Nilay Shah, Shubham Pandya, Sparsh Shah: Simplifying the Process of Knowledge Translation for All Scientific Discoveries

Tidbit’s mission is to simplify the process of knowledge translation for all scientific discoveries. We believe scientific knowledge should be accessible by everyone and the work we do at Tidbit is to eliminate barriers that currently exist to achieve that.

Our long term vision is to make knowledge communication quick, simple and universally accessible to accelerate the global scientific progress.

Tell us about yourself?

Nilay – I’ve worked in startups for all of my professional career focusing on developing systems and securing them. I love to build and experience products that “just work” all the while providing actual value to all parties involved. Given that, after learning more about the publishing industry from Sparsh, the lack of accessibility and amount of inefficiencies along the way stood out to me the most. What Tidbit aims to do is work towards improving both of those (and then some).

Sparsh – I started noticing the issue of knowledge translation in research about two years ago, when I was a fourth year medical student. I was preparing for residency in Emergency Medicine, and knew that I would have to keep up with the latest literature to keep my practice up to date.

However, I found it difficult and cumbersome to discover and digest text-heavy research information that was relevant to me. At the time, I had completed an undergraduate degree in business and had experience creating infographics for medical organizations.

I knew that visual communication was a growing trend in medical research, with studies demonstrating that it leads to superior knowledge retention and article visibility. I discussed the challenges I faced with my two co-founders, and together, we came up with Tidbit as a means to increase the speed at which medical knowledge moves from papers to the bedside, with goals to expand into all other academic fields as well.

Shubham – Although I have an academic background in Business, I have spent over 4 years in Data Analytics. Recently, I transitioned to a Product Management role focusing on profitability, growth and product development.

I am an extremely curious person and a visual learner. I like to constantly read up on the latest scientific developments in physics, technology and biology in my spare time but found it extremely difficult to access information that I can trust.

I believe there should be no barriers to accessing education and knowledge for everyone. Upon discussing the challenges Sparsh was facing in his medical education and his proposed solution to use infographics, it instantly clicked with me and I was sold on the idea and determined to make it a reality.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Shubham – Instead of trying to do it all at once, take some time to figure out what is the most important goal we want to achieve and why that goal is the most important regardless of any time delay that may occur.

While it is crucial to move fast as a start-up and common to make minor mistakes along the way, multiple minor mistakes and wrong assumptions take a toll on the company’s momentum and team morale which ends up hurting the company more than the time delay.

Nilay – Drive alignment early and often amongst your team. Earlier on in Tidbit, we spent so much time making decisions, figuring out how to work on things, etc. and progress was really slow. If we had all discussed more of our thoughts instead of silently disagreeing or sometimes purposefully disagreeing, we would’ve been able to progress much faster even though it might’ve seemed we progressed slower in that immediate moment. Hindsight is 20/20 though!

Sparsh – I would ask myself to take the time to figure out who benefits from your idea, and who your customers are. Initially, I thought this would be the same group, however, there are many cases where the direct beneficiary may not be the one paying.

This subsequently affects how a start-ups business model then develops, and a superficial understanding of this initially led us down a path of a business model that was not scalable to begin with.

While it might be exciting to identify where you create value and start building a product immediately, it may not be the right move for a startup. If I could go back in time two years ago, I would ask myself to slow down and map out the key players within my industry, and have a deep understanding of the relationships between them, before building a product and executing a business model.

What problem does your business solve?

Our product focuses on the current pain points that exist for authors and journals that publish research.

Authors currently find the practice of creating visual abstracts for their article submissions to journals time consuming and difficult due to a lack of experience with visual designing. As a result, either they forgo the creation entirely or they end up relying on services that create visual abstracts which end up costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

While an increasing number of journals recognize the importance of visual abstracts in expanding their readership, improving alt-metric scores and attracting top researcher talent, they face tremendous difficulty in the manual operations, high cost and time commitment of managing visual abstract submissions. As a result of this, most journals have avoided implementing visual abstracts in their submission workflow.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Tidbit’s inspiration to solve knowledge translation in scientific development stems from a few key principles that the co-founders deeply care about.

1. Simplifying published research and showcasing it in a new form factor expands the audience of readers and spreads knowledge quicker, leading to faster real-world applications of new discoveries.
2. Standardizing the visual language of scientific communication further broadens the audience on a global scale.
3. Due to the peer-reviewed nature of the content means that we prevent misinformation from spreading through our platform and become a reliable source of information and knowledge.

What is your magic sauce?

Our web-based software provides a guided approach to creating infographics on templates our team has expertly curated to support all major types of studies.

By using templates, the author is essentially filling in the blanks of their research on the template rather than starting from a blank canvas – eliminating the requirement of having any designing skills. The guided approach removes any ambiguity on the author’s part and focuses their attention. It’s a simple solution, but from the early reception we’ve heard from users, it’s very effective.

For journals, we offer an online portal which acts as a CRM, agnostic of the existing article submission CRM the journal is using, to manage visual abstract submissions. Editorial teams can view submitted visuals from authors, assign peer reviewers, track progress, apply 1-click journal branding for color schemes and font styles, add the DOI and leave feedback for authors to update. Journals have various workflows, branding requirements, and a lengthy peer review process which is greatly streamlined due to the automations and integrations our portal provides.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

While our current and short term focus is on simplifying the creation for authors and integration of visual abstracts for journals, we want to expand beyond visual abstracts to other form factors such as videos.

Beyond that, we want to tackle the knowledge discovery, consumption and dissemination side of the problem. Similar to what we’ve done for the content creation side of the problem, we want to simplify access to this wealth of information, expand the audience of readers and eliminate barriers by creating a community around a steady stream of new content that is published. This will help our journal partners and authors get more exposure for their research.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Due to our target demographic of users being niche and having minimal spare time, initially it was extremely difficult connecting with potential users to understand their key pain points, perception towards our proposed solution and their likelihood to use it prior to us building out our product. As a result, our first product was met with low usage and lukewarm reception because we offered a blank canvas with simple tools to authors to create visual abstracts. It was only after talking with our product’s early adopters that we were able to understand that they value time to create and ease of use amongst others.

We are a boot-strapped start-up with no external funding. So to realize that our initial solution wasn’t ideal and we’d have to invest more capital to build a new solution was a tough pill to swallow. Getting through that phase of our company, raising team morale and getting buy-in on the vision was a trying time for Tidbit but I can happily say all of us have grown better for it.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

We are currently partnering with publishers and journals to offer our software to authors submitting to these journals and use our journal portal to easily manage the submission process with all of its built-in automations.

Any publisher or journal that wishes to partner with Tidbit or simply learn more about our entire offering suite of solutions can email us at [email protected]!

For authors and students who want to create visual abstracts for their existing or upcoming publications can do so right now within minutes at www.tidbitapp.io!