It’s time to say goodbye to a project of mine. You will be missed.
It all started in 2019, when I was a participant at the Digital Tech Academy, a 1-year program that teaches about entrepreneurship, how to develop an idea and build it to become an actual product or service. To me, it was and still is an amazing opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship, working in a team and creating something that might turn into a real business.
In the beginning, we divided people into “ideators” and “creators”, so people who have the idea and can develop it, and people who want to create the idea. Some people want to be entrepreneurs, but they simply did not have the right idea, so matching these with people who have ideas all the time seems like a natural process in team matchmaking.
I was one of the very few people with a technical background in the group of 20 people, so I was basically pushed to the “creator” label, even though I have spent the last 10 years thinking about interesting product, software and service ideas. So I joined a group that wanted to ease the integration of foreign experts into the German work force. Ultimately, the group failed because of team dynamics and split up.
After the split-up, I decided to work on my own idea. I will spoil the idea now, because I will not further pursue it, and in the end the execution of ideas is more valuable.
The ideal idea
I wanted to create a social app that connects experts to people in need of expertise. The unique spin I had: every person is an expert, and “expertise” is defined by whatever obscure skill or knowledge you might have. Here is an extract from the first drafts I wrote for a pitch:
Davide is a security professional and a great cook for Italian food.
Jenny knows about bike repairs and middle eastern cultures, which she is studying.Davide might have problems with his bike, so he searches for a bike repair expert and is connected to Jenny, who might accept or deny the request of joining an expert group.
They connect in order to benefit from each other’s expertise.
The idea stems from a personal problem I have: Often I need to solve problems that I can not solve myself. Have you ever changed a tire on a motorbike? I have and spent several days finding out how to do it, using online tutorials and old forum posts to understand what I was doing. In the end, I changed the tire, but only after I spoke to a neighbor that also had the right tools and was able to explain it to me.
I developed the idea further and came up with a mobile app that allows you to speak to experts and build a circle of experts that you knew could help you in your everyday life. These could also be your friends and family, but they would be all in one place. So the name was also born: The Circle app. No, it’s not related or based on the movie starring Emma Watson about the tech company that controls the world. It was a bad choice, I know.
The idea lingered in my head for years, and that for a central reason: I wanted to provide a tool for people and families that struggle financially. A tool that offers them access to a wide range of solutions for everyday problems. A tool for people who won’t simply search the internet for help, who will ask friends and acquaintances for help. A tool for my family.
In 2020, I performed a survey to determine how people managed to solve everyday problems. To my surprise, a lot of people rely on family and friends to solve most problems and conflicts, and only a short percentage solved their relationship, health or legal problems using internet resources. Some competitors were already established, such as Quora (an enshittified AI-bot infested platform), and TheONE, an app that offers video calls with experts (though I am not sure if they are still in business).
The app was beautiful
In the last 4 years, I continued developing The Circle with less and less motivation. I struggled with my PhD, so I did not have enough headspace to really work on it. The app was developed using Flutter, a cross-platform library and tool package based on the Dart language, developed by Google. So, while I learned to use it, I built the app, changed the design every 2 months, left it unused for months, started again, and so on.
There are multiple reasons why my motivation disappeared for long times, but one I remember as really frustrating: The Flutter API changed so much between releases that I constantly had to adapt the whole code, because the existing code was rapidly deprecated. I had so many sessions where it took me a weekend to update all imported libraries. So, not much energy left to build out features. I love the framework, but I hate the ecosystem it lives in.
ChatGPT kill shot
If you have followed the developments of generative AI, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT specifically, you already might anticipate where the story is going. In 2024, OpenAI released a version of their chat-based product which had significant improvements over previous models: It could talk. It was able to see photos and react on them. It could solve every problem imaginable, simply because it stole from millions on the internet, from tutorials, blogs, and forum comments of knowledgeable people.
ChatGPT and its competitor cousins significantly changed the way people handle problems in their life. Instead of trying to find your solution in some forum or YouTube clip by some passionate hobbyist, people refer to these word-producing statistical models to give them the answer, in less than a few seconds or minutes. You no longer need humans in the process, and even if the answer is wrong, people might not even notice.
The user need and business case for professional expert advice disappeared over some months. Sure, you might personally disagree and value human advice higher, but the harsh truth is: Generative AI is here to stay, and its magical appeal is just more appealing. Hell, even Google Search has changed significantly in the last months, returning only generated AI bullshit.
This was the moment I knew my idea would not become profitable anymore.
Post-mortem
The idea died before I was able to develop it. The saddest part for me is that I do not consider ChatGPT a good or valid replacement for The Circle. It is heartbreaking that such a wasteful technology, sold by companies free from ethical considerations… That the latest developments would bury an idea that would have benefitted people in a social and humane way.
I will remove the official project page in the next months, and I archived the site for future reference. Like many ideas, I have not fully given up on the basic concept of community sharing of skills and knowledge, but this journey ends with this post.
Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash
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