This is the blog post where I’m gonna show you my “ambition”.
Since I was young, I’ve dreamed of starting my own startup, merely because in my opinion, one of the most meaningful things in our ordinary lives is doing something not ordinary. But I know it is necessary to be mature, experienced, and well-prepared before launching “big projects” that require a large amount of upfront investment. Unfortunately, obviously, as a “noob”, I dare not carry the responsibility of managing the whole company, bearing the risks of failure, losing all my money and wasting all the efforts that I have poured into the project. As a result, I’ve decided to start with building a small app as practice at the beginning.
So what can I do?
I’ve read several articles of entrepreneurs who have succeeded in starting their own companies beginning with only a small amount of money. For those people who finally turn the small companies into enormous ones, most of them have something in common — creative ideas, solid products, broad and long-term vision, and good luck… It sounds so difficult to succeed that I’m even afraid to have a try!
But actually there are far more difficulties on my way to starting a business.
In the past, I might be afraid that technically I couldn’t build the satisfying project that I really designed in my plan limited by my poor programming skills. However with the development of AI, it becomes possible for people who only know a little about computers to build a whole project by themselves! One of the biggest problems gets fixed!
Another big problem is the upfront cost. Since I might be disappointed if I suffered heavy losses in my first attempt, I wouldn’t spend so much money on the project, so I had to look for some ideas that can be easily achieved with little upfront cost.
Now I’m facing the most important decision before starting — what kind of app should I create.
An old saying is that — the best idea comes from your own life. Figure out the problems you face in real life and create your app to solve them.
There were truly some ideas that I thought of before. For example, I wanted to manage my time better, so I decided to create an app that can be used as a “todo list” or a calendar. It seemed to perfectly match what I needed — didn’t need lots of money, easy to build, and even very useful to me as I can do more personal design to suit my preferences. I nearly got started with this idea until I once tried to find if there were any apps that had similar functions as mine (so I have to compete with them) — there were so many such apps in the App Store! I suspected if “todo list” is the first choice for every independent developer!
I had to give up this idea!
So what can I do now?
Nowadays, lots of people around the world, including me, spend so much time scrolling through the phone all day just for fun. However, at the end of a day, I’m always guilty about spending a lot of time doing nothing! I’m so self-indulgent! It seems that I should spend some of this time studying, but what if I just want to relax at that time?
Here is my solution — we can spend the time learning some relaxing and interesting knowledge that we haven’t heard about. Some general knowledge and popular science are all that kind of stuff. Why don’t we spend some spare time learning knowledge that can enrich our minds and expand our conversation topics?
Then I decided to build my first app in this way —
The app contains thousands of knowledge cards, where people can scroll every day and learn some interesting knowledge subsequently. That is a good way of both reducing screen time spent on trivial things and expanding people’s knowledge.
But that’s not enough to become a competitive product. It isn’t attractive enough for people to want to give it a try, and the idea isn’t original enough to stop others from coming up with similar concepts. What’s more, it’s impossible to make massive knowledge cards all by myself.
Then comes the important idea for this app — to be powered by AI!
As I mentioned in the previous post (maybe I’ll talk about this as a frequent topic in my future blogs), AI has already become one of the most powerful tools in our daily lives that can greatly change humans’ way of working. So why not use AI to produce the knowledge cards in the app? Although some people don’t support AI-generated content now, I bet they will finally realize how powerful AI is and how much better it can perform in some areas than humans. So I believe that in the future it will certainly be a norm that lots of things around us are all made by AI, while we humans can just enjoy what AI does for us.
What’s more, AI can not only generate the cards, but also play a bigger role in the app, adding more and more interesting and interactive functions. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
That’s the initial idea of my app. There may be some small changes, but that’s basically what the app looks like.
I hope this app can be available to everyone soon.