Thanks for coming to read the very first article of what I like to call Tip of the Berg. It’s an attempt to take you a little deeper into what happened behind a product, a movie, or a piece of writing. Let’s start with my own product. Untropy.
This isn’t a long story of how I had been working on this for years. This wasn’t even the idea I started out with when I quit my full-time job last year to become what I would like to call a full-time explorer of ideas.
It began with a simple idea that I worked in my previous company where I had tried to make the last mile delivery a bit better with a slightly different approach. Last-mile delivery is everywhere from your packages to the grocery that gets delivered when you order online. Hundreds of trucks go around the city from one point to another and I always felt that they shouldn’t be on a jammed road at that very right moment when I too was stuck. I did develop a cool product that I even showcased to a few potential customers. Though I was excited my heart wasn’t in it fully and a B2B sales cycle wasn’t exciting at all. So I pivoted.
I pivoted to what was closest to my heart. Traveling to cities. I have always enjoyed traveling to big cities, be it New York, Mexico City, or New Delhi. It’s the age of the city and history behind those attractions that was alluring and I wanted to improve people’s visit there. So I converted what was the last mile optimization engine to an itinerary optimization engine. I used open-source public transit data and my engine to make a visit to a city more value for money. You see more places per day while not compromising on the time spent in each place. Say you’re visiting London and have 3 days and you travel partner pops out an itinerary that shows you 12 different attractions from the Westminster Abbey to the British Museum, what if you could see 20 and add 5 more attractions? All it takes is to understand when those attractions are open, how are they spread in a city, and how the public transit system works. It was a cool product again but I soon realized that a product that ignored human input and purely relies on machine intelligence is not realistic and hence I made it into a travel social app.
Ghumo, the travel social uses my itinerary optimization engine and a user can generate an itinerary and travel to a city. But what was cool about Ghumo was that it recorded your visits and generated the actual trip that you had instead of the itinerary. Now, this is actual user data. This can be shared to a social feed that other users can use for their own trip.
This was in line with my grander vision of an A.I. Travel Agent. Imagine you’re guided by the voice and have a conversation during your city trip. How cool?
It was until our dear friend Corona hit us so bad that travel became a thing you did only if you had a death wish. The founder in me didn’t want to believe this and pushed on for 2 weeks in March until the sane-rational mind told me that this idea is over for at least now.
Enter Peepul. The social education app that is now Untropy. Untropy came out of this deep desire to see good quality education reach and be available for all. Only later did I come to know that this is what is called Bloom’s 2-Sigma effect.
eLearning was taking off in the modern world even before COVID and the pandemic only accelerated the already boiling pot. But just like any innovation built for profit, it was again leaving behind the majority of the human population. Many eLearning platforms had ridiculous subscription fees which most of the parents would be unable to pay. Many platforms like YouTube had free education material but teachers had no chance of recognition given the YouTube algorithm puts them against the entertainment videos which obviously people watched more. Many free education platforms again had content but only by a few teachers and students were left to decide if they really understood the concept or not. There’s was no personalization of material and there definitely was nothing free.
So I started building Untropy which was essentially TikTok for education. Teachers from anywhere post short videos of material that students from anywhere can watch. No fee and no subscription. Everyone gets the same spectrum of educational materials and students decide which is good by liking it.
Untropy was a cool idea but difficult to implement because as quoted by someone “Education is fundamentally against human nature but entertainment is not.” Given a chance to learn and be entertained we humans choose the latter.
But this hasn’t stopped teachers from joining the platform or me continuing to build it. We gamify the experience so that learning is fun. We want students to make a habit to use Untropy. We want to enable teachers to monetize their content and make a living out of this platform. And to sum it all we want to fix education which was already biased and paywalled to make it universally available to all.
Thanks and download the Untropy app from http://onelink.to/untropy