I Spent 6 Months Building the Wrong Product (And What Saved Me)
I started irel.ai as a "smart chatbot for WhatsApp."
People would message it. It would reply. Technically, it worked.
But nobody stuck around.
I kept thinking: "The AI just needs to be smarter." So I tuned prompts. Added memory. Improved context.
Still. Nobody. Stuck. Around.
The breakthrough came from one user interview.
Me: "What would make you keep using this?"
Them: "I don't want to chat with an AI. I want it to DO things while I sleep."
That hit me.
We weren't building a chatbot. We were building a secretary.
Secretaries don't just answer questions. They:
- Label your emails
- Remember birthdays
- Prep your daily brief
- Actually finish tasks
So we pivoted hard. Killed the "chat first" positioning. Built Jobs — true delegations that run autonomously.
The lesson?
Your users don't care about your tech. They care about what gets done while they're not looking.
Build that.
