I am currently exploring 3 spaces atm. Learning from others, building to test & validate. They all align with my mission of reducing the barrier to human connection
1. AI wingman/companion
This is what I’ve been building with Ember. Currently at 100+ users across UCalgary (heyember.me) & UWaterloo (uw.heyember.me) chatting with/calling an AI that currently has 3 main features:
- knows exactly the kind of person you’re looking to meet (e.g. finding someone from your class who also loves to play basketball after lectures)
- Knows all the clubs around campus and which one you should join
- find the perfect course to take based on your major and what you’ve already taken (e.g. Ember suggesting you a class you would enjoy or a GPA booster)
- still seeing if there’s a need for this The ultimate vision here is to have this AI companion that can be that casual friend that you talk to and knows a lot about you and your life (not to replace your friends/parner, but generally enhance your life). But then also have an additional layer where your AI friend would recommend you people to meet as you go about your day. while privacy is one thing that might stop people from using this, I know it can be solved. Especially now with open-source models being runnable in people’s mobile phones
The thing that is harder for me to achieve is getting my target audience to really understand the value and how it can effortlessly fit into their lives. This is where good marketing and content comes in which I myself don’t have the time to really do well in. One good e.g. I came across is Offline from a few CS kids from UofT
FYI I’ve been livestreaming the process of building this out https://www.youtube.com/@ramimaalouf/streams
2. Make it easier to bond with someone (personalized linktree/card game)
While Ember focuses on the first step of building meaningful relationships (finding your people)
this focuses on the 2nd step of building meaningful relationships (maintaining and strengthening your relationships). There are several problems I see in this space that I’m actively exploring:
- We very often meet so many cool people, but we don’t really find a spark in our first few minutes of interacting. This spark usually comes in the form of discovering shared ambitions or vulnerabilities which are hard to bring out. What if there is a software that can make it easier to bring them out. I got a few ideas:
- one of them involves building a card game (something like fluster). If I pursue this idea, I will have a mentor from Florida, who’s built and launched several previous card games, to partner up with me. Still exploring this space like listening to Tim Ferriss’ journey of making his own card game Coyote with Exploding Kittens
- the other one is like a personalized linktree. When you go to someone’s page, you only see things that are shared between you and them, like countries they’ve visited, favorite music, TV shows, podcasts, movies, books, etc… The list of things we can show is endless. That can be achieved through graph databases and GenAI. Not only it can reveal to you similarities between you and them, but also similarities between them and your other friends. I explore this in the video I made a few weeks back: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rami-m_i-think-i-found-a-way-to-make-ai-think-like-activity-7374494387558301696-vYUZ
3. Autonomous personal CRM that isn’t a CRM
This idea directly ties with the “personalized linktree”. I envision a platform that can autonomously manage our relationships, and not by sending automatic messages and stuff like Omi.me does. Instead, what I’m looking into is a privacy-first tool that can listen to all your conversations in real life. Only if the other person you’re talking to consents to recording that conversation, we will be able to store the recording. Executed on this idea last week in HTN: https://devpost.com/software/7degree/ Then, what happens with these recordings? It will be taken into our autonomous CRM that stores all the important and key information you need to and would want to remember from that interaction. Nobody wants to manage a CRM but everyone wants its benefits. Especially people who have several critical conversations with people irl As with the “personalized linktree” idea, it will reveal to you the shared things you have with them and you other friends have with them through the power of Graph databases and GenAI. It’s like the IRL version of Granola & Circleback and so many other meeting bot/note-taker startups. I might execute on this idea with 6-8 other people who are interested in building this with me (long story)
The reason I’m exploring all of these is because I feel like they all connect and work together, and in some way, can potentially become an ecosystem which can all fall into the Orbit ecosystem. An ecosystem to bring an end to loneliness. I also make content on overcoming social anxiety since knowledge and being your own therapist is another key thing to stop loneliness from creeping in (that was my experience). The Chalant Society (https://www.instagram.com/thechalantsociety/) is also another thing I’m doing. It’s a university club striving to help people build social confidence through rejection therapy challenges while having fun & making friends around campus.
I feel like I’m sitting in a goldmine of insights, and the only thing that’s stopping me is time and resources to validate them and bring them to life. Would be nice to also have a co-founder who’s just as ambitious as me
The crazy thing that I recently realized is there’s an investor called Amber Atherton who is betting on two of my three ideas that I’m exploring: https://patron.fund/blog/future-relationship-tech/