I stole the idea from my Hackathon buddy

Over the past 5 years as a developer, I've been trying to build side income with officemates and non-tech friends. One contract work succeeded and was able to bag $1000 for it while for others, I couldn't complete one that could be considered marketable.

Then last July, I invited my former officemate (Al) to participate in AWS Hackathon where he also invited his friend who is a UI/UX designer and developer (Ron) to join us in the team. We immediately went into ideation stage where Ron presented an idea to help those who are visually impaired (the elder and the blind) to listen to the news through an app by using only phone gestures such as swipe and tap.

I thought it was a brilliant idea and had to build the prototype (https://youtu.be/lvLtlSOlk9o). Later on, Ron also modified the front end which completely changed the user experience (https://youtu.be/usc2HdaBUHU). Overall our entry (audionews.softwarebeing.org) ended up at the top 5 out 488 entries in that Hackathon; a bit sad that we didn't take away any prize but still, the experience was worth it.

It was after the event that Al and I started converting it into a SaaS app but had to pivot to make the app more suited to wider audience and hence, development for dailynewsound.com has started.

I've been working on it since 1st of August using Angular 10 in front end and deploying it to AWS S3. For the backend, I have used a NodeJS app to fetch the trending topics and Spring Boot Java application for the content in the feed.

Right now, the development is still ongoing and I've been personally using the app. It would be cool to get feedback from IH community.

See the app in action and feel free to let me know what are the features it lacks and how to make the message clearer: https://dailynewsound.com