I always wish my feed was more interesting to read, with more honest, raw posts and less pure announcements and AI slob.
So, trying to be the change I want to see in the world, I will try to post more openly about trying to build an independent business (and at the same time make enough grammar mistakes to prove that I type this myself).
Recently, we’ve been ideating ideas to build technical products while keeping the lights on with freelancing:
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Morsel, an agentic system to iteratively improve a knowledge base by finding issues, reaching out to experts, and making improvement suggestions over time. I am fascinated by knowledge representation, working with domain experts, and pragmatic use of modern AI. With our background, we’ve focused on quality reviews of public, technical documentation as a first slice. I really like the work; building the prototype was fun, but it feels dangerous because people might not pay to improve knowledge bases?
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Data-driven competitor intelligence for SMEs. Inspired by a blog post by Justin Duke (of Buttondown), we’ve looked at making it easy to ingest pricing data of SaaS companies with the goal of providing a dashboard and notification service to monitor your place in the market. There are quite a few new “throw everything into an AI model, make that summarize competitor offerings, and send emails” startups, but we’re thinking more about the “Grafana for competitors” vibe. Sadly, Justin has yet to accept my LinkedIn request, so my secret goal here is just to get his attention.
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Hosting a simple, open-source, and European docs alternative to Google Docs. We wanted this for ourselves (to make meeting notes) and wanted to try LaSuite (an open-source cooperation between the French and German governments). Turns out, it’s harder than we thought to just get a hosted LaSuite account somewhere. So we did it; it’s live in very alpha, and we’re dogfooding it. Still exploring what the main user would be, though, if you have some in mind, let me know!
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This one is out there, but we’re really into games, puzzles, and doing free walking tours in cities we visit. So, as a fun B2C product, we’re thinking of building an app for digital treasure hunts. Also a market full of competitors, but the assumption is that AI slop will bring the quality down, and we could compete on a few high-quality treasure hunts sold at a one-time fee. Additionally, I live as a guest in Paris, so if everything fails, at least we might get a good exploration of the city out of it :).
Last, and less relevant to this post, of course we mainly do freelancing right now, mainly complex software engineering and technical due diligence.
So, there you have all our current exploration directions. Let me know your thoughts! What speaks to you? Do you have any input on them?