Wikifiction.ai Case Study - Intro
What does it look like when a project manager without a coding background decides to build an AI platform from scratch? Welcome to the journey of wikifiction.ai.
Table of Contents:
Introduction:
Hi, my name is Carson, and I’m a project manager by trade. Over the last several years, I’ve seen a pattern where technical project managers are increasingly expected to come from a developer background. Last December, I decided that to stay competitive in the future, AI is a must-have skill set. To put these two needs together, I set off to build a small AI project. That project grew into a nearly year-long solo endeavor that admittedly took many twists and turns beyond my initial plan. Given my primary goal of learning, it made sense to pursue these paths even though they weren't directly in line with furthering the project's end state. I saw this as an experiment to see how far a single non-coder could get in building a web business. I recently finished some of the final steps I felt were required before posting publicly about this project, leading me to finally write this case study, or project retrospective if you will. The subsequent posts will look at the challenges and how I approached them, as well as the various facets of the project, including the different roles I took on. The project is far from polished, but it’s enough to demonstrate the core idea. I’m eager to take you through this process, starting with this introductory post.
With that in mind, I'm excited to introduce wikifiction.ai! This platform was born out of a desire to make the creative potential of AI accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical background. At its core, wikifiction.ai offers a user-friendly experience that allows anyone to generate fictional stories, characters, and worlds with the help of AI. The idea is simple: you provide a brief prompt or idea, and AI takes it from there, creating visuals and lore. The platform lowers the barrier to using various AI components together, making it easy for non-technical people to explore storytelling in new ways. Your creations are then stored in a familiar wiki format, meaning they are not only well-organized but also easy to share with others instantly.
To showcase the possibilities of what can be built, I maintain daily posts on the wikifictionai TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram pages, where I share a variety of AI-generated stories, characters, and other fictional creations. These posts are a way to demonstrate the versatility of the platform, inspiring others to start their own creative journeys.
Through this platform, I hope to inspire anyone, even those who might not consider themselves storytellers, to use AI as a creative partner to explore new worlds and ideas. Whether you're a writer looking for inspiration, a game designer building a new universe, or just someone curious about what AI can create, wikifiction.ai is here to help you explore. In the posts that follow, I’ll dive deeper into how the platform works and the unique challenges I faced in building it. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and maybe even start creating your own stories along the way.
Why am I doing this?
Continued PM learning
As I mentioned, one of the primary goals of this project was to learn. I'm not a developer, but in nearly every role I've had since college I've worked directly with developers. More recently, I've also worked with dedicated product managers as well. This project enabled me to wear all the different hats associated with software development, from ideation to defining MVPs to grooming and tracking the backlog to developing both backend and frontend. This allowed me to gain intimate knowledge of the pain points of each role, something critically important to growing in both the project and product management career paths.
AI learning
Since Large Language Models (LLMs) came on the scene, there has been an explosion in available models and tools, as well as a non-stop discovery of how it can be used and what its vulnerabilities are. This project was particularly interesting in the way that I not only used AI to learn how to code as I went, but the project itself is centered around building a platform that enables users to easily access AI. This granted me experience not only in heavily augmenting my own productivity with AI, but a vastly broader view into what AI is good at, what it's bad at, how to tie components together to make a comprehensive end product, and much more.
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Supporting personal goals
?????????????? I have a couple of personal large goals that go hand in hand. One is to support myself living abroad, and the other is to own my own business. Ever since I was a kid accompanying my dad to his office where he ran his own small business, I’ve dreamed of being a business owner. Anyone who knows me, however, knows that I’m not exactly a wheeling and dealing sort of person. I’m not a salesman, nor am I interested in trying to convince people to ‘try this’ or ‘buy that’. Instead, my approach is to find and build something that people inherently want or find value in. There’s a good chance that monetizing wikifiction.ai might not be feasible, but if I can build something people find interesting to use, I’ll consider it a good start.
Why wikifiction.ai specifically?
MediaWiki is the underlying software that Wikipedia uses, and I think it’s an incredibly simple and powerful way to present content. There have been several times in the past I’ve considered trying to build a MediaWiki site only to get scared off by the comparably small amount of resources available online to get started. With the advent of generative AI as a coding companion, this door unlocked. I also think playing around with LLMs is particularly enjoyable, including watching it grow and mature. Putting these together seemed like a logical step. While I readily acknowledge that wikifiction.ai doesn't solve conventional problems, my experiences have shown me that many developers work on projects that don’t necessarily address direct business needs. Simply having a space to escape the familiar and freely explore new landscapes can be valuable in its own right. After all, something doesn't have to be conventionally useful to be valuable.
With that said, there are two specific goals I hope to see from wikifiction.ai.
The ask
I now have this simple but functional web app with zero users, zero name recognition, and zero monetization. Currently, it costs very little to maintain, as there are no users. My purpose for sharing this article is three-fold. The simplest purpose is just to share what I’ve been working on. Some might find the end result pointless, and some might have some fun with it. Please give it a try if you’re curious!
A second purpose is to showcase the journey of a non-coder embarking on such a project. I’m in a unique position to take significant time away from traditional work to explore new territories, and I think the story is worth sharing.
The third purpose, simultaneously being the most serious and the least likely to be realized, is to see if there is anyone in my network who takes enough interest in what I’ve built to give advice on how I might prevent the project from ending where it stands. The past eleven months have added enormous breadth to my professional toolkit, but I’m quickly approaching the point where the learning benefits simply no longer justify spending time on a project that doesn’t have a clear path towards monetization. I've loved the experience of wearing all the different hats throughout the software development process, but one hat that I've never really had an interest in wearing is marketing or sales. Plainly put, I don't know how to monetize wikifiction.ai, or if it's even possible to do so. I currently have a very simple donation link set up, but if anything, I imagine that might just help to offset the small operating cost.
I am looking for help in this respect. Whether we've worked together in the past, or if you are reading this without any prior knowledge of my existence, I welcome your thoughts. If you have an idea of how to monetize the site, or if you offer consulting services that might be able to help, or if you are interested in working together somehow, I'm interested in exploring any avenue to prevent the project from dying. Please send me a message, or leave a comment, or email me directly at [email protected].
Next Article: wikifiction.ai case study - Part 1: Breaking Ground