Remade.chat Writeup + Seeking Funding 🥂
Hello! For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been working on an open source chat client called remade.chat.
Below is a Figma mockup of the design!
I purchased the domain in October, though if you look at it right now there might not be anything there - and that’s the reason for this blog post! 🎉
I started the project on AWS LightSail on the Free Tier but have quickly run into platform limits and am now seeking investment. My ultimate plan was always to work my way up to making Link and to use this project as an example of a modern web server so I would have a solid foundation when I started writing the iOS and Android clients. Unfortunately, it has become evident that LightSail’s platform limits on their free VMs aren’t suitable for anything beyond static websites.
remade.chat avatar selection screen
remade.chat main chat screen
(Those with an astute eye for design will notice that the styling has been left a bit bolder during development - this was to help guide with implementation on different sized screens with different contrast ratios.)
I have a decent amount of the state management handled and the AWS integration functional, but Vercel is a static front end, so at this point, I cut over and began developing on AWS to connect the app to its backend. I played around with LightSail a bit since AWS offers an end-to-end 90 day free trial, only to discover that its resources are sandboxed from the rest of AWS so those resources are not accessible via the AWS SDK. This leaves a scaling problem, since if this app were to get any amount of traction, I would eventually need to move everything into greenfield AWS.
I tried to keep LightSail at the core even with AWS resources from elsewhere in the console, but I ended up recreating my own work several times while cutting over from LightSail’s sandbox to full AWS resources. In the end, I had a MySQL DB provisioned by RDS and a standard S3 bucket tied together with an Ubuntu instance from LightSail that would need to be replaced by an EC2 instance as soon as the app hit the real world anyway. This left my DNS registry routed through LightSail as the only other artifact in the console, which I could easily transfer out.
To sum up the current state of remade.chat - it is on hold until I secure funding, as AWS bills can start adding up to thousands of dollars a month before you realize it. I’ve been working on Foundation Labs full-time for about 3 months now and in that time have purchased several domains (samanthaallen.info for $12, foundationlabs.net for $12, remade.chat for $36). I’ve got various software subscriptions active as well now, so it’s time to get outside funding! 🎈😸🚀
Seeking Funding
This is Foundation Labs’ official announcement that we are seeking investment! 🍾🥂
Foundation Labs is currently unincorporated. In order to incorporate, I am seeking members for the board of directors as well as considering others who would like to come in as co-founders. I am a solo founder with a strong technical background and bring a decade of Silicon Valley engineering experience to the table. My ideal match would be somebody with extensive project and people management skills who enjoys traveling, meeting new people, and problem solving on their feet.
Beyond that, Foundation Labs is seeking angel investment to cover the first year of operations. Our comfort zone would be around $1 million in order to cover two full-time salaries, contractors for graphic design, server space, and marketing.
In our first year of operation, we would be focused on getting the basics of AI-assisted chat down. I would like to finish remade.chat and publish the client open source, and from there we would create the iOS and Android clients for Link. We would be spending a lot of time integrating different AI SDKs, primarily for chat but with varying amounts of image and code generation as well. Since there will be location-based features on the app, we will need to do field testing, and then stress testing before we can start charging for subscriptions.
At Salesforce, I wrote a chat client that could handle about 800 messages/second from SMS or Facebook Messenger. My standards for Foundation Labs’ apps will be just as high. I want to create products that are reliable enough to get humanity to the stars.
I will be reaching out to friends, potential partners, and investors over the next few weeks. Feel free to reach out to me as well at founder@foundationlabs.net.
I can’t wait to see what we accomplish together. Until next time, take care! 🖤
