Exire: AI Conceirge

In late 2018 I met professor Mukund Iyengar who first opened my eyes to the world of startups. We bounced around ideas of pain points that I was experiencing in my life as a new college undergraduate and I realized that I was missing out on the bountiful opportunities to discover new events and interesting places to see right across the Hudson River in New York City. This led to the first product idea I was going to set out to build: a discovery tool for college students in New York City.

At this point I had to learn some software skills, so I self taught myself native iOS development with Swift (this was before the Swift UI days), and some backend development with Node and Express. Fast forward a couple months, I met my Co-Founder and we decided that college students were shitty first customers, because we’re broke and won’t pay for a product.

The product quickly shifted to an itinerary builder, and we both had an interest in learning about conversational AI. So we decided to build a chatbot concierge that would guide millennials to create plans when going out with their friends. We decided to go all in on javascript and switch over our frontend framework to React Native to quickly iterate and build for both iOS and Android simultaneously. And this is when Exire became a true possibility on the horizon.

Throughout 2019 we learned how to design, develop, work as a team, and set up the business side of running a company as we chugged forward. By the end of 2019 we were in full spring and we were looking to launch our MVP early in 2020. Right as we received approval to launch on the Apple App Store, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and New York City became a desolate island.

Originally we believed that the pandemic would only last a month or two so we eagerly awaited a true launch of our product. As the lockdowns droned on month after month, we realized we needed to do something different. We considered pivoting to hosting virtual events like AirBnb, however these didn’t seem authentic or engaging to us.

By the end of 2020, in month 9 of lockdowns, we sat down and asked each other, “What are we doing here?”, and decided to end Exire.

Overall the experience was truly eye opening into the world of tech and startups. This allowed me to learn all about Full Stack development and showed me what needs to happen for a startup to move quickly and successfully.

I failed on a lot of fronts, however the failures are all growth opportunities and I learned much more than just technical skills.