What inspired you to start your project, and what drives your passion for it today?

We were constantly having troubles finding files and information in our team. That’s when Wildan, our CTO, proposed an idea of building a search engine that could scan all of our apps and find any needed data with a simple title or keyword search. Within just two weeks, we developed a working prototype that allowed us to integrate apps like Google drive, Gmail, Slack, Notion, Sigma and more to search through them with ease. Though it looked rough around the edges, we were more concerned with obtaining validation. We reached out to ten companies and were thrilled to find that they all said yes, even paying for a full year upfront. With ten paying customers onboard, we started our private beta in which we got overwhelming support. Oh, we also decided on the name — Klu.so :)

I started the project as I was going through the pain myself and have seen others struggling with the same. In my case, it was scheduling meetings internally with a group of people across different timezones. I was doing product management for 8 years, and given that more than half of time goes into meetings (not proud of it), I was scheduling lots of meeting everyday with different stakeholder to collaborate cross functionally. I realised that scheduling is a multi step process, which includes lots of to n fro and takes up lots of time especially if you are scheduling >10 meetings in a week. I drew the analogy from an executive perspective that they have never have to go through such pain because they have an actual human being helping them for the same which is their EA in most cases. But not everybody in the organisation, not even senior folks in mid sized company have an EA to do this job for them. When I saw my VP Product in 1000+ people company going through the same struggle, I realised that there is something can be done here. And so I picked the phone and had a chat with 50+ people to understand this. What I found this is can be distilled below - This isn't the problem people looking out for a solution. - It's not game changer but yeah giving EA to every senior manager will save their time for sure. So, I'm onto building Jarvis- AI executive assistant for every manager. It's been almost two months of me building this and I'm loving every second of this journey. The best part is learning curve is so so steep that I keep on wondering why I didn't tried this before. I am determined to launch a closed alpha by April 15 to get the initial feedback. Stay tuned. My advice for the folks who are still thinking to take the plunge, I would say you have to be in crazy love for the problem to enjoy each bit of this journey and just keep going :)

The idea for (https://stare.softr.app/) came from an APM fellowship program and I found many aspiring PMs asking similar questions over and over again and the answers were given in Slack. And that that point in time I knew my niche and thought of creating a knowledge base but the problem was what to include. Went through all the comments in Slack and picked the more frequent ones. Bult an MVP and tested the idea out! and it was a great success! The idea of people learning from each other's work without irritating or expecting others to help, especially passionate folks who want to keep learning drives my passion.

Honestly, I work and felt to get the best out of growing, and be ahead of the curve. Working on a project that helps me achieve this to excel and help at the companies i work with more efficiently, consistently putting in the time to not be a bottle neck as much as i can and always use this time to ask questions that i never get a chance to answer during the work day. It allows me to also experiment with new tech in my own time and just coming out that little bit better and over time having as much comfort talking about topics i wouldn't normally engage in out of not knowing if ill bring benefit to the conversation even if i know that no question should be a wrong if learning is the end goal of the conversation. Plus, because Im more introverted and always behind the computer, I can use it to get out of situations i am not ready for without others questioning which is a perk at times so my interests always seem to generally get time set aside and i get to work on projects.

When I was younger, it was all about the dream of money and stature. But, as I've gotten older, it's much more about exploring my passions and pushing technology into new realms. It's more fun this way for sure!

We started because we had a problem we wished to solve which we have personal experience in. As we looked around we noticed many others had the same issues so we saw a potential market. Being brand new to this journey there was so much to learn and gain from it we got excited at the prospects. Along the way seeing ourselves grow in skill and character, it keeps us motivated to keep taking risks and growing. Additionally, getting to meet so many interesting and helpful people is an inspiration as well.

What started the project was pure pain. What drives it is seeing other people's pain go away when using Cinebody

Love such questions, as there are always so many interesting stories! We are also started TheSprkl for our internal team purposes. For many years on almost all the projects there was a conflict between developing fast and creating good UX/UI. We wanted too make a solution that can reduce a cost but not the quality of the work. That's how we've created our design framework. Passion - feedback and results we see from using it - want to give more flexibility to the community as well. And what about you Naresh?

I was inspired to start InterviewJam as I needed a personalized and efficient way of preparing for behavioral questions in Interviews. After conducting several interviews as well, I noticed that people were missing out on opportunities due to the lack of communication about their value add. I wanted to build a product to help people tell their stories, and prepare efficiently.

In the era of information explosion, a product was needed for summarization, so I developed Glarity.