For the past year I’ve been spending my free time working on an App to help people find the perfect electric vehicle. I’m currently calling it “Hello EV”, and it’s a sweet mix of front end, back end, and some under the hood API endpoints for AI.

And I think I need to pause development on it.

Now, before you say “hold on Chris, aren’t you close to release!?” - yes and no.

First, while the app is in a state to get usable information, a lot more work needs to go into making it user friendly, and more importantly backend optimized. That’s the easy part.

The more complex piece is in the limited market testing I’ve been able to conduct - to be blunt the features I’m bringing to the table and the features users expect are out of sync. My idea is valid, but I simply lack the resources to do this myself at this time. To launch my MVP I have to do a few things that “do not scale”, which I simply don’t have the manpower to do at this time with my dual full time jobs of being a Staff Software Engineer and a father.

Next is the sheer scope of the app. It’s ambitious, which is good, but scope creep is real and honestly needed for the Viable part of MVP.

The silver lining is I’ve learned a lot of great technologies in what I’ve built so far, including Capacitor, React Native, and Open AI’s API offerings. And I can repurpose this into a new app with a much smaller scope.

So, this is my pivoting to an RSS-based news app.

The problem I’m solving for is I’m too informed, and honestly I kinda want a bit of a barrier between me and the 24-hour news circle, while still being in the loop. I love apps like Net News Wire and Feedly, but I feel like I want something more in the middle.

So first and foremost I’m going to build this app for myself and my wife, and we’re going to use it for a bit before release. Given what I’ve already learned this should be much simpler to create, and for MVP I won’t be offering any premium AI features or even user accounts, just a simple customizable reader.

I’m sure there’s a startup bro somewhere that’s screaming about not capturing users and forcing an account for future data & marketing use, but honestly respecting privacy is important to me, and I’m of the opinion that a user account should always be optional unless its required for core functionality.

Well, I’ve rambled enough, as soon as my kiddo’s not sick I’m going to do this heads down for a few weekends. Here I go!