Stempad

What do they actually do

Stempad is a browser-based scientific editor that lets people mix typed text, equations, graphs, chemistry drawings, code, spreadsheets, and freehand sketches in a single document. It offers real-time collaboration, export (PDF on free; LaTeX/Markdown on paid), integrations, and built‑in AI helpers; paid plans can choose among multiple model providers. There’s also a web SDK to embed the editor in other apps under a commercial license (homepage, learn, pricing, docs).

Today the product is used mainly by students and teachers. Before YC, the founder reported several hundred users with a few paying subscribers, and the team is very small (listed as one person on the YC profile) (YC profile). The live product focuses on block-based scientific editing, collaboration, export/sharing, and early AI features; Cloud and Enterprise plans add storage, SSO/SAML, private hosting, and admin controls (pricing).

Who are their target customer(s)

• Undergraduate and graduate STEM students: Switching between separate apps for equations, graphs, chemistry drawings, code, and sketches breaks focus and makes assignments harder to assemble and export cleanly (learn, homepage).
• Teachers and teaching assistants: Preparing interactive lectures, worksheets, and demos is slow, and sharing/updating materials across a class often loses equations, diagrams, or embedded graphs (learn, pricing).
• Graduate students and research assistants: Keeping notebooks reproducible while combining code, figures, and math in one place is difficult, and collaborating on documents that also export to LaTeX/Overleaf or Jupyter adds friction (pricing, homepage).
• School/university IT and department admins: They need SSO, private hosting, license controls, and compliance so tools can be rolled out and managed at scale without security or provisioning issues (pricing, docs).
• Education or lab software platforms: Building and maintaining domain-specific scientific editors is costly; they prefer an embeddable, licensable editor with collaboration they can integrate rather than build in-house (docs, pricing).

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Convert known instructors, TAs, and lab leaders into paid pilots by migrating one existing assignment or course module into Stempad, offering hands-on onboarding and a short classwide trial to gather usage and feedback (YC profile, learn, pricing).
• First 50: Run course-level pilots and a campus ambassador program, shipping ready-to-use assignment templates and a one-hour instructor workshop to drive adoption and collect testimonials and feature requests (learn, pricing).
• First 100: Roll successful pilots into departmental or lab licenses and sign a few SDK embed deals, using usage data and instructor quotes to sell multi-seat Cloud/private-hosted contracts and to convince adjacent platforms to white‑label the editor (pricing, docs).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

TAM spans academic technical note-taking/docs, parts of electronic lab notebooks, and embeddable scientific editing for education and R&D platforms. Near-term focus is higher-ed STEM courses and institutions rather than the entire research/pharma market.

Bottom-up calculation:

If Stempad monetizes 500,000 individual STEM users globally at ~$60/year ARPU (~$30M) plus 5,000 institutional departments at ~$10,000/year each (~$50M) and 200 SDK licenses at ~$25,000/year (~$5M), the near-term TAM is roughly ~$85M.

Assumptions:

• ARPU ~$5/month for individual Cloud users; institutional pricing averages $10k/year per department.
• Addressable departments include higher-ed STEM departments and select research groups; SDK buyers are education/lab platforms.
• Adoption reflects a narrow initial wedge of global STEM learners and institutions, not the full ELN or enterprise R&D markets.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Overleaf: Browser LaTeX editor strong at typesetting, bibliographies, and collaboration; focused on LaTeX document workflows rather than mixed scientific blocks in one WYSIWYG pad (features, collaboration docs).
• Jupyter / Google Colab: Executable notebooks for code, analysis, and plots; great for reproducible computation but centered on code cells rather than rich mixed-content teaching notes with chemistry and freehand drawing (Project Jupyter, Colab features).
• Notion: General-purpose block-based docs with strong collaboration but limited native scientific blocks like chemistry editors or interactive math/graphing (pages & blocks, writing basics).
• Benchling: Life-science ELN and R&D platform with templates, inventories, and compliance; optimized for lab workflows and sample tracking rather than classroom notes or mixed scientific blocks (notebook, what is an ELN).
• CoCalc: Online collaborative math/computation environment bundling LaTeX and Jupyter; prioritizes computational reproducibility over a general-purpose scientific note editor with built-in chemistry/drawing blocks (features, overview PDF).