Rami's Universe

HackAI Toronto application - v2

5 min read

What is the most challenging project you have worked on? Why was it challenging? Walk us through your journey.

Over the past year, I’ve spent 800 + hours building two open‑source apps (Exo & Orbit) and 400 + hours creating 25 + videos (while being a ft student).

After months of interviews, MAJOR pivots, we demoed it in April and got a lot of feedback. More info:

Also building in the space similar to kAI—turning ideas into valuable writing in the most frictionless way. Will talk more about that in the next question

Over this past year, I have spent over 800 hours working on 2 mobile apps: Exo and Orbit, and 400+ hours creating 25+ videos. These open-source apps and the community around them represent everything I stand for: using technology to reduce the barrier to human connection.

10 months ago, I started Orbit, a platform to fight loneliness among university students. As someone who recovered from social anxiety after years of struggling to connect with others, this mission means a lot to me. From the start, Orbit has been my top priority — my magnum opus and the culmination of everything I’ve learned about human connection and the psychology and sociology behind it. When the idea of Orbit first came to life, it was very different to what it is right now. Around September, I began interviewing students in dining halls to better understand their challenges with forming new friendships. So with that information, we started building the platform.

Four months in, we discovered major pitfalls in our approach. We decided to pivot, which cost us hundreds of hours in code refactoring. After recovering, we demoed the app at an event hosted by Hunter Hub on April 4 with several testers. The week leading up to the event was intense. I was juggling three group projects across my courses while working over 40 hours to get the all the features implemented. I wanted Orbit ready so I could gather as much feedback as possible.

At that time I started building a Discord community to be able to directly talk to people excited about the app and willing to provide feedback. In just the 2 weeks before the event, I managed to get the server up to 120 members through 3 avenues:

Feedback was generally positive but I was hoping that people would be more excited about the idea. This is what I am currently working on. Exploring different ideas and testing them out quickly. So that by the time fall semester comes by, Orbit would be ready to launch and empower new students to find their people, build their crew, and forge lifelong friendships and relationships in the most frictionless way possible.

The other app that I’m also actively looking for feedback and looking to iterate and flesh out is Exo. I launched an MVP but it’s also far from reaching PMF. I briefly talked about it in my app demo that I linked above.

So as mentioned, I am now focused on leveraging GenAI to help people find the perfect person to meet up with. Kinda like what boardy.ai and series.so are doing. I’m still looking for different ideas in the space of GenAI and AI agents because there is so much potential in it in the context of social networking. People are building dating apps that revolve around GenAI like https://ditt.ai/ from a Berkeley dropout.

I tested out one of the ideas that I had for Orbit in LAHacks back in April. The idea was, what if we could automate everything standing between people and their perfect circle? More info:

One idea that I’m exploring is combining these 2 apps into one. So it would be both, a personal relationship manager and a finder. The no.1 personal CRM specialized for university students. That will take quite a while to build tho😬 But as always, since I have the will, I will find the way.

I’m also exploring and building in the space similar to what kAI (Kortex AI) is doing—turning ideas into valuable writing in the most frictionless way. Will talk more about that in the next question

Have you built a project using AI? If so, what was the project and what were the challenges you faced?

I’ve built AI tools that save people time and let them focus on what matters to them. One of the takes a voice note where I spilled all my thoughts into it and then GenAI takes care of all of the tedious work of integrating it into your note-taking app and connecting it to other ideas in your vault. Also drafts you tweets n YT vids Similar to audiopen.ai www.cleftnotes.com voicepal.me but more personalized and integrated with the user’s knowledge base I’m basically the perfect Kortex.co employee

What do you hope to make the most out of your experience at HackAI Toronto?

Now with GenAI and AI Agents, it’s unlocking a whole new dimension of consumer social and content creation that is growing and changing by the day and I have wild ideas that I’d like experiment and bring to life. I wanna create tools that would be integrated into Kortex and Obsidian.

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