I wanted to build something for China's export trade, and I found a public livestream where both sides of that market met: factories and export companies looking for ways to put AI to work, and the technical people offering it. They talked for hours about real needs, pain points and what it took to deliver. I built a pipeline that recorded those talks and turned them into a searchable, time-stamped transcript, so every statement could be traced to its speaker and moment.
The room had no fixed schedule, and a session could run for more than a day. The host left the stream on even while asleep, on purpose: the host recorded and summarised the talks too, and encouraged viewers to do the same. So capture had to keep going unattended. One night the audio dropped out four times; after the fix, the next day ran 8 hours 45 minutes without a gap.
The recordings showed me two things. The businesses wanted something that works the moment they open it and makes them more efficient, the same thing I heard when I asked export business owners directly. And what was on offer was uneven: some products were thin wrappers around someone else's AI model, and some claims did not hold up. So I set a high bar for my own product: the smallest version worth offering is one people can trust, not just one that works.