This will sound like shameless self promotion but when you get down to the roots of who I am, I’m an ideas guy. I’ve served in various executive strategy capacities and have expanded my domain of knowledge over the years. But when you strip it all away, I’ve always traded in the currency of ideas sold as visions. Big ideas, small ideas even those that are in between. I’ve had some I’ve carried around with me for a long time. I used to work with the company Waste Management and pitched them on the idea of, “Zero by Design.” WM was looking for footholds in sustainability and I shared how many of the issues holding sustainability back start with how products are designed. If designers thought about sustainability first, voila, we’d have more recyclable capacity and WM, by extension, would get credit for having championed the idea. They chose to pass. I still have a lot of heart for it and carry it around with me. I fully intend to write a section on it in the next year.
But I’m not an ideas guy by choice. For a very long time I’ve been an ideas guy because I lacked the technical acumen needed to turn said ideas into actual realities. AI purports to solve a lot of that but it wasn’t until recently that I was able to motivate to act.
Design is the middle ground between vision and reality and I was able to develop some skills in that area though I would never share that with my colleagues in my agency’s design studio. It was a nice release to be able to take something out of one’s mind and put it down on paper.
I spent time designing a fitness app years ago. I called it FitMetric. It’s core angle was tracking and quantifying the totality of your effort with an eye towards using Machine Learning to nudge you higher over time. It also had features that allowed trainers to make money coaching you remotely. I even went as far as putting a pitch deck together.
Of course, lacking the pre-requisite skills to actually build and test the app it just stayed on paper. That was until I saw this.
Hillary Duff, the celebrity, just launched her own fitness app and while it’s not the exact same, the feature set is close enough that it sort of made me a little angry. BTe similarity was undeniable. I may not have had the celebrity influence but I did have the idea well before. The fact this app had celebrity endorsement and marketing dollars behind it essentially validated the value of my initial design. I should have built it or at least given it an honest swing. Now that the technical hurdles appear to have been removed there’s no reason I shouldn’t pursue an MVP build of other ideas I’ve had.
So, I’ve decided to take a step forward and test whether or not AI can deliver on the core promise of giving technically talentless people like myself the keys to the maker kingdom.
I will chronicle my efforts, lessons and outputs in this section. I call it Builder.
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