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Tello Mate

Gain clarity and peace of mind from your own personal AI-powered digital assistant

Tello Mate Text AI Assistant
Tello Mate AI Reminders

Origin Story (Why I built it)

It all started with a meme, which is kind of a crazy thing to build a product off of but I have the hypothesis that memes can be windows into society and we can find insights on how people think based off of them.

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This one was centered around the idea that dads never remember any plans that moms make and moms have to constantly remind them - it’s a pretty common theme for parenting memes and I saw it repeated across a lot of accounts so I started wondering if there was a way to solve this problem.

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There are shared calendars and things like that but I suspected these don’t work since this seemed to be a common complaint - I think there are a variety of reasons why they don’t work but we can chat about that later.

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So the problem I was trying to solve was: how can I build something that would help people stay connected with each other on important, upcoming plans.

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My proposal was to build an AI-powered assistant that you could text with that would keep everyone up to date on what was happening. Its primary goal was to intake reminders, plans, etc., and send out reminders at the right time.

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I started with parents since I have 2 kids and there’s a lot to manage around this and parents need a ton of help in this area.

One key takeaway from my last time building my own product was to start small and test out an MVP first. So I started by building a prototype using Bubble.io, a no-code tool

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I created a landing page, built the prototype and got a few people to sign up to test it out.

My Role

Once again I found myself in the founder seat (previous being Meerkat), but this time with a lot of learnings from my previous venture. I was again solo bootstrapped, but I was determined to spend as little money on this as possible so I had to do it all myself.

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I designed the UI in Figma and sketched out the technical design in Miro.

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I watched some tutorials on Youtube on how to build things in Bubble and built my first prototype based on the designs.

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I found some initial users to beta test and gathered feedback.

I ultimately decided to pull the idea as it wasn’t seeming to gain traction.

Product Vision & Strategy

For parents that need to better coordinate schedules and important events, Tello Mate is the AI-powered assistant that solves this by automatically sending reminders via text message to all parties.

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My goal was to build out an MVP to test the market and then build out a more robust solution based on interest and feedback.

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I wanted to create a better way for parents to stay on top of all the chaos in their lives.

Key Features & Functionality

Keeping my target customer in mind, busy parents, I designed it to be as simple as possible

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  • Easy onboarding

  • Personalized chatbot assistant

  • Dedicated phone number to send texts to and receive texts from

  • Web interface

  • Viewable calendar

Key Learnings

  • This kind of app requires users to adopt an entirely new method of schedule management and getting users to adopt an entirely new method of doing something takes a lot of reinforcement.

  • I needed to set up more automations to onboard users and to keep them going.

  • ChatGPT was able to translate reminders and events with a pretty high accuracy rate and capture the events properly.

  • Users loved the personalized touch as I had ChatGPT include an additional note related to the event. For example, if it was ‘Dinner party at Jon’s on Friday at 8 pm’, Tello Mate would tell the user about the reminder and then add a note like ‘Bringing dessert is always appreciated’!

  • Users loved the ability to set a reminder that would go out to others

  • I still think this one has potential but needs to be reworked a bit

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