Monthly Update
Yeah, I also know that I’ve been missing a couple of indie logs since mid-June, and I mean, we’re almost at mid-July now. So, it’s been almost a month since I haven’t written. So basically, what have I been up to since back then?
Week of June 17 to 23
What I’ve been up to was basically building a couple of small tools for my real estate agents. I’ve been experimenting with a listing description generator that uses the Grok API, and I built this on Next.js. I even shared some of what I was doing on Twitter, but I didn’t get much success, to be honest.
During the week of June 17, I was feeling pretty demotivated. Yet, I came up with a new tool called Audio Tweet, which allows you to create tweets from your voice. The same as this voice note tool, which I’ve been using to record my thoughts and have my notes transcribed from my voice. So that’s pretty cool. I did this Audio Tweet thing to experiment with speech-to-text, aiming to build niche tools for my personal website and learn how to use AI. I spent a couple of hours every day working on this and eventually learned a little more about integrating LLMs. I’ve been tweeting about this as well.
Week of June 24 to 30
I continued on building another tool, this time for agents, which allows them to create listings by just dumping raw source data into the LLM to figure out stuff.
Back to the previous week of June 17 to 23, I managed to land a new customer for my Room for Rent app startup. However, it felt buggy, and I felt there might be a better way to solve the problem I’ve been working on. Essentially, automating the inbound lead processing phase for landlords and real estate agents—those manual, repetitive tasks required when running a service department, hotel, or real estate business.
These were the formative weeks when I started thinking about pivoting my startup. I didn’t code much or improve any feature for Room for Rent in the last weeks of June. I began scouring the internet for people trying to solve this problem.
I came across Hey Purple on Y Combinators’ website. Hey Purple got into YC, either in 2023 or 2024. They are solving the problem in a much smarter way by building AI agents to respond instead of real humans, which sounds more appealing than me building a link tree for real estate agents. These are two different solution spaces.
First Week of July
Last week, I spent more time experimenting with LLMs. I set up Obsidian on my laptop and imported all of my previous notes from previous years, experimenting a little with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on them.
I’ve been pretty excited about this and wanted to do it for a long time. Last week, I did a lot of RAG on my previous notes, self-reflection, introspection, and writing.
I’m considering whether I should join the Antler Founders program. Today is July 10th, and that’s where I’m at. I’m experimenting more with AI, and so far, the solutions I’ve been building are compelling and useful for my own needs. I want to continue building tools based on my observations. Tools like the chat interface I built for myself could be useful for others at some point, or at least I now know how to build such tech and integrate it into my commercial products.
On the other hand, I want to keep solving the problem I’ve been tackling for so long—automating sales for a specific market niche, currently real estate. I’m focusing on people who need to find hotel rooms, rentals, leases, and such. So, that’s the market I’m serving these days.