I'm one step away from beta testing Connect.
That step isn't a feature. It's not the AI-powered email generation or the business card OCR or the voice note capture - all of that works. The step is infrastructure. Specifically, user accounts.
And honestly? It's unsexy, intimidating, and absolutely critical.
Here's what most people don't see: Connect already personalizes to you. It captures your words, your conversation context, your tone for how you want to follow up. That's the core value - turning a 30-minute follow-up task into a 30-second workflow while keeping it authentically you.
But accounts unlock the next layer of personalization:
I started building this after struggling with networking follow-up - collecting business cards at events, then watching conversations run cold or taking weeks to actually follow up. Initial testing focused on that networking scenario. But as I've used it more, I've tried it across different types of connections: sales follow-up, post-conference outreach, client relationship building, "I met someone interesting" moments that deserve real follow-up.
Accounts are what make this work for everyone - whether you're doing daily sales outreach or occasional personal networking. This is infrastructure for other people's experiences. Their preferences. Their patterns. Their trust that this will work when they need it to work.
That's what makes this real.
This can't be free. I'm using two paid APIs - Anthropic's Claude for OCR and email generation, and Deepgram for voice transcription. Every scan, every follow-up, costs me real money. So a payment model is necessary.
But here's what I'm not doing yet: locking in specific prices.
I have hypotheses:
But I'm deliberately holding back on committing to numbers. Why? Because I don't know what I don't know.
Is 100 follow-ups per month realistic? Way too high? Way too low? Do most people use this daily or weekly? Should the pricing favor frequent users or maximize accessibility for occasional users?
Beta testing will give me more insight. I'd rather let real usage inform fair pricing than guess based on assumptions and optimize for revenue before I understand how people actually use this thing.
Having a child's mindset is an advantage. You're not a domain expert in your client's industry - you're a domain expert in curiosity, asking hard questions, and understanding people. That mindset is serving me well here. I'd rather see how people actually use Connect and iterate based on reality than assume I have all the answers.
Here's the truth: Connect is partly about solving a real problem, and partly about proving I can build real, impactful products.
I'm a veteran of UX/UI with over a decade of app development experience, but as a brand? HiteLabs is relatively unknown. No one knows me. This product is proof of concept - not just for users, but for future clients who might want to build their own AI-powered apps.
And that influences everything: the curiosity-driven pricing approach, the willingness to learn from real usage before optimizing for revenue, the commitment to making this accessible rather than extracting maximum value.
Getting Connect in as many hands as possible and making it genuinely useful matters more than revenue optimization right now. This is about building something people depend on - and proving I can do that for others too.
Beta is coming. The infrastructure is almost ready. And I'm building this the right way: with curiosity, transparency, and a commitment to learning from reality instead of assumptions.