Short-form content is incredibly good at one thing: keeping you scrolling.
You open Instagram or YouTube Shorts intending to watch one thing. Thirty minutes later, you've consumed dozens of videos and remember almost none of them.
I wanted to experiment with a different approach.
So I started building InspireX, a project focused on creating a more intentional way to discover and consume content.
The Problem
The problem isn't that short-form content is inherently bad.
The problem is the recommendation loop.
Most platforms optimize for metrics like:
- Watch time
- Engagement
- Retention
- More sessions
- More content consumed
That creates a system where the easiest way to keep a user engaged is to continuously remove the friction between one piece of content and the next.
I wanted to explore the opposite question:
What if a content platform optimized for what the user actually gets from the content?
Instead of building another infinite feed, InspireX is an experiment around intentional content discovery.
What I'm Building
The initial idea behind InspireX is simple:
Help people discover useful and inspiring content without getting trapped in an endless consumption loop.
The project is still evolving, but the direction is to combine:
- Curated content
- A focused discovery experience
- Better content organization
- A cleaner interface
- Eventually, AI-assisted content processing and automation
The interesting part isn't just building the UI.
It's figuring out what the product should actually optimize for.
Why I Built It
I originally approached this as a frontend project.
That quickly became insufficient.
Building another React interface is not particularly difficult anymore. AI can generate a decent-looking interface in minutes.
The harder questions are:
- What problem am I actually solving?
- Who has this problem?
- What behavior am I trying to change?
- What should the product optimize for?
- How do I know whether the solution is useful?
- How do I get real people to use it?
Those questions turned InspireX from a simple coding project into a product experiment.
Engineering Lessons
One of the biggest lessons so far has been that building the feature is only one part of building a real product.
I've had to deal with things that aren't particularly glamorous:
Deployment
Getting the application deployed is easy.
Getting it to behave correctly in production is another story.
Routing, caching, asset handling, refresh behavior, and environment configuration can all create problems that don't appear during local development.
A project that works perfectly on localhost is not necessarily a working product.
Humanity continues to discover this the hard way.
SEO
I also started looking more seriously at technical SEO.
That meant dealing with things such as:
- Page titles
- Meta descriptions
- Canonical URLs
- Indexability
- Route configuration
- Crawlability
- Duplicate content
- Sitemap configuration
- Production rendering
This forced me to think about the application as something that has to be discovered, not just something that has to be built.
Debugging
Another important lesson has been learning to distinguish between:
"The code is broken."
and
"The code works, but the environment around it is behaving differently than expected."
That sounds obvious.
It wasn't obvious when I started.
I've had issues where the application itself was functioning correctly but caching or deployment behavior made it look broken.
Learning to debug systematically instead of randomly changing code has probably been more valuable than learning another framework.
Where AI Fits
I'm also exploring how AI and automation could extend InspireX.
One possible direction is a pipeline where long-form content can be:
- Discovered
- Evaluated
- Extracted
- Summarized
- Converted into smaller pieces
- Categorized
- Presented through a focused discovery experience
For example, useful long-form YouTube content could potentially become structured, concise pieces of content instead of requiring users to consume an entire video just to discover whether it is useful.
But I'm deliberately treating this as an experiment rather than blindly adding AI because every project apparently needs an AI sticker now.
The AI needs to solve a real bottleneck.
The Bigger Goal
InspireX is also part of a bigger goal I'm working toward.
I don't want to only become someone who can build interfaces.
I want to become someone who can take a problem from:
Problem → Research → Product → Engineering → Deployment → Distribution → Feedback → Iteration
That's a much harder skill set.
And it is much more useful than being able to reproduce another dashboard from a tutorial.
What's Next
The next stage for InspireX is less about adding random features and more about validating the core idea.
I'm focusing on:
- Improving the current user experience
- Fixing production and SEO issues
- Understanding what content users actually find valuable
- Experimenting with content curation
- Exploring AI-assisted content processing
- Measuring actual usage instead of assuming the product is useful
The goal isn't to build the most complicated system.
The goal is to find out whether the underlying idea is worth building.
Final Thoughts
InspireX started as a project.
It's becoming an experiment in product development.
The biggest thing I'm learning is that software engineering doesn't end when the application runs.
A real product has to survive production, be discoverable, solve an actual problem, and give users a reason to come back.
That's the part I'm interested in learning.
And InspireX is currently my laboratory for doing exactly that.
check-out source code - https://github.com/pancharasshubham/inspirex
