Lokko Labs

A webapp to repurpose old, unused tablets to information displays.

I accumulated a bunch of old tablets that I thought were useless.

Wanted to repurpose them as displays for information.

So I made [this site](https://counterdash.com).

As of writing, there's only 2 dashboards and it supports:
- Local time
- Local weather
- News
- Timer
- Draggable cards
- Cards resizing
- Nightmode
- Brightness settings
- Fullscreen toggle

All done in alpine.js + tailwind.

Since nobody pays for B2C, I thought I'd gratis this for everyone to use.

Counter Dash

This project is mostly an experiment to see if I can:

1. Scrape my website as training data.
2. Use that training data to fine-tune a model to generate human-written text that sounds like me.
3. Expand steps 1-2 to anyone else's website.

Here's the [website](https://mochihumantext.com).

## How it works
There is some prompting you can do to fool AI content detectors. Though a lot of these tactics are short-lived. As soon as a tactic is exposed, detectors can be trained to consider those tactics as AI. As an example, you can fool AI detectors by:

- Introducing grammatical errors.
- Misspelling words.
- Never using commas.

However, it is easy to add a large corpus of AI-generated text with those tactics and update models to detect those.

To combat this arms-race situation, you can train an AI to write <mark>***just like you***</mark> by using a large corpus of your own written text. This is what Mochi Human Text does.

If an AI writes exactly like you and is still flagged as AI content, you could argue that it is a false positive on the detector's side. This is because if you were to write the text in the same way, an overfitted AI content detector would flag your writing as AI content.

Though most AI content detectors will likely err on the side of false negatives than false positives, as the latter carry consequences in academic and certain business settings.

Mochi Human Text

Turns keywords into automatically published SEO'd articles.

Wraith Scribe was started on July 2022:
- Before ChatGPT was a thing.
- GPT3 cost $.06 per 1k tokens (or $60 for 1M) -- and I thought it was cheap.
- Was ecstatic when they cut it to $30 per 1M tokens.

Here's the [Wraith Scribe website](https://www.wraithscribe.com/).

## Marketing

### Tactics 2021-2023

#### Reddit
Shilled on Reddit. Not highly effect for conversion but the ones that did sign up were a lot more sticky.

As an alternative to shilling the software itself, I used the software to do freelance writing for me to 'stress test' its quality. It did well, netting around $1K per month. This is ironic as using the software itself made more than selling the software.

I posted my results on Reddit and it went viral on [r/entrepreneur](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/z3q3n0/10000_in_20days_side_hustle_experiment/) - this got me a few customers and they were a lot more sticky than the ones on Tik Tok.

#### Tik Tok
Tried Tik Tok. Did many ideas.

One video went superviral with around 2 million views, and it was about how Wraith can humanize essay texts.

This got me up to around $500 MRR. However, eventually they all churned fairly quickly as they attracted the wrong audience (students trying to cheat on their essays instead of evergreen businesses that want to pump out content for SEO).

### Tactics 2023-2024
I tried to DM my followers for unique mentorship offers on Tik Tok but got banned from messaging. Tik Tok attracted the wrong audience (and I can't pivot offerings to them via DM), so I wanted to pivot to a different platform. One less time-consuming.

I decided to try X (formerly Twitter) instead because there are many success stories for #buildinpublic there.

#### Twitter
I started with Twitter on November 2023 and right now it is August 30th, 2024. I haven't converted a single person from there. It is an inferior platform in my opinion.

Only way to use Twitter is to use other traffic sources and drive them to Twitter, build a huge following, and then market to that following. If you're a small account looking to grow organically on Twitter, it's a time-consuming and bad idea.

Better to do parasite marketing to get Twitter followers.

Projects

Counter Dash

Mochi Human Text

Wraith Scribe