So you’ve made it to my life. Take a deep breath, hold my hand, and let’s venture into an embarking journey where I guide you from the inception of ReplyMind to its eminent existence. But first, a bit about myself.

Rollback two years from now. A junior undergrad pushes one last commit before presenting his year-long course project: Intel 8086 Emulator, an Android IDE made for students to practice and visualize 16-bit Assembly Language, entirely for free! His team is called upon. At this point, he realizes what it feels like to be “on edge”. An entire year’s worth of blood and sweat. He thinks to himself, “Will I be able to convince the instructors of its potential?” What do you think?

Yes! I am that undergrad. Believe me, I prepared well for that day, esp. after how the last course project raised usability concerns (a story for another day!). I went all out. From common editor functionalities such as IntelliSense, syntax highlighting, and error detection to emulating register operations, arithmetics, jumps, loops, etc. I tried my best not to miss a single feature. Feedback? To my surprise, not only were the instructors impressed one of them went a step further and suggested using the Emulator to coach future batches of Microprocessor students. Wow! I felt over the moon. At that point, I cared less about the grades. I couldn’t stop thinking that people were actually going to use something that “I” created!

From that day on, whenever I found myself immersed in the depths of a new idea, or when I was presented with an exciting concept, I asked myself one simple question, “Is it something of value?” which serves as a reality check. Does it actually solve a problem? Is it something that people would really benefit from? I’ve learned that no matter how good I am at doing what I do, or how much passion I have, it’s the value I bring to others that truly counts. And imagine the potential when your passion aligns with what the world needs.

During my vibrant, yet stern academic life, esp. in the midst of the Covid pandemic, I got ample opportunities to take on remote part-time roles at amazing tech startups. This is right after my freshman year I’m talking about. Primarily, I focused on Native Android Development. Within the next two years, I got pretty comfortable with Android SDK, object-oriented Java, Android lifecycle, API testing with Postman, and different architectural patterns like MVC and MVP among others. Notably, my contributions to projects like BYDO Academy and Uposorgo are still up and running on Google Playstore with over a thousand downloads and a pretty commendable rating.

Throughout these years, I stumbled upon the same recurring question. Regardless of what I was doing “Is it of some value?” I was starting to comprehend the outer world aka the market. I understood, at the end of the day what matters most is the “target audience” and the impact and “value” I provide to “that audience”. I learned to invest my time and effort in pursuits I both enjoy and excel at, while also being mindful of the fact that it should make someone’s life easier.

Just when I thought my life and learning path were on an upward trajectory, I couldn’t escape the inevitable reality. During my senior year, I was diagnosed with Pneumonia. Despite my determined efforts to overcome it, Pneumonia got the best of me. My plans crumbled. My entire life came to a halt. For weeks, if not months, I would wake up with severe headaches. Staring at the screen would make it even worse. Also, while solo coding, I have this habit of vocalizing my code, like I would read it out loud, really loud! And trust me! You don’t want to know what Pneumonia does to your vocals. I couldn’t make sense of my own speech, let alone others. After countless visits to doctors and a regimen of medications, I eventually recovered. But during this time, what cost me was my continuous learning streak, which explains the conspicuous gap in my GitHub contributions in the year 2022. And getting back on track from that point proved to be a formidable task.

Fast-forward to 2023. Generative AI and Large Language Models took the world by storm. And here I was, pushing through one last semester of my undergrad life. Every night, I would delve deep into introspection on life itself, thinking and contemplating, “How in the world did I end up here?” For quite some time now, I have been exploring JavaScript-based Backend Frameworks like Express on top of Node. I picked up a few things or so from React Hooks and Context APIs as well. Combining these with OpenAI’s Generative LLMs, I began crafting some cool AI-powered Web apps. But I could tell something was off. I was missing the outer world, the market. Despite trying to regain my footing, I felt I was not making any difference. My efforts, however, did not go unnoticed. I was approached with a new opportunity, a new beacon of hope. I was offered a Full-stack Dev role at a “to be” SaaS startup where I would be “solely” responsible for developing MVPs with Generative AI. Although seemed daunting at first, esp. considering the fact that, from inception to reality, I would have to carry out all the technical responsibilities by myself, I thought “What’s the worst that could happen?” I was desperate to get back into the market. So without much thinking, I jumped right into work.

One day, while having a casual meeting at a coffee shop, my brethren and Founder Mr. Nazmul tossed a new idea about creating a tool that is set to revolutionize the way we network and engage on platforms like LinkedIn, X, and Product Hunt. The day had arrived, the 31st of May, 2023 to be specific. I completed my Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering and graduated with a First class. The convocation ceremony left me with a mix of emotions. Immediately two days later, I joined the office at Impact Hub Dhaka. I was warmly greeted by everyone. New faces with the widest of smiles. People from all different skills and niches work hand in hand. Awe inspired by the energetic vibe and supportive gestures, I was pumped to get right into work. Their tagline: “The new economy starts here” grabbed my attention. Speaking of starting, as I was about to initiate a GitHub Repo for our project, I realized, “Wait a minute.. we didn’t name ourselves!” Then after a round of discussions and research, we agreed to go with something simple and catchy, yet reflective of our mission and vision. How about “ReplyMind”? There you go! The inception! Though the first day of office was quite harmless, yet impactful, little did I know the next three months were going to be a roller coaster ride.

First Month

Tip of the iceberg! We planned to launch the first version of ReplyMind as a Google Chrome Browser Extension. We quickly identified our “target audience”. Mr. Nazmul initiated surveys and discussions on socials to reach potential users such as solopreneurs, freelancers, marketing professionals, or content creators. Though the outcome was quite opinionated, we were able to pinpoint their pain point, which was:

“Growing social presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Product Hunt.” You must provide valuable content. You must also… wait for it… actively engage with your audience through relentlessly commenting and replying on your feeds. And guess what? Merely “Congratulating..” or “Agreeing..” with someone is just another needle in a haystack. You have to come up with the most genuine and authentic feedback. Now think about doing so 24/7 on and on. It will cost you a good chunk of your precious time and effort. So there you go! Problem identified. Next question: “Can we solve it?” Well, nothing Generative AI and clever Prompt Engineering cannot handle. We found our tagline: “Let ReplyMind write the authentic, thoughtful, and relevant reply for you!” Now asking ourselves yet again, “Is it something of value?” To us, the answer was a resounding: YES!

From that day on, it was nothing short of Research and Development. Every day, before even firing up VSCode, I would put myself in the users’ shoes and try to understand what “they” really expect. Between coffee breaks and light chats, I would spend most of my time surfing through the Chrome Docs and developing along the way. Confused or facing a challenge? Stack Overflow came to the rescue. Surprisingly enough, ChatGPT also proved to be quite a problem-solver. Within the first few weeks, I gained a well-rounded understanding of Chrome Extension Manifest v3 and its core components. I learned the distinctions between content scripts, injected scripts, and persistent background scripts. Let’s not forget to mention Chrome’s message-passing APIs. Week after week, promptly translating my learning into code, ReplyMind was starting to get into shape. During this time, I also set up the Node Backend server with Express and deployed it to Cyclic for testing.

Second Month

The second month proved to be the most nerve-wracking. I was starting to get into the nitty-gritty details of extension development. A browser extension is merely a tool that transforms the DOM structure of a webpage/website to make it behave in a certain way. In our case, these transformations center around the comments or reply sections. And guess what? I went the whole nine yards with nothing but good old Vanilla JavaScript! No npm, no yarn, no webpack, no third-party libraries nothing! Why, you ask? Cos there were none. For weeks, I turned the internet upside down. I scoured through the Docs, watched videos, sifted through hundreds of StackOverflow Q&As, GitHub issues everything. I had to define literally “everything” from scratch: rendering the ReplyMind buttons, scraping the web contents, prompting the GPT models, and finally whacking that “authentic” reply to where it belongs. And let’s not forget, that I had to replicate all of that across three different platforms (X, LinkedIn, and Product Hunt).

By the end of July, I started working on publishing the extension on Chrome Webstore— The Beta version. My colleagues and people from Impact Hub Dhaka were the initial adopters of ReplyMind. I can’t thank them enough for their valuable testing time and feedback pre-launch. Word of mouth attracted more beta users. We felt we needed a face. Without delay, I set out to develop ReplyMind’s landing page.

Third Month

Third month! Probably the most pivotal and impactful of all. So far, we have been bootstrapping our way forward, with just a team of no more than five people. Like ReplyMind itself, we were evolving. We were joined forces with two more talented individuals: our Marketing Manager Mr. Omar and Product Manager, Mehdad who know their ropes. During this month, I dedicated most of my time to implementing payment gateways and perfecting the prompts to bring out the most “genuine” of responses. I also migrated most of our server-side logic to a more reliable and robust Backend as a Service platform. The product was pretty much ready, all it needed was exposure. It was the 25th of August, a beautiful afternoon, the sun gradually descending towards the horizon. We were having a friendly exchange on the upcoming launch. Suddenly, an email notification popped up. I opened it. What I saw, I almost fell off my chair out of excitement! The first sale! It was a moment of pure euphoria. “Did someone just buy something that I created?!” and that before even launching? The same feeling from two years prior. Remember? Only magnified by a thousandfold.

The Launch!

Sealing the deal! Putting the icing on the cake! It was time to bring it home. 28th of August. We launched ReplyMind version 1.0 on Product Hunt. Content writers, graphics designers, and marketing connoisseurs all united in one single goal: “Shoot ReplyMind to the top of the podium.” We started bright. Everything was up to the plan. Within a few hours, we were already among the top five. We were actively engaging, eyes wide open on the product page and discussions. Commenting and replying to every single query and feedback. Although the marketing wizards did the heavy lifting, I played my small part by attending to anything requiring technical assistance. And as they say, “Hard work pays off.” Like “literally”. We successfully closed the day as the 2nd Product of the Day and 10+ organic sales!

Conclusion

And that’s pretty much how ReplyMind is where it is! Today, I am beyond proud to introduce myself as the Chief Technology Officer of ReplyMind. Over the past three months, I have poured my heart and soul into developing a tool that is set to revolutionize the way we network and engage on platforms like LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and Product Hunt. I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the Almighty and then to each member of the amazing team for their unwavering support, dedication, creativity, and hard work that has brought us to this point. Now, we are actively working towards making the product better and accessible on more platforms and devices.

If you have made it this far, then thank you soo much for your time and patience. I believe time is one of the most valuable forms of exchange. Really appreciate you reading so far. Would love to connect with you and hear your side of the story.

Let’s connect on:LinkedIn | GitHub | ReplyMind | Webstore

Your feedback is always welcome!