Meet Zach, a dynamic digital nomad who transitioned from finance to the exciting world of AI development.
His fascinating journey, sparked by inspiring AI projects and mentors, took him from being a complete beginner to creating innovative AI products like a personalized AI newsletter writer.
Using his unique tech stack and the knowledge gained from the BuildFast Academy, Zach is revolutionizing the way content creators work. Tune in to discover his transformation, his AI development journey, and the future he envisions for AI in our daily lives.
This is one interview you won’t want to miss!
1) Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey so far?
So it’s pretty straightforward. I went to university in finance and machine learning, so machine learning as a minor. I was already really interested in AI but I took the finance path.
So I worked at a big four company in consulting for about two years and then during the final year I started building an AI generative, a generative AI.
I started with my buddy and we got to speak to a few YC partners but at that point I was too inexperienced with AI to to manage to scale it and grow it. But it gave me the interest to start learning about AI and my buddy was really proficient. He was, he is still an AI researcher.
So at that point I discovered Levels.io as well and he was building the photo AI software and that got me really interested in AI. So that’s when I started learning and I left my job and sold everything in Canada and just started you know being a digital nomad and learn how to code and learn how to build with AI.
2) Was there a specific event, project, or person that inspired your interest in AI?
There’s three events that inspired my interest. First one is trying to start an AI company with not having the technical skills to scale and thinking about the product that well. And since I tried starting it with my buddy who was really interested in AI, that was a pretty specific moment.
The second one is Levels.io with this photo AI project, an avatar AI. And then the third one is probably you, Pete, with your AI content and your AI apps that I found really interesting. So what was my experience in AI before the BuildFast Academy? So in terms of building AI, zero. I had experience building projects, so like, you know, building with Next.js and web apps, but no AI at all. So resources to learn AI, the main one was BuildFast Academy, and the second one was videos on YouTube.
Some resources on Twitter was pretty useful, and courses that I curated on my site, CoursesHunt, and the AI category were pretty useful as well.
3) Your previous experience with AI?
Like I said, pretty much a beginner. I had some experience reading papers and watching YouTube videos about the topic, but in terms of the technical understanding, I’d say it was pretty beginner.
I was pretty motivated to enroll in BuildFast because I want to enhance my skill set. So I’ve been learning how to code for the past six months.
I just felt it was a natural extension of my skill set to learn how to build with AI.
And I was also super interested in it since you’ve been posting a lot of content and my friends have been building stuff with it.
Apart from AI, other interests are martial arts, hiking, I’d say, video games, not anymore though, but it used to be, and reading.
4) How do you spend your time outside of work and learning?
Outside of work. I always like to build stuff.
So when I was young I used to skateboard a lot and I used to build Skating ramps that I really really enjoyed building them then using them then refining them and upgrading them I’ve also always had an interest in martial arts, you know constantly improving your body your mind.
And then I was a basketball player as well in high school I played in the team and I was Always super interested in getting better and learning new techniques and strategies I’ve also recently been really interested in design and UX UI and I think it’s just natural That I’m interested in AI because it enables more opportunities in terms of building Digital products, so whether you want to build a AI product or you use AI to enhance whatever you’re building It’s just natural for me.
5) Could you share some details about the AI product you’ve developed?
So far, I’ve developed a few small products. One is “Talk with your PDF” which I built while attending BuildFast Academy. The second is an AI workout generator. You provide it with a muscle group, and it generates a specific workout for that group, along with images showing how to perform each exercise.
Currently, I am working on a real AI product as part of Build Space Season 4. It’s going to be a newsletter and content writer, trained on the user’s voice to assist users in producing newsletter content more efficiently and in their own style. This AI is tuned for storytelling, helping creators convert personal notes from their week into compelling content. It could even connect with Notion, for example, to create newsletter content using new information from the week.
The target users are busy founders and content creators who would like to write a newsletter but don’t have the time. I am experiencing this problem myself. I don’t have the time to build, market, and write tweets and newsletters. However, I have several notes, tweets, and personal thoughts in my Notion that could be interesting content and could be converted into a fine-tuned model.
7) Can you talk about your tech stack?
Techstack is pretty simple, React, Next.js with TypeScript, then MongoDB for NoSQL and Superbase for SQL, NextAuth or SuperbaseAuth for authentication.
I also use UI libraries like ChakraUI and MaterialUI, and TailwindCSS sometimes. Streamlit has been an incredible discovery from BuildFast Academy.
It will be excellent to test out new ideas, but there’s definitely a limitation in terms of building out a full-scale application.
So in terms of the Techstack, you kind of need to redesign the whole app with a new stack after that, because I don’t plan on learning Flask or Nuxt. I plan on building my own Next.js front-end boilerplate, so I can plug some Python in the back-end whenever I want to test out new ideas.
8) How has your experience with BuildFast Academy contributed to the development of your AI product?
My experience with BuildFast Academy has significantly contributed to the development of my AI product. The most important contributions were the clarity it provided, removing the feeling that AI is complicated and providing an overview of developing apps with AI. This experience left me feeling inspired and motivated to start building a lot of stuff with AI, which is another positive contribution from the academy.
The second major contribution from BuildFast Academy was to boost my confidence with Python. It provided actual projects that I could get my hands into, practice with, and actually build small projects. I really liked that the academy’s approach isn’t just about listening to lectures for hours on end, but about coding actual small projects.
For me, BuildFast Academy came at exactly the right time. I finished the course just before I joined the Build Space program, which was perfect for starting to build an AI product within the program. This gave me a lot more confidence to build an AI product and also helped my brainstorming process in terms of thinking about new AI project ideas.
9) Awesome, what did you like most about BuildFast?
I have various points to add, which can be allocated to the relevant questions. Firstly, I appreciated that BuildFast Academy catered to non-technical people. As a former non-technical person myself, I found the content highly understandable and didn’t need prior knowledge of Python to start coding and learning. The course’s use of graphs, whiteboard examples, and a mind map was incredibly helpful in providing clarity on complex topics.
My previous experience with AI involved heavy prompting, which, although not technically building, gave me a solid understanding of how AI works and how to prompt for desired results. A potential area for development in the course could be a chapter on building apps with images. While most of my ideas involve language models, I believe that a section on images could be interesting.
Finally, I’ve built a product in the past month called Courses Hunt, a type of product hunt for creator courses. Since completing the BuildFast Academy course, I understand AI better and am confident that I can create a page allowing users to prompt and receive suggestions for the best courses for them, using language models and AI. This could be a significant enhancement for my site.
