Besides the on-the-nose reference to Peter Thiel's Zero to One (one of my favorites), this blog post is mostly going to discuss my early experiences building PLATO5 and the challenges therein.
PLATO5's web app launched on November 13th, 2024 and has been reimagined and upgraded a dozen times since. Most recently I struggled with the gamification feature and how it fits into the social ecosystem that I'm building. It seems counterproductive to create a point system on top of an already stressful and intimidating experience for many people, like forming new social bonds. There are more reasons, but to avoid veering off-topic, I'll leave the explanation there for now. Regardless, I've learned more about design and system building in the last 4 months than I have throughout my many years of 'tutorial hell' and previous attempts at building something as ambitious as PLATO5.
At first I wanted to build a mobile app for PLATO5 because I believe mobile apps to be much more readily adopted by my primary demographic, but I had some issues with the Google Developer Program that shifted me to the much less monopolized and limiting process of getting a web app on the internet. Luckily, I had the basic design, the backend, and the concept of PLATO5 fleshed-out at that point, so a simple web app took me a little over two weeks to get online.
Since publishing, and very very very limited marketing, I had little to no expectations about mass-adoption of PLATO5 or a 'build and they will come' mindset. 3-5 non-friends or family have tried the app and interacted with it in surprising ways that helped me understand users a little bit more. For example, everyone that signed up took the personality assessment. I thought this would be a massive obstacle initially, but it actually seems to be a main selling point. People want to know about themselves so much that they're willing to take a test, or at least they're willing to take the assessment for the purpose of improving their matches, or some mixture of both. I guess my understanding is limited by my small user base and lack of comprehensive data science.
Unfortunately, my early attempt at building a simple version of PLATO5 didn't retain those early users. This is what I've been working on now: making PLATO5 immediately useful, navigable, and understandable. PLATO5 is, after all, a tool or engine, not a platform (at least in the traditional sense). Also, I've been reserving most of my marketing activities until I'm confident people will stick around and I've enabled people to pay for premium features, hopefully letting me earn some of my adspend back.
Perfectionism is another thing that I've wrestled with while building and iterating on PLATO5. The app is never done or perfect. There's a near-infinite list of features or improvements I want to roll-out tomorrow, but due to me being the only developer on the project and reality dictating that a million features doesn't guarantee usership, alas, these features will only truly exist in my imagination (at least until I'm not the sole programmer).
To circle back on the idea on building features that encourage retention, I've built stories, AI conversation assistants, a user feed that prioritizes recency and completed profiles, multimedia support for user's photo galleries and kommin (our discussion board), a restructured navigation column to prioritize nanos (our group chats on PLATO5) and easy tab jumping (this one's just for me).
Next up will be the premium tiers and their full integration into PLATO5. As mentioned, I hope to get some money back from this, not necessarily profit yet. We'll see though. I'd love to take this on as a full-time job. The amount of work I could put into PLATO5 then excites me. It doesn't feel like work, it feels more like exploration or creation. I assume this is what a calling or destiny is (or maybe a term that's less pompous and metaphysical).
The rest of the story of PLATO5 is still being written and I'm sure there's much of it I've memory-banked or just forgot. Still, time will tell if this is a serious tool for helping combat the loneliness epidemic that's devastating the younger generations or a flash in the pan.