The Journey to Building uncram.ai

It all started back in 9th grade, when my best friend and I decided we were going to start a business. We had no idea that decision would eventually lead to building uncram.ai.

1st Idea: The AI Law Game

In 9th grade me and my best friend started with an idea for an AI law game using AI and our plan was to animate it ourselves making it a natural game for lawyers to practice. But after about 2 weeks of working on it we thought, "wait we don't know anything about this" we should target a group of people we understand not future lawyers.

2nd Idea: BigEdits - The Google Workspace Extension

During my internship in winter at Skyward IT Solutions I saw how the real world worked and how the job market worked a little more. So I pitched the idea to my co-founder and he grew to love it and we decided to make this into a chrome extension called BigEdits. The idea for BigEdits was for it to be a tool for google workspace (gmail, docs, slides, drive) all packaged directly in a chrome extension. We instantly began building as we really liked this idea and thought we had a good understanding of everything.

However, we were very soon humbled dealing with elements we had never seen before like Shadow DOM, markdown, google apis, and google oauth verification all in a chrome extension environment which limit what tools you can use. We had a prototype version of this working which could make slides, edit your documents, organize your google drive, and respond to emails. However, we soon realized we don't understand this market enough yet too and we would need to keep playing catch up with Google's Gemini. Which is when we decided to pivot and niche down yet again.

3rd Idea: uncram.ai - The Student Productivity Platform

Believe it or not this was right in front of us the whole time we just never saw it. What market do we understand the best? Well students because we are students at the end of the day. This is where we came up with the idea of student productivity so we started brainstorming what issues we had with how we study. One big one was I could never pay attention in class because I'm always so worried about getting every word down so we created an AI lecture note taker so I could actually focus in class only write down important things and the AI gets everything I miss.

We also wanted to make these notes shareable so we added a feature to share notes with all your friends. And we also wanted to be able to convert the notes into a study guide with a click of a button instant study guides also shareable with friends with 3 different unique AI study modes. And eventually we made it into an application for mac and windows and currently working on a mobile app as well. So that's the story of how we started our business.

What I Learned

I learned a lot through the journey of making this startup: how to niche to a specific audience, persistence, and of course a lot of coding knowledge.