“Before going through BuildFast I only knew a little bit about AI, and didn’t know how to build anything meaningful. The previous things I built were just toys, I couldn’t build anything commercial. That changed with BuildFast”
1) Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey so far?
I’m a data science manager working in big tech. Before that – I was a consultant, then a data analyst, and eventually a data scientist. I got into AI after tinkering with GPT3 to see if I could build a slack plugin to respond on my behalf (as a joke) – after I got tired of management.
My favorite thing about AI is how quickly it let you get useful stuff off the ground. These days, the most impact AI has had on me is in accelerating my ability to write code. In so many ways, AI makes me faster.
2) Was there a specific event, project, or person that inspired your interest in AI?
At one point I got bored of managing and asked ‘could GPT3 respond on my behalf?’. So I built a slackbot called “dmitri-bot” that scanned for questions in a specific channel and answered them. The one thing it did consistently was deny people PTO.
At the time I hadn’t used many resources – and the ones I had discovered were all pretty terrible. I’d say my level of expertise was medium to low. I built something silly – but didn’t really know how to use AI well.
3) Your previous experience with AI?
I would describe myself as a beginner. I had made a few things with AI, but nothing worth writing home about. I was inspired to enroll in the BuildFast Academy after seeing what Peter was building and thinking ‘i could totally do this’.
Apart from AI – I like to travel, cook, and go fast on skis. Lately I’ve been getting back into bartending.
4) How do you spend your time outside of work and learning?
Having a day job in data science definitely amplified my interest in AI. I’ve always been a hacker – and any time I see something I think can save me time, I get really excited. At one point I coded up a small program to help me get through a defensive driving course. It took me longer to program than it would have taken me to just complete the course, but I was still pretty pleased with myself.
These days I’m also really excited about the idea of using AI to build tools online.
5) Could you share some details about the AI product you’ve developed?
With the help of the course – I built Profile Poet. It’s an app that writes dating profiles for Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, and a lot of other apps. A big challenge we head with dating apps is people feeling ‘stuck’ with writer’s block. Staring at an empty profile, trying to come up with something clever to day. On the opposite end, we also saw a lot of really terribly written profiles that didn’t do a good job of marketing the owner.
Since launching, Profile Poet has been used 50,000 times. Users tell us their product has increased the amount of matches they get – and in at least one case helped them find their partner.
We’ve gotten a lot of media attention, with mentions in Fox, CNN, and WSJ. The end result is a fun to build, profitable product that we’re continuing to grow.
6) What enhancements or new features are you planning to add?
Shhh…. it’s proprietary. Can’t give away all the sauce.
7) Can you talk about your tech stack?
I love Streamlit – but you can’t use it to build a commercial product. It’s not performant, and it’s far too limited for most commercial use cases. Use Streamlit to prototype, but move onto Flask as soon as you can.
8) How has your experience with the BuildFast Academy contributed to the development of your AI product?
My journey with BuildFast Academy has been transformative for my AI product development.
The course content was comprehensive and hands-on, giving me the knowledge and confidence to build my own AI projects.
The step-by-step roadmap, coupled with the community support, made the learning process engaging and practical.
BuildFast‘s focus on shipping products rather than mere theoretical learning, allowed me to quickly implement the AI concepts I learned and build Profile Poet.
The constant updates in the course modules kept me informed about the latest AI trends and developments, which was critical in keeping my product relevant and effective.
