AI-Powered Parenthood: Bottell’s Parenting Innovations

Join Nikki and Stephen Marinsek, co-founders of Bottell, as they share their AI-powered parenting assistant. Bottell provides personalized advice, coaching, and daily tips tailored to your child's needs. Developed by high school sweethearts and parents Nikki and Stephen, Bottell leverages chatGPT to reduce the cognitive load of parenting. Check out bottell.ai to get tailored guidance on parenting topics like potty training and handling tough behaviors. This podcast walks through key features like the daily blog and milestone tracking. See how Bottell’s conversational interface and child profiles create an easy way to get parenting advice personalized to your family.

BOTTELL

https://bottell.ai/
https://www.instagram.com/bottell_ai/
https://twitter.com/bottell_ai
https://www.fry-ai.com/p/bottell-ai-amplifying-effort-parents

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➡️ Promo code: FRYAIJOURNEY50

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Creators & Guests

Host

Ryan Lazuka

The lighthearted Artificial intelligence Journalist. Building the easiest to read AI Email Newsletter Daily Twitter Threads about AI

What is Behind The Bots?

Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by interviewing the brightest minds and exploring cutting-edge projects. From innovative ideas to groundbreaking individuals, we're here to uncover the latest developments and thought-provoking discussions in the AI space.

Nikki Marinsek: Why? So husband and wife, we are high school sweethearts. Book came from the same small hometown in Gallup in New Mexico. And then I also got my PhD in incognitive neuroscience at UCSB and then went into data science and I'm now a data science manager at a digital health tech startup. You have two boys, we have a three year old.

Stephen Marinsek: We both went to school also in New Mexico for undergrad. Went out to California for Nikki's PhD. I started working my backgrounds in mechanical engineering. Now I'm in the aerospace sector of that and going after my masters now, but like Nikki said, do little boys running around. We try to keep up with and take all the energy out of us, but it's a blast chasing them.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, yep. Yeah, we moved back to Albuquerque a few years ago. So now we're in New Mexico again.

Hunter Kallay: Very nice. And you said your boys are younger. They're like toddler age or they...

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, they're really, we just passed that transition. So we were in the 202 phase for a while. So juggling a baby and a toddler. Now we have two toddlers, which is easier in some ways. It's like a little bit chaotic, but yeah, they're still young. So the youngest one is running around, but not talking yet. The oldest one is now starting to talk, but is starting to learn self-control. Just really nice. Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Marinsek: We're good to that point where they're starting to play with each other and enjoy each other, like chasing each other and we can just kind of sit down and catch our breath. So hopefully more of that to come.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, but they're sleeping a lot more now or what?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, yeah, that's been nice. Yeah.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, like I said, our Ryan, who's my partner with Fry AI, he, for the reason he's not here today is because his sleep schedule is all messed up. So unfortunately he wasn't able to get here, but he has, like I said, two kids who are really young, twins. So he really enjoyed when I sent him your project.

Like he's like, oh, this is really cool. Oh, that's cool. So could you just tell me a little bit about, you know, what is your project or, yeah, just tell me, we'll go back to, we'll kind of backtrack to what inspired you to do this project. But first of all, what is the project we're even talking about?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, so it, I think we can think of it as it's like a parenting sidekick. So it's like a digital tool that helps in a lot of ways that, you know, parents need help with on the day to day of raising kids and, you know, parenthood comes with a lot of questions and a lot of unknowns and ambiguity.

And this is a tool to use AI to help with those questions. So there's a few different aspects to it. One is personalized advice. So, you know, it uses the chat GBT to have this conversational, you know, advice and back and forth. But it uses your information that you supply about your child and about their interests, about their history, their challenges.

So then personalize those responses for your kid. And then there are other aspects for other parts of the parenting journey. We've had these programs around big transitions and milestones.

So that's more like a coaching aspect. So, you know, if you're like struggling, you can ask for help on specific topics and it creates a plan and then you can check in for the plan and get badges and milestones along the way. And then what I think probably my favorite aspect of it, there's a personalized blog and it's every day from birth to five years old, there is like a short, easy to digest blog posts about your kid. So it might be like, like, so we have it for our kids. So one is how to introduce Aaron, that's our son's name, to maps. And it's like, it's like teaches them things. So it spans like learning, emotional development, like those sorts of things. It's just these bite size. Here's something that you can do for your kid today.

Hunter Kallay: Very cool. Yeah, that's a great overview. I personally, I got to look at the project quite a bit. And when Ryan and I research for these types of things, we tend to look at the projects and it looks like it's very well put together, very professional, has a lot of features. We were surprised by how many features it has. You kind of talked about like the journal feature and different things like that. It seemed very complex, which was awesome.

So I want to ask before you think too much into how the project, maybe it works a little bit or maybe like some uses that you hinted at. So what kind of inspired you? Was it just having, like, obviously you guys have kids, but was it something, why bring in the AI component? Why this like sort of application?

Stephen Marinsek: Yeah, so I think one of the things we struggled with in parenting, there's a lot of like edge cases and you have all these questions and you never know. It's either like, you're not quite getting the answers you want or you spend just tons of time just sifting through blogs and Google search results. And there were times where it's like, man, we just wish we had the answer like to our specific problem with our specific kids, personality or challenges. And then, you know, we started seeing the big breaking news about ChatGPT and it dawned on us, we were like having lunch one day and we're like, oh, we should build this tool because there's nothing out there like it.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, that's kind of it. We weren't looking to build a company. Like we weren't really in the market for this, but, you know, like I think, I mean, at least for art, ChatGPT took us by storm. Like we knew some of the advances in AI, I worked in like machine learning in my job, quite a lot, but like there was really nothing like seeing ChatGPT and what it could do.

That was like, we could, like this is something that, like it could be very useful in the realm of parenthood. And you can do it with ChatGPT itself, but it's not made for it. You know, like I think so much of ChatGPT's power is knowing how to use it and like knowing what to ask, what information to give it, like exactly how to ask it. So that's kind of what we've put a lot of work into. It's like, how can we take like this amazing technology and make it really good for parents?

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, it's kind of funny how whenever you have your life experiences and you're not necessarily looking for something, but you might see ChatGPT or some technology or some advancement in a different way that other people would and it allows you to apply it in a way that other people wouldn't think of just because of what you're doing in your regular life.

So it seems like it wasn't something you even sought out. It just kind of like came to you like as you were living your life. So that's really cool. When you first created the project or you were looking into it in the bottle, that's what it's called, right? Bottle, you might say that right?

Okay. Okay, so when you're first looking into bottle, what was the vision for it? And has that vision changed now that you've kind of gotten into creating it a little bit?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, it has. So like the core and personalized advice that hasn't changed too much, but we did go one direction at the beginning where we were thinking it could be more like a summary of what's like the literature that's out there. So like one of the things that we spent a lot of time on is like, this is when we've had specific problems, like looking at research articles. And I guess I do have an academic background, so I'm a little bit more inclined to do that. But reading these research articles, trying to understand what decisions we should make, like what's the best solution for different things. So we're thinking maybe we could use chatGPT to summarize like what's the literature on the best solutions for disciplining your children? Or like what's the literature on?

Stephen Marinsek: Like the years or something like that?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, yeah, like what are the effects of watching too much green time? And have like that be one module, or have like another one have like a perspective of a parent who's been there and kind of like summarize like some different forums, went to summarize more like the medical blog literature. But we found that that wasn't like, it's hard to verify the information, like in a way that's not super manual, where we're also doing all of the work and to try to verify it. And especially in the research space, you know, it's, I just don't think that that was like the best use of it in a way that we could feel really confident about releasing. So we did pivot a little bit to make it much more. More like personalizable, right?

Yeah, yeah, much more like taking the information that you provide and then, you know, providing like the framework so that you can ask that information and get guidance and it can be in your way.

Stephen Marinsek: It was pretty fun. I think the first time we got that really working, our old it was, or any still is really big in a Spider-Man. We put that in his profile. Then we'd ask the questions like, what are some fun outdoor, or no, what are some activities we can do that would promote X or promote Y? And it'd say like, oh, work, you know, Spider-Man into it this way. And so you'd get these like really good general parenting advice, like tips and things to work on. But it'd say like, oh, use his interests or do that. So you felt like it really understood your kid and what you're asking.

Hunter Kallay: I like that. So you said it stores information, right?

Nikki Marinsek: Yep, yeah. So you can have a profile for your child with like their name, their birth date. The way that we have it now, which I like, it has pros and cons, but I like it, is it can be free text. So you can put whatever you want in it, including like what you don't wanna include. So there's like, it's up to you what kind of information to give it. But like we've found a lot of success when it's, you have more information, like what their routine is, what kinds of foods they like and don't like, what their challenges are, the family structure if they have any. And it stores that and then it uses that information in providing all of the other guidance.

Hunter Kallay: So are you running like, are you running? I guess we can talk a little bit about the tech here. Kind of leave them to this. What are you running some sort of, you mentioned chat GPT, is that the LLM you're running in the background to kind of source all of this? Is that how this is working? What is some of that behind the scenes? Without giving away your secret sauce obviously.

Nikki Marinsek: I mean, yeah, no, of course. So yeah, we use bubble. That's like the no code app in, it uses, we use the open AI API. And then, yeah, most of the work is really in like the backend workflows and passing information and in and out all the prompt engineering and then kind of the scaffolding around it, around like suggested questions. It's more like, I feel like most of what we've done is really just like guiding people on how to use the tool well.

Hunter Kallay: When you were creating the project at the beginning, at least, did you run into any sort of complications that were like big roadblocks? So you're like, how do we overcome this? Is it technical or like as a team or what were some of the things you had to overcome?

Nikki Marinsek: I mean, I would say like, this wasn't that early on in the project. This is what we're going through right now.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, or right now, like anything you're working on right now or working through.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, with the, so bubble is a really good solution for the backend workflows. Like when you don't wanna do everything you're doing.

Stephen Marinsek: It's a good like full stack solution for quick development. That's how you run with it.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, it's not good for page speed though. So that's what we're dealing with now is like some of the page speeds are just very slow for the like...

Stephen Marinsek: From like a static pages or landing pages. Yeah, so we're working on

Nikki Marinsek: optimizing that in a different tool now. I don't know, what else do you think? Have there been...

Stephen Marinsek: I think it's just been a lot of like, like sort of knowledge points, like let's get to this part with this project, feel it out. And then if we're comfortable with the prototype and how it's behaving, then we release it and let, you know, our customers interact with it. But I think a lot of it is just like asking ourselves continually, like A, is this working?

How we want it to, and then B, is this useful to us as a parent? Cause that's one of the nice things we have going for us is we're like one of our own customers in a way. So, like, yeah, If we kind of find something that's like, this is kind of cool, but it's really not something that I'd use much. Then we just kind of like adapt the product. And I think we've done that a couple of times, like Nicky mentioned the big journeys, we call them journeys, but they're like, like potty training or transition to solid foods is what we're working on at some point in the future. Sleep training will be another one, but like those started as something kind of completely different, like a series of finite checkpoints.

And then as we kind of talked through it and envisioned how people would start at the beginning and end up at the end through various different paths, which chat GPT gives us the flexibility to like adapt the plan on the fly. We kind of realize like, and especially with our kids, like every potty training journey is just like so different. Some kids might get it in a couple of days, you know, some might take a lot longer. So we changed the format of that up to just be so much more flexible and provide as many adaptations and checkpoints as parents need. So it's always just kind of a, is this working? Does it feel right? If not, let's make the corrections until it does.

Hunter Kallay: So what's the next step in development right now? Where are you trying to take it right now?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, right now, I think we've, so we've done a lot of building and now I think we're going to try to shift into the learning phase and just gain some, hopefully get some more customers, understand what's working well.

What are the gaps? Like really just try to understand from parents what's useful, what else could be useful that we think like there could be an opportunity there. And then, and then, you know, with that, try to then shape the roadmap. I think one area that we think could be pretty valuable is expanding these journeys or programs that we do around big transitions.

Because there are a lot of transitions to that. Like as we know, so, you know, like David said, party training, our youngest Dominic is learning how to talk now and we're thinking, that could be really useful to have some sort of thing where you have like a list of common like first 100 words that you're kind of like working through and understanding like what kind of language activities could be useful for learning your first words. And yeah, so that's what I think there could be a lot of room for that. There are a lot of big transitions in early childhood. So that would keep us busy for quite a lot if we were to go down that path.

Hunter Kallay: Okay, so you mentioned milestones earlier and then you brought it back up again, which is really cool. So what do you do? You mentioned you do something for milestones. Like you have a reward system. How does that work?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, yeah. Did you wanna, I could do it too. Oh yeah, sure.

Stephen Marinsek: So we call it our milestones coach. And it's kind of, it's really big, especially in the early childhood development. It's always like, what should children be doing at three months, six months, 12 months? And that's one of the things we kind of noticed early on when we're trying to build awareness and we're running ads is we get a lot of traffic for milestones. So you said, okay, what can we do with this?

How can we use chat GPT? You know, to help parents out. So what we did is like the CDC's milestones are kind of like the gold standard for what milestones should be. So we use those as a reference and we have those in our system and as kids meet a milestone, they check it off and they get a little bad for it. The parents check it off, I guess. But what we're doing with chat GPT is parents can then say, hey, this is going well.

This isn't developing as quick as I'd like. And it's gonna give you advice on little activities they can do with their kids to target that specific development if they're kind of concerned or their kid is falling behind or maybe needs a little bit more attention there.

Hunter Kallay: What do these plans look like? Like if they're develop, if they're getting some sort of plan, what does that look like? Like practically for the user?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, so for example, like for our youngest Dominic, he will be, he's pretty on track for the milestones but one of the ones where like we might say that we want help with is, the CDC milestones and something like, you know, six words or something. So like he only knows, you know, I'm making this up because this isn't really true for him.

But like, you know, like he only knows like three words. We want to like, this is something we want to work on. And so then the plan will be, okay, I understand it. Like here's some different activities. So, and we've done this as like read with your child. We can play these little word games, talk about animal sounds, look at body parts, have him like try to repeat after you.

But like it lists all these activities. And then we'll say, you know, let me know how it goes. Check in in a few weeks or whenever you want to. And then there's a little space where you can say how things are going, what's working well, what's not, what you would like help on.

It doesn't have to be the actual CDC milestones. Like it's very flexible. So you can use it for whatever, but it's really supposed to be, you know, as your kids developing, you want to make sure that they're on track. You can kind of gauge that. And then get this personalized guidance and adapting plans along the way to try out.

Hunter Kallay: Very cool. So you mentioned that you guys are asking parents for some stuff, like some feedback. I mean, obviously you guys are parents. So as you said, you're kind of your own customers in that way. And that's very cool that you have like a very quick insight into what this might be. So maybe you don't have to ask as much people as people as much as maybe some other companies do. But do you find yourself asking parents, other parents a lot, maybe, hey, try this out and see if it works or anything like that or you product testing in some ways.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, we're getting some, but I mean, to be transparent, I think this is something that we need more of because we've been, you know, we started this out, just the two of us and we, you know, like didn't feel super comfortable telling friends and family and we just wanted to make this like our project for a while. So now we're kind of getting in that phase where I'm trying to get more feedback from people. So this is something that, yes, we're doing, but we need to do more of.

Stephen Marinsek: Yeah, I think one of the challenges with this particular space is just building the knowledge that the product is there. So I think a lot of like content kind of gravitate toward like the tried and true like books or, you know, kind of serial video classes or static blogs, that sort of thing. So I think kind of with this space, just it being like not particularly tech and the people and they're not being on the cutting edge of tech, it's also like a knowledge battle that we're trying to just, you know, even just tell people what it is and what it's capable of. So a lot of awareness building that we're having to do along with this.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, that makes sense for sure. Well, that's why we're here to try to help with that a little bit. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. So do you guys have a cost for it or how does your pricing work or are you guys going to try to build a cost eventually, like a monthly cost or something in your yearly or something like that?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, so those big transition programs, those are $19, but then you get it for any of your kids and it's like from start to finish. So you just, you use it until you're at your goal. And then we have, for the rest of the future, it's more of like the ongoing, like the personalized advice, the personalized blog and the milestones coach.

There's two options. There's a free option where you get limited access on like how many questions you ask per day, the blog posts are weekly. That's free. And then there's a premium option that's $5 per month and that's like unlimited access with a milestone coach.

Hunter Kallay: Very cool. Yeah, that's not bad at all. That's only a few diapers, right? So yeah.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I guess I want to say, because I haven't seen anybody doing this sort of thing. So like I, I mean, like, like you guys were saying, like getting the word out is kind of difficult because it's not a project. And we see, like we see these projects sometimes where it's not a project that like tech people would think of where like you see them like get up and they have all these like super techy projects and they're like, okay.

Hunter Kallay: But then like it's, it's not a project that's like super like accessible to people and like knowable by people. So it's like, how do you make this more, like you're kind of like in the middle of like people who don't like tech and people who do like tech.

Stephen Marinsek: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. If you do like tech, you're gonna be like, this isn't techy enough. If you don't like tech, you're gonna be like, this is too techy for me.

Hunter Kallay: It's tough. But you know what? I think there is a market there because I think that's where a lot of people sit right now is kind of in, in this middle ground of like, curious about tech. And that's what we've seen over and over again. But just like with our audience in particular is there, you have people on both ends. People want nothing to do with it. People who want a lot to do with this. When you talk about AI, there's people split down the middle, but most of the people are curious about it. So if you kind of peak their curiosity to like, maybe this is something you can try, you know, or like this is some practical thing that you can try.

I think that would be really cool, you know, that would be really cool. So with that in mind, I would say like, how can you, like, how does this benefit the average parent? Like the average parent who has like, maybe one, two kids, three kids, whatever, how does this benefit them? Yeah. Frankly, like right now it can benefit them today. Like you can start benefiting now. I would probably answer it as like, chatty b is so good.

Nikki Marinsek: It can be so powerful with the things that you have to do with the parent all the time. Like the amount of decisions that we have to make is a lot. And like there's like a lot of planning. There's just like so much of a like a cognitive load of parenthood and chatty b is great for reducing cognitive load.

But you have to know how to use it. And like you have to, like it's not obvious what kind of questions to ask. And that's what we've been putting a lot of thought into. So for example, you can ask it, you know, can you plan our meals for this week? And like here's what people like to eat. And here's what we're trying to get more of. Or you can ask for a bedtime story that teaches them a lesson that you're trying to, like that, you know, like they need to learn at the time.

Stephen Marinsek: You had a really cool feature idea. It's just to have a list of like preloaded questions for when you're not quite sure what you want to ask. And you just click on that, it loads it up and you fire it off. Yeah.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah. So yeah. So if you, there's like all these suggestion questions across all these different topics. So, you know, like, I'd be like, what kind of questions should I ask my pediatrician at the next visit? It's just like all these things that you don't really think to ask. But once you do any, any like marry that with your child's profile, it feels really good. Like it's, you see it.

We added streaming in there. So you just see it type out and it's this like beautifully worded response. It's very thoughtful.

And it brings all of these, you know, like all of these little insights from your kid in it. And it it's different. It's a very different experience than Googling something.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah. It sounds like when you Google something, I mean, there is so much information available to you. I mean, and this is times 10 with parenting, I can imagine. I'm not a parent myself, but I've I've seen like I've grown up.

I have little sisters and stuff like that. Ryan's a parent. So he's talking about it all the time. Yeah. I can't imagine trying to find an answer to something with all the different contradictory answers. This is specialized to your child. Yeah. So that's really awesome.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah. And that's it. It does cut out like that, you know, like that information overload. And then another thing is something that we're trying to what we're finding is when we first had kids, you're asking me a lot of questions and you like, there usually is an answer like, you know, like what to do with constipation or like how, you know, all of these questions are an answer. Now, if there are three year olds, it's like that's kind of taken care of. But now we're wondering, how do we teach him how to socialize? Like, how do we make sure that he has empathy for others? Or how do we know he's going to, you know, you know, when do we start teaching him a like, you know, ABC's colors?

And well, he knows all those things. But it like the question is shift and it becomes a lot of like, you want to make sure that you're doing right for your kids. but there's no like very specific question to ask. So either you're just reading all of these blogs or trying to go on social media and just like trying to get like little things that like insight, but that's where that personalized blog comes from. Like it kind of fills that gap where it's not really anything that you're looking for, but it just gives you like little tips and little advice every day around development. You can like take what you want, discard the rest, but it kind of, it fills that hole a little bit just to know that you're on the right track and that your kids are on the right track.

Stephen Marinsek: Cause I remember brainstorming that one and it was like looking back in hindsight, there's like things you didn't know, but you didn't know, you didn't know them. And that's really what motivated us to make the daily weekly blog is like just a quick little thing, but you know, just to help parents, because there are things like we look back like, man, we really wish we did that different. And every parent's gonna think that for one reason or another, but it's like, oh, you know, we could really, we could use that in bottle.

Hunter Kallay: That's awesome. You know, you're still right about that. And I mean, it goes for parenting, but it goes for a lot of things. So you guys know like, you guys are both at Ben or are in like some academic setting or something like that. So I'm in the philosophy program at University of Tennessee and the PhD program and philosophy is that way. Every time you discover something new about philosophy, every new discovery you have, you realize how much you didn't actually know about. You're like, okay, the rabbit hole gets deeper.

Now the rabbit hole gets deeper. And everything you find out, you're like, I wish I would have known that before. So yeah, you know, that's true with a lot of things that I think people can relate to, but I'm sure especially parenting, especially when the stakes are higher in parenting than they are in philosophy, you know, it's like somebody's life is taking care of.

So it's really important that you have those resources. So if you're talking about the blog, can you just give me a little bit more about, because you've referenced that a few times and it's a very cool feature that you have. So talking to me practically, what does this blog look like every day? What is like an example of something that it says?

Nikki Marinsek: Oh yeah, I love the blog. It's my favorite feature. So every day it gives you, you know, probably like two, three paragraphs with like a few tips inside and they span different topics. So it's like eating and nutrition, health and wellness, learning, cognitive development, parenting strategies, there's a few others.

And it's just like a blog post for your kids. So it'd be an example would be like, how to help Erin navigate through transitions or how to teach Erin about the life cycle of plants.

Stephen Marinsek: You know, like that was not on my radar. That was not on my radar to teach her about, but like it's cute, it's fun. You know, like age appropriate. So when you're, if you have a young baby, it'll be like how to teach them, like activity recommendations to work on rolling over or like tummy time.

Nikki Marinsek: Tips for tummy time. And then like every month it's, you know, what can you expect for this month going forward? So like what's month 20? Like what kind of developmental changes could be happening now to look for?

Stephen Marinsek: Yeah, just like one sampling from all those topics that Nikki mentioned per day. And then it expands it out and writes it with all of the individual child's preferences and challenges factored in.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, so you might be thinking, how did you do this? So like we made the like the topics and yeah, like the topic per day for every day from births of five years old and then using chat GPT, it takes that topic to write about plus the information from your child's, including like how old they are. And we'll just tailor like some advice just for you, just for your kid based on that topic. It's really cool. It's, yeah, it's fun to read.

Hunter Kallay: I bet it is. Cause it's like, especially for you, you who like kind of developed this thing and you're like, well, I created a monster or something like that, like a really cool monster. So I wanted to ask about that. So chat GPT's pulling from these, these various sources. Obviously chat GPT's not that controversial and a lot of people talk about it has different biases towards certain things. So how does your platform handle these controversial topics?

Like think about like, like breastfeeding or something like that. Different things that are widely disagreed upon or maybe people have strong views on either side. How does it deal with those sorts of things?

Nikki Marinsek: So from what we've seen, it's very conservative. So it's very much whenever you steer into areas, especially regarding like medical advice, it will like clearly say like, this is for advice only always consulted pediatrician. So it does very much provide this balanced view and it caveats a lot of what it says with those sorts of things. So that's what we've seen in our testing.

Stephen Marinsek: Yeah, and I think we've done our best to build that into like when we're generating all the list of topics or the blog is very much like just whatever the parent preferred don't lean one way or the other. Just because there's, you know, for a lot of things in painting, no single right way, just.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, we're trying not to make it like prescriptive. It's really just like, here's a tool for you, how you want to use it.

Hunter Kallay: It's a guide to you. It's not like something that's telling you this is what you should do as a parent.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, exactly. And even with like the milestone tracker, like that's based on the CDC milestones. For the potty training program, we also have something similar over these like badges. But even then, like we try not to make it to like in your face or like, you know, you have to do these steps.

It's more like, here's a framework, here's a guide, here's some steps in you getting fully potty trained, but really it's very flexible. So you can ask anything. You can ask it to tweak things to really just get exactly what you want. Yeah, that makes sense.

Hunter Kallay: I mean, if anybody talks to the chat GPT, you can see it is very conservative. It's hard to get it to make an argument for something. Yeah. Sometimes I try to trick it just because that's what I do as a philosopher is trying to trick people.

There's no one that I try to trick in and I've found ways to trick some things, but it's pretty good actually. It's pretty darn good about it. So where do you see this going in the future in the long term? Do you see like a possibility that this could, I mean, I see it possibility could become very popular. What's your vision for it? Is your vision to like get it in every parent's hands? Or what is the vision?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, I mean, that would be amazing. You know, I would want everybody to try it out. I don't think it's gonna be for everybody, but like, but I do see like, parenthood is great, but it does come with a lot and a lot of stress. And I do think that there's great opportunity for this to take off some of that mental burden, give you some of the like advice and guidance emotional support that you need. It's like, even if you don't use it in your day to day, just that it's there when you need it.

Stephen Marinsek: I think it can be like an amplifier of like, your effort as a parent in some ways to like small questions. You can ask it and it'll really flesh out the details and help you figure stuff out. I think one of the things, we realized this a couple of months ago, is I think these big life journeys are a really great opportunity for it to help parents longer term with not just like a single question, but like you said, the whole evolution of potty training from start to finish or sleep training if parents wanted to do that or when they transitioned from to solid food. So I think that's gonna be one of our near term, long term focuses, if you will, just to help parents even more.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, yeah, I kind of think of it the same way as I think all of us, well, not all of us. A lot of us have thought about chat GPT for work. Like it's just nice to know what's there, what it could be used for, what are like the bounds of possibilities? And then you kind of fall into this pattern of like you use it for what you need it for. And then for some things you realize like, okay, it's probably not the tool. But that, I think bottle could be that for parents. They're when you need it. And one thing that we'd like to try and do and we'll need to do this just with like, with feedback from talking to more parents and people who use it is like, what are other things that it could help with? And what are some of those gaps that can make it even more useful? You mentioned the prompts, like the prompt engineering.

Hunter Kallay: I think you're really onto something there. And you talked about like the questions, right? Like maybe pre done questions. That's a big thing with chat GPT right now. So one of the things that we do in our newsletters we explore different tools and we see different trends that are coming out. For a while it was image editing and then it was like video creation. Then it was like talking to your files, like chatting with like different files on your desktop.

Now it's prompts. People don't know what to ask chat GPT or how to ask certain tools like chat GPT. They don't know what to say. They might have a question, but they don't know what to say or they word it a certain way. And there's a way to kind of use the technology to help clarify what you're saying and help you get a better answer. And that's a lot of the technology right now. Like that's where it's at. So that is awesome. You guys are doing that.

Stephen Marinsek: That's been a decent amount of work behind the scenes. It's just like you said Hunter to prime it. So it gives the right answer in like a great format. Yeah.

Nikki Marinsek: And one thing we also have is it will give you suggested questions to ask based on your kids profiles. Like here are some questions that like, you know, based on your kids profile, like you might want to ask one thing that we don't have yet, but hopefully we'll do soon is once you ask a question, it also gives you some follow up questions.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah. I love, I use and I personally use a, tool, I don't know if you've heard of Proplexity. It was popular for a while and it's an app. And it's, I think it's better than chat TFT because it gives you those follow up questions. If I have a question, it doesn't just like answer the question, leave me hanging. It gives me like recommended follow up questions I should ask. And sometimes I'm like, that didn't quite answer my question. The recommended follow up was like, okay, that's actually what I was getting at. So I click the recommended follow up and there we go. So I think that that's really helpful. Also, another shambles pub for Proplexity, but they also give like citations little things. So if you ever want to do Proplexity, it will give you the answer. Then you just click a little, like the little number next to it, the little, what's it called?

Like it looks like it's going to a foot. Like in text, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the in texting and you click it and it'll take you to the website. And it's usually pretty good sources. So I like, I do like Proplexity for that, but you guys are doing something similar to that, which is really awesome. Because yeah, you don't always know what to ask and a lot of different things. So when did you guys launch this?

Nikki Marinsek: So we had the idea in April. I think we launched a very MVP, like very minimal viable product. But that was probably May. Yeah, it went quicker than we thought. And then we've just been building and adding and refining. Yeah, so it's been relatively recent.

Hunter Kallay: Is it just you two or do you have some other people you're working with as a team?

Nikki Marinsek: It's just us. Yeah, we're both working full time. So it's just in the evenings.

Stephen Marinsek: After the kids go down, it's work part two. That's impressive. It's been fun. It's been nice to just work together and think through these problems. It's kind of a fun challenge.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, we're learning so many new things that... But we didn't think we'd be learning like earlier this year.

Hunter Kallay: I was gonna ask you, I'm gonna get too personal. But as far as like your relationship, you guys have been together, you said you were high school, sweethearts, very cool story. So have you found that this has either added, like working together on this project?

Has it added something new to your relationship in general of using this product or anything like that? Do you see that as a potential for parents who might like, I mean, they're not gonna be working on the project. Like using the project. Do you see the potential for like parents to come together in a certain way or be on the same page?

Nikki Marinsek: Oh, like in using the product and not using it. But yeah, using it.

Hunter Kallay: Well, I wanna know about you guys building it. And you see parents using it.

Nikki Marinsek: So building it, yes, it's been interesting. It's been, you know, you kind of develop work styles and work and then you make your personal lives. You don't see that all the time. So like we've seen that come out and kind of understand like how we work, what are our styles, like what are our strengths? That's been pretty interesting. Mostly though, I think it's just been really enjoyable to strategize and just have like new things to problem solve together toward, yeah, I've enjoyed it.

Stephen Marinsek: Well, then us both kind of coming from tech backgrounds, the building part isn't too difficult. But what we found is like the whole like marketing and getting it out there is just like totally new to us both. And that's been a fun, you know, learning experience for us. And we're still on that learning curve, but we're getting there.

Hunter Kallay: And then the second question to follow up, do you think that there's potential for maybe parents who are maybe working together on this sort of app or program? Do you think there's potential to bring them together? Or do you think this will help their relationship or marriage in that sort of way?

Stephen Marinsek: I think that's actually something we've been brainstorming as it just a couple of weeks ago is like we're giving parenting advice for parents, help with their children. But like, you know, people don't ask about like the parents themselves much.

So maybe we're not quite sure what this would look like, but the parents might have their own profiles. Maybe have questions like you're saying Hunter is like, you know, how do we reconcile this between us? Or like, how can we, you know, improve on X or Y? But yeah, that's something we've been brainstorming lately.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, we're not sure how far we want to be out from like the early childhood, like raising kids. But but you know, like postpartum, that's like another thing that has like and like while you're pregnant to a lot of questions, a lot of things that you want some like emotional support through and guidance. So having something, yeah, where it's right now, it's very focused on the children's like everything is linked to your child's profile. And so like all the guidance you get is for a child.

But to have something for the parent like, yeah, it could be for the relationship. I think for the existing product, one thing that I found those blog posts we'll talk about and we'll like, you know, like discuss the ones that we've seen and then also for the guides, like the programs. So we especially before we had kids and we had a little bit more time, we would watch video courses together. But then some of the things like I would read some of the parenting books, like I was more into reading that for parents who don't have the time, I think it's a really nice tool because you can be on the same page.

You can get the very short plan and it's not up to like one parent or both parents to do all of the homework, you know, like reading books, seeing full courses. So you can be you can kind of ask the questions, be on the same page easier. Yeah, that's a good point.

Hunter Kallay: I mean, I can't speak from my experience, so I'm just going to leave it there. You feel like add input or something. But yeah, got nothing. Maybe Ryan would say something. But yeah, I mean, I'm definitely can see how it could benefit a relationship by keeping people on the same page for sure. Because I mean, just from seeing different experiences in my life, kids have a big impact on relationships. There's no doubt about it.

Stephen Marinsek: So yeah, things get turned upside down as soon as well, even before the little one arrives and that's yeah, something fast to be navigated.

Hunter Kallay: Dynamics different in a person there, fourth person or fifth person or whatever. Yeah, so do you know how many like you guys said that you're pretty small, you're starting out, seems like you're building a really good foundation, though. Do you know like of any is it mostly just family and friends that are using it right now? Or you talked about your marketing efforts. How are those going? Do you have like a user base of some number or are you still kind of figuring out how to get started with that? What does that look like?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, I've still been quite private with it. So we're getting some organic traffic now. It was really the AI blogs and like there's like a lot of blogs around different tools.

Like that bottle got picked up there. So you have some organic traffic there, some users from there. And then we've also been trying paid ads around the party training system. Users around there too. So far, we have been more private with it. So not maybe like a very small group of friends giving feedback, but mostly it's been strangers.

Hunter Kallay: Are you using paid ads for are you on like Reddit or Twitter, Facebook kind of stuff? This is just Google search. Google search. OK. Very cool. That sounds awesome.

Stephen Marinsek: It's been a learning process for us. I think like we'll have like an ad campaign. We'll see it out for a week or two and then kind of take all the learnings from that kind of implement them. That's what we're doing right now. We realized our static pages need to load much faster and then we're going to kick up the awareness and ads again as soon as that's out. So it's always like an iterate what's working well, keep that what needs to be improved, solve that and see where we land.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, that's that's just marketing in general. I was like trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. So basically throwing a bunch of things at wall and figuring out what's. Yeah, once something sticks, you're like, OK, we got to go with that. Yeah, but once you can get the snowball rolling, getting the snowball rolling is hard. Once you get the snowball rolling, you're like, OK, you know, so we found out like with our newsletter, we found that same sort of issue like getting started. We're like, OK, like you're trying to get like your organic growth and you always want your organic growth. But like, how do you get the snowball rolling? Like, yeah, so maybe we can talk privately about that.

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah, I believe you'll take your tips. Yeah, yeah, that would be cool. So you said it's just you two. Do you guys like so on this kind of marketing thing, do you guys have like a social media page that people can follow? I mean, you guys have a website.

What is that situation like? Yeah, we have Instagram. That's where we do different kind of posts. That's where really we just want to show how like what does the product look like in action? What kind of questions can you ask?

What kind of what kind of tips are there? And so it's general parenting advice and plus some of the examples of what you can do in the product. And then, yeah, we do have a website, bottle dot a I. You can on the on our homepage, we have a demo. So you can try out the like the personalized advice. It's set up for a hypothetical child, but but you can still get a flavor of what it's like to answer questions. And then you can stand up for free too. So you get the personalized advice and then the personalized blog for free.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, cool. And that's B O T T E L L dot a I.

Nikki Marinsek: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. The name is a it's a mashup of bot and tell because it's yeah.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, I just put that together. OK, got it. I was wondering who came up with that name? How'd you get that name?

Stephen Marinsek: Yeah, I think it dawned on you one evening.

Nikki Marinsek: I was like, hey, what about this? That's like, yeah, that sounds right. It's sticking. Yeah, I care about design a lot. So even like when we were first thinking about this, like one of my first things is like, let me do the logo.

Hunter Kallay: Let me do that. That's the fun stuff. That's the fun part. Yeah. You can do all the coding or whatever tech stuff. I'll do I'll do the logo. Yeah. And I do. Yeah. That's the way to do it. Yeah. So do you get I was also going to ask you guys on that coding slash tech thing.

It just dawned on me. You guys use chat GPT. You said, are you are you thinking about ever using any different language models in the future? Or you do you like chat GPT? If so, is there a reason that you like chat GPT more than others?

Nikki Marinsek: Yeah. So I mean, I would say we do like to have GPT. We switched over to chat GPT for for the the program stuff that had like the plans. I think, you know, it's better like reasoning we found. Mostly though, it's we've we've been very happy with it. And we have so much other like features to build around it that looking into different models hasn't been our first, you know, like a high priority. So not at this time. But I think once we become a little bit more of a stable state, and then if we feel like that's a limited factory, we'll look into more.

Stephen Marinsek: Yeah. And I think as we built the website, we purposely like architected it behind the scene so that it can be modular if there ever becomes a value case to switch.

So it wouldn't be too big of a lift. But you know, like, Nick, you said, it's been great so far. And like, like you said, Hunter, you know, just the two of us working on it. It's always like, what's the best use of our, you know, time after the kids go down before we're like out of energy, you know, it's really not. Yeah, just like triaging that sort of stuff.

Hunter Kallay: And then are you guys looking for are you looking for any VC funding like currently? Or do you guys look at like in the future, are you looking for any VC funding?

Stephen Marinsek: I don't think so. We're interested in bootstrapping it. You know, it's it's such it's been just such a we've been able to get really far with what we have. And I think part of the thing that needs to happen is like time needs to pass and more people like you said need to be more comfortable with it because they think parenting is going to be toward the later end of like topics and areas that adopt AI. So I think I think times on our side, we're in no rush and really what we're trying to do is just build a really good product with good product market fit. And then, you know, get that snowball rolling on our own, but we don't really need the accelerant that VC funding or more on it.

Hunter Kallay: Yeah, and if there's any other things like that you were thinking of, I asked most of the questions that I wanted to ask and a few more based on what you guys said. Was there anything else that you wanted to share about the project or your experience or just you guys in general?

Nikki Marinsek: You know, just the the one thing that came to mind while we're talking in terms of like, where do we see it going? One area that it could be interested, we've been approached for is using it for like daycares or schools or some sort of thing where it's you know, like the like a preschool might want to have some kind of like module for parents where they can get advice or get information about the school or the curricula, but it's tailored to their child. So that could be not something that we're like really seriously pursuing right now, but could be another another area. Opportunity. Opportunity.

Hunter Kallay: Follow their website, bottle.ai, Instagram. Was there any other plugs you guys have?

Nikki Marinsek: I think just stop by the website and check it out. We're working on like guides and articles, just general parenting resources for kind of the top questions just to if you don't need AI, but kind of just need some resources or questions answered. Fresh content there too.

Nikki Marinsek: But really, we just really appreciate this. This is like very neat to us. I'm sure you can maybe tell like we have been like quite private with this before. So this is you know, it feels nice. We really appreciate you taking the time and

Hunter Kallay: your parents go ahead and try it. Or if you just like technology, just go check it out. I mean, even if you're not a parent, I mean, I'm not a parent, but I thought the technology was really cool to just see how it works and stuff. So if you're a tech person, check it out.

If you're scared of tech, just check it out because it's really not that scary. It's just a very practical way to help. And it's not that much work. It's not much more work than googling something or looking something up. It's actually way simpler than that. Way less.

Yep. Anything can make your life easier. Why not try it out?

Right. So at least give it a try and then tell somebody to give it a try. So yeah, visit Bottle.com. Bottle.ai. Bottle.ai.

Yeah. Check out our newsletter fry-ai .com. We do weekday newsletters. It has three stories a day with the latest news in AI, the AI world. And then we also have three tools a day.

Usually we keep it to free tools, tools of all different varieties. And we have some other fun jokes on there and stuff like that. Very corny jokes.

I feel like corny jokes. You're going to like the newsletters. So check that out. And then we will put all the information below. Everything that I just said, we'll put below Bottle.

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