For the last year I've been working on an app called Glimpse. It's a dictation app and a meeting app, built pretty much all by myself. I want to share something I've learned about building apps like this, where people come in with expectations, and how to build something that sets you apart.

After spending a few months getting Glimpse to have every feature anyone would expect in a dictation app, I wanted to look at meetings, since they could be built on the same models and interfaces. One of my big inspirations there was MacWhisper. After I'd released a working meeting mode, I got an email from them about a new feature they'd launched called live transcripts. I thought it was cool, so I built it in.

The important part is that I used it. I noticed what I didn't like about it. Then I'd sit through lectures writing notes, and I'm thinking: I'm writing notes, but I also have live, diarized information coming in. Why can't a model use that?

I'd rather look at notes as the lecture happens than paste the whole transcript into a model at the end and have it write notes from that. This way I can work with the model. I write my own notes, it updates them, and everything in between.

So I built that, ran the development version of my app, and had it take notes through my lectures. I realized that sometimes it would listen too long or too short, and it wouldn't tell me which model was listening to my live notes.

A few things I'd pass on from this:

  • Copy what people expect. I built live transcripts because MacWhisper had them and people want them. There's no point reinventing that.
  • Pay attention to what you don't like, even in the stuff you copied. That's where the thing only you would build comes from.
  • Use it everywhere. For me that was sitting through lectures, not testing it for five minutes.

But the most important part of building anything is being obsessed with it and using it all the time. You'll notice the issues with what you built, and the odds that someone else will see those issues, or relate to them, are very high. So you fix them before other people ever try it.

If you build something you don't use, then other people probably won't use it either.