Ideas I've been Exploring at South Park Commons
ListenShareNearly 6 months ago, I joined South Park Commons. SPC is a community of founders who are in the “-1 to 0” phase, figuring out what they want to do next, with coworking spaces in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, in SoHo in New York, and soon in Bangalore, India. Lots of folks in SPC have gone on to greater things, including the founders of Airtable, Cognition AI, Vanta, Replit, Luma, Render, and more. Over the past 6 months, I’ve been rapidly iterating on 4 ideas. Here’s what I’ve built and learned from these attempts.
Stonks Party
This was my first experiment in GenAI video, built with Dan Rhodes who was in the class ahead of mine at YCombinator. We were seeing a bunch of new gen AI video models emerge that could lipsync humans. The daily use case brought us to a daily habit: checking your stocks. We asked ourselves, what if your stocks app was more like TikTok, with celebrities telling you what’s happening in the market? That’s Stonks.party.
Stonks Party got a lot of great first reactions. I believe this stemmed from the cognitive dissonance between the GenAI celebrities and the seriousness of financial news. But there were two problems with this concept: First, in order to get that effect you had to use the likeness of a celebrity like Kim or Chamath. This would inevitably get the app in trouble. The second problem I didn’t realize until I got to chat with the head of one of the most-used financial apps in the US. Once he stated the issue, it was obvious: While Stonks.party is fun for a few minutes, scanning your stocks app in the morning gets you the same information in far less time.
Choosy Chat
Shortly after Stonks Party, I worked on Choosy Chat, a platform that feeds questions to the top AI models to determine the best answer. Choosy Chat offers three tiers: Free, $4.99/month, and $19.99, with increasing features and limits.
For marketing, we tried various strategies including Product Hunt and Google Ads. SaaS is a wonderful business model, and seeing users find the product useful enough to pay for it is rewarding.
FounderMode.video
Wanting to cater to startup founders, I created FounderMode.video, a platform for fresh video content ranked by upvotes. The concept was well received, especially by fellow consumer founders in the South Park Commons community.
One notable aspect of this journey was the shift to using Vercel, Supabase, and Resend for deployment, hosting, databases, auth, and emails, respectively, in an effort to simplify the tech stack.
These explorations have been both challenging and rewarding, and I look forward to continuing to innovate and learn at South Park Commons.
