Problems I’ve encountered

Walkthrough: Connect your email on a website. After that, call a number and enter in a verification code that is texted to you. An AI will summarize each email and let you reply with natural language to take action:

This can be built with OpenAI’s audio interface, and connect to messaging platforms like Twitter DMs or LinkedIn messages via Matrix bridges.

My experience: I’m a productivity geek and a dad. I spend an hour a day washing baby bottles and pump parts, and spend most of that listening to podcasts or zoning out to music. By the time my daughter goes to sleep, I’m too tired to handle my emails, messages, or digital to-do list, and they keep piling up. I’d love a way to turn that hour a day into productive time. For others, this may be time spent doing laundry or in a commute. I’m not rich enough to afford a dedicated virtual assistant, and don’t have enough tasks to merit one either.

Related:

Walkthrough: A data provider works with many customers. These customers will ask for custom features or file bugs, each of which is logged into the data provider’s task management system. The data provider connects a tool to their Jira system, and selects which Jira tasks are related to each customer company. As the task progresses or a new ETA is estimated, the shared page updates and a notification is sent to a Slack channel.

In the future, a data provider’s eng team can use this tool to share internal roadmaps with date estimates or relevant service degradations. Customers are able to directly file bugs into a data provider’s task management system or page their on-call engineers.

My experience: When we had asks for a data provider, we filed bugs by writing in a shared Slack channel (later Google doc), and tagged the other team’s PM. That PM would ask their eng team for an estimate, then share it back to me. I had to set a weekly reminder to ask for an update. Sometimes, they completed an ask ahead of time but forgot to notify us.

BD team has said that almost all crypto partnerships are via Telegram, which was not built for enterprise collaboration. It’s tough to schedule time, get approvals, or have a common workspace.

Walkthrough: A user uses our custom Telegram client with Unibot. Buttons and menu options stay in one place, unchanged information like links to website and tutorial is hidden, and wallet information and balances is visually represented instead of using ASCII characters. There are two extra tabs at the bottom - one is a global feed of transactions and access to a crypto bot app store, another is a portfolio page showing P&L over time as well as positions held.

My experience: Telegram trading bots, like Unibot, are increasingly how users trade crypto. Telegram itself is leaning into this by launching a self-custodial crypto wallet. However, Telegram was built as a messaging service, not as an app.

Notes and Trends: Telegram is built on open source software. Account abstraction for Ethereum is gaining steam, and most new retail users will interact with crypto via apps like Telegram that minimize complexity (signatures, gas, etc) while offering composability (take your wallet to another service).

Walkthrough: Business development connects with another crypto team to schedule Twitter spaces or joint promotions. They use Telegram, and use a custom Telegram desktop client, which allows them to easily track asks in a CRM or task management system so it doesn’t slip through the cracks.

My experience: Crypto companies increasingly use Telegram, given the pseudonymity of many founding teams. For enterprise uses, it’s easy to use Slack’s built-in “Save for later” functionality, plus integrations like filing tickets directly into CRM and task management solutions.

Walkthrough: For a company with a prominent mobile app, they’ll identify a set of core pages that a competitor has. Every app update, this service navigate throughout their app, takes screenshots of each page, and stores them in Figma. We’ll call out new toggles or features, while not flagging changes due to live data (eg. prices). We’ll also document the entire app flow in an easy-to-use flowchart.

My experience: At two separate companies that had mobile apps, we have a channel where we posted screenshots of competitor apps when we notice a change. On the product, design, and eng teams, we also had issues understanding what’s the latest design for our apps. This is because specs and designs get out of date, especially after bug fixes, and the screen in question is in the middle of a process (eg. mid-ride, mid-transaction).

Walkthrough: I download an offline Notion app, which prompts me to grant access to my Notion via their API. Depending on the number of pages I have, it’ll download all pages, or just my favorites, to my device. Viewing and editing notes will work, but advanced functionality like database operations (which are currently handled server-side) will not.

My experience: I’m a Notion fanatic and store everything in Notion. I want to see my grocery list, frequent flyer numbers and flight info, and other reference information, especially in places when I don’t have, or have spotty, mobile data, like large supermarkets or airports. I’m a power user with thousands of notes, and dozens of complex databases and automation, so recognize that Notion can’t store these locally.

Walkthrough: An iPad app that provides toddler programming, stopping intermittently to ask them to repeat a word. If they don’t repeat it, to try a few more times. If they do, to provide a congratulatory experience.

My experience: We let our daughter watch toddler programming when we need a moment, and it’s often Ms. Rachel. While she’s fixated on the TV, she doesn’t talk as much as she would if we sang or spoke with her on a video call.

Companies in this space, but I want this product ASAP:

Walkthrough: I’m considering whether to migrate to a new data provider who gave me a test endpoint. I fetch a bulk number of requests to both my current and this new test endpoint, and specify the response fields I care about as well as any special behavior (eg. a 1% difference is fine for a pricing field, or that I do/don’t care about the # of digits returned). It shows the latency distribution for this new API provider, which has a lower median latency, but for 2 cases, has much higher latency. Also, response field A had 3 responses that differed from our current provider, and it makes it easy to dig further in by showing each data point side by side and letting me view context inline.

My experience: When evaluating different data providers, it’s hard to compare latency and data. For latency, we often only have telemetry in our apps, so we’d have to make a build pointing to their endpoint, and simulate a bunch of requests. To save work, we often just ask providers themselves for their own measurements but their test cases may be different from ours. For data differences, programmatic diff-ing requires writing one-off scripts, so we often just do a bug bash of our most important cases instead, but this misses the long-tail.

Walkthrough: I open up an internal dashboard that is behind my company OAuth, and a Google doc that our team uses for meeting notes. In Google docs, I use an add-on to insert an “object” onto the page. This object specifies which fields in the dashboard I want to display in Google docs, and pulls it live data from my dashboard tab. Unclear about implementation and security, but hoping that this can be done locally on-device with a Chrome extension (which can view content on all my tabs) and a Google Docs add-on (to allow for custom content type).

My experience: On a weekly basis, we would review ongoing experiments and data on different market regions. It required opening an internal page, and copy and pasting data points one by one into a Google Doc.

Walkthrough: A publisher adds a few lines of code to their website, which passes along the API responses that the browser provides about the user to the publisher’s supply-side platform. Without this SDK, a publisher would need to manually implement code to interpret API responses from each browser, or if they don’t, risk losing revenue because that browser’s users will be less targetable.

Details: Cookies are being deprecated in Chrome in early 2024. Chrome’s replacement is a set of APIs called Privacy Sandbox, while Firefox is working on Interoperable Private Advertising, and Safari has already implemented Private Click Measurement. The long-tail of browsers like Brave, Opera, UC Browser, etc. also each have a different privacy implementation.