AutoPick

Once I had the proof of concept, It was time to think about the user experience. How can I make it so easy for the user that he/she can just pick up the phone, point it at some highlighted information and done. I had no reason to add even a single additional click to this flow, so I started with a simple camera view and a button to capture the image, everything else I tried to automate based on various triggers articulated in the flow. It took me another 3 months to design, code, test and deploy the app on Google play store.

Now it was time to launch, but How was I gonna do that? I knew no reporters, I had no big global network with whom I can share this news. So I did what every other indie hacker would do Launch of submission platforms such as Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/autopick) and the response was overwhelming, I knew what I've built is useful but I wasn't expecting 80 something upvotes and thousands of visitors with 20% install conversion rate.

First I tried Internet. Found a few apps that would scan text and convert it into digital form but they required more than one click they actually required 3-4 clicks just to get to the piece of text I knew I want and nothing else around it. So I started to think of ways this text can be distinguished from it's surrounding on demand as in whenever the user wants he/she should be able to denote this part of text in real time, then it hit me HIGHLIGHT yes highlights is a used and tested method of declaring interest on a particular piece of text be it on paper or digital screens, that's how it became clear to me that I will have to create a mechanism which can detect text with background color that separates it from the surrounding.

After a month of tinkering I had a piece of code which could scan any text highlighted with color "yellow" and the first piece of text that I scanned with it was "Hello World" written on a piece of napkin.

I was bored, so I went to medium to find an interesting article to read just so I can get through the day. but one after another I kept cycling through various suggested articles and while juggling through these articles I was also taking notes on the notepad where I had pasted all my favorite lines, quotes, stats from these articles that I had been reading, somewhere in the middle of this I was worried that now I'd have to save this note and email it to myself so that I can access it later on my phone and even after all that it won't be organized, so it hit me - using my existing knowledge of technology I should build a workaround that would make the it easier to grab text from anywhere with a single click.