Summarizing Youtube Videos and News/Blog articles

I made a new app/service that lets users summarize the deluge of info that comes our way every day. Its unambiguously named MakeMySummary.

After returning from a recent vacation I saw the 100’s of new items from blogs I follow, news aggregators, youtube channel subscription and podcasts. I was simply overwhelmed. So I put on my hacker hat and resolved to fix it.

First, I built a prototype that would summarize news articles by using just their URL or Text (essentially the same thing).

The second challenge was more demanding, summarizing youtube videos. It took a while to wrangle this but I was able to make it work.

The third was to make this app work with my existing toolchain of how I manage my incoming info. I had set it up all on autopilot in Zapier, so I made it work inside Zapier.

That was one long weekend well spent. Having spent all the vacation with kids and family, I could hole myself in my home office without remorse or strange looks from wife and kids. I looked like a ghost after my marathon hacking session. In the end, all was well, I had a working app that worked for me.

In the week that followed, I read thru all the summaries that the app generated and was able to get to the holy land of Inbox-Zero. Over 90% of the incoming media content is not useful, but earlier I would have to spend time to read it at least halfway or more to see that the article was totally useless or the video was not very informative.

I didn't have a name for the app yet, as it ran on my personal AWS backend. I searched the thesaurus to find a cool sounding name and checked for it with the domain registrars. No luck, all the cooling sounding names were already taken or were extremely costly.

Gosh!

Can you imagine USD 100k for a domain name! So I decided to make it dead simple and non-confusing, so I named it MakeMySummary, taking inspiration from Hugging Face :-), thank you Hugging-Face!.

So, I purchased makemysummary.com and made the app public here https://www.makemysummary.com. AI servers don't come cheap, yes they have free tiers and such but after that, the costs are very high.

Hence I put in a subscription plan using a payment processor that will charge in local currencies. Local currencies, because I have personally faced issues of exchange rate changes making the monthly subscriptions go up and down. I don't want others to have the same problem due to lazy thinking on my part!

Using MakeMySummary, you can at this time, do three things:

1. Summarize a news/blog article using its URL or its text.
2. Summarize a youtube video using it URL.
3. Use the app inside of Zapier

If you have any questions on the tech and other ideas on how this can be used. Please leave feedback on the app here (Opens a Google Form): https://www.makemysummary.com/feedback

Here are some examples of the summaries the app makes

Startup Molekule Is Using the California Wildfires to Sell Its Crummy Air Purifier — https://onezero.medium.com/startup-molekule-is-usi…

[1] “Molekule Air Purifiers not only filter out 
ash and debris from smoke — they destroy airborne 
pollutants.”.
,[2] Compared to other air purifiers, Molekule’s 
air purifier is wildly expensive, and looks 
like something you’d find 
in a millionaire’s doomsday bunker..
,[3] By many accounts, Molekule is not a good 
air purifier..
,[4] None of that addresses the simple fact 
that Molekule air purifiers are bad — and 
should be avoided..
,[5] And while HEPA filters generally cost 
more than lower efficiency filters, an air 
purifier doesn’t need to 
be as expensive as Molekule’s..

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What Makes The Top 10% Of Founders Different? — Michael Seibel — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtfTOuSHGg8

[1] Um, the first thing that I’ll say is great founders execute, 
and I’ll be really specific about what that means when I do office hours with the great founder 
and they say they’re going to do something..
,[2] And it’s pretty intimidating to work with someone who’s constantly getting things done, 
not intimating in a bad way, but intimidating in a way where the demand 
respect because they get shit done..
,[3] So once again, the three most important things I see that separate 
out top 10% founders from anyone else is first a good execute..
,[4] Being motivated in the face of defeat or failure 
is an extremely important thing for a start of 
founder to be able to do So..
,[5] And so I never use idea to separate out great 
founders anyone else because I’m not the arbiter 
of what a good idea is..

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