012: Echochamber.ai - part 2

TL;DR: I’m building a new prototype of a social media product. It’s called Echochamber.ai and I’m documenting the process.

I left you in mid-March with the first prototype of my Echochamber.ai idea, which was, at best funny, at worst stupid. However, the feedback about the idea was significantly positive. I would regularly pitch the idea, and people would grasp it instantly (or be completely insensible, but that’s fine 🙂)

While I felt it was too early to continue focusing full-time on the idea, I took a full-time contract to get some cash while working on the next iteration on the side.

9 months later, a quick update and lessons learnt.

• I made some progress but not as substantial as I expected, failing to dedicate regular hours to the project during my free time on the side of a draining day job.
• I’ve started (and continuing) an weekly accountability process with a friend where we document and report to each other our weekly process on this kind of projects.
• The initial scope of the prototype was too broad, and I decided to narrow it down for the validation phase. I’m focusing on 2 particular topics (startups and tech, and circular economy).
• I’ve also decided to go for a much more manual approach, in the pure “do things that don’t scale” tradition. I’ll be spending time reviewing and adding content sources manually to start with. I tried to outsource it on Fiverr, but the result was not up to the expected quality. So I’ll go for a manual pick of the 5 links to send to each user, which will help me to find a pattern in the curation.

I finished my contract at the end of November and am now full-time, focusing on finalizing a prototype and validating my hypothesis:

Users would be interested in receiving weekly links digest from a different perspective on topics of their interest.

Watch this space for part 3.