the charts. Don’t, don’t just look at the charts, go meet customers. Don’t build a product or just add features that can level up the conversion, meet users and ask them why they are using Liner or not using Liner. This kind of culture was cultivated now – it is cultivated now, but it took about a year and a half. So I think if we just stick to the customer focus like principle that we have from the beginning, maybe we were even faster than right now. So I advise everybody who are building product and doing business to don’t fall into the trap that we’ve fell, and then meet customers more frequently and often, and ask them and get to know why they are choosing your solution rather than others. This will be the most important one.
Kate 24:29
That is first of all, thank you for sharing such candid advice and sharing like a mistake you made and admitting to that. You know, I think it was really helpful when founders talk about mistakes, and, you know, are candid about things they could have done better. And what a powerful story. That shows, you know, I see it all the time people get so into the numbers and the data, but just the importance. Of that customer feedback loop that really shows it. And I like how you phrased it. You were kind of getting away from the mission, right? The core vision, and that’s what COVID did. It isolated us all, right? And we tried to do the best we could, but it was a tough time. Super inspiring to speak with you today, Luke, what an exciting story. For people listening who want to learn more about liner or to try it, where should they go?
Luke Kim 25:30
Yeah, so we have a website. It’s getliner.com we also have a mobile app in iOS and Android. You can just search Liner there.
Kate 25:39
Great. I know I’m going to check it out because I have two kids in college, so I will definitely be checking it out. Thank you for joining us today and sharing a really inspiring story, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next for you all.
Luke Kim
Yeah, it was great talking to you.
Intro 26:00
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