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Paper Studio AI

AI assistant for writing academic papers

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Project Overview

Paper Studio is an app designed to help students and researchers streamline their academic paper writing process. This idea came from my own struggles and those of my partner when we were working on our final papers at university. We realized there were a few big pain points that many students face:

  1. The challenge of following complex academic writing guidelines.
  2. The frustration of writer’s block.
  3. Difficulty in finding high-quality journal references.

In February 2024, I decided to build a solution called Paper Studio AI—a smart assistant designed to make the academic writing process easier. It’s a web application that functions as a complete ecosystem for writing papers. To get started, we created an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with three core features:

  1. Smart Templates: More than 50 pre-designed paper templates in Indonesian that are easy to use and align with academic standards.
  2. AI Assistance: Tools that help users paraphrase, summarize, and expand their writing with the help of artificial intelligence.
  3. Smart Citations: A feature that helps users easily cite sentences from millions of papers worldwide and automatically generate bibliographies.

We secured funding from Universitas Indonesia and had just three months to finish the development and onboard early adopters. As the co-founder and CTO, I hired developers and built a team to bring this vision to life. Initially, I proposed using PostgreSQL, NestJS, and NextJS for the tech stack, but after consulting with the team, we switched to Laravel for the backend.

My Role

  • Designing the tech stack and server architecture.
  • Planning and designing the user interface (I took on UI/UX).
  • Setting up CI/CD processes using GitLab and IDCloudHost (an Indonesian cloud server).
  • Contributing to frontend development.
  • Conducting testing to ensure quality.

By July 2024, we had successfully launched the app and onboarded 170 early adopters, all of whom gave us valuable feedback. However, due to budget constraints, we were only able to use OpenAI’s API for the AI features, which limited our capabilities. As a result, we decided to pause further development.

What I Learned:

  • Conducting research and building a complex app from scratch.
  • Setting up CI/CD pipelines, managing server SSH, CDN, domain control, and overall server architecture.
  • Integrating OpenAI API for the first time.
  • Using LaTeX to design academic paper templates.
  • Navigating the business side of things, including working with investors and engaging early adopters.