Inkling: Your Literary Discussion Partner
Role: Founder/CEO/CFO/CTO/Chief Coffee Maker...I'm everything.
Platform: Web application (React) → iOS/Android (React Native or Swift)
Status: Early development, building toward MVP
Current Focus: Developing core chat functionality, validating market interest
The Vision in One Sentence
Inkling transforms solitary reading into collaborative intellectual exploration through AI personas that remember your conversations, grow with your thinking, and discuss literature at exactly the pace you're reading it—something generic AI tools fundamentally can't do.
The Origin Story
The idea originated a few months ago when I began reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky back in August of 2024. Great book. Alyosha is a saint. Anyways, I was hit with this wave of nostalgia and regret.
In high school, I attended a school with a class called Humane Letters. The express goal: read famous, powerful literature and have group discussions to tackle life's greatest philosophical questions. Here's the kicker—as someone who never struggled in school, I found it actually quite easy to pass that class with flying colors without doing any of the reading. Through some basic text scanning before class or the occasional SparkNotes summary, I found every way to do just fine without actually digesting and mulling over the ideas in the text.
Little did I know that my mental absence was only a detriment to myself. After discovering all these incredible books seven years later, I realized what a disservice I had done.
All that to say: I want my high school group discussions back. I want the glory days back dammit, I'll never grow up, take me back! take me back!
Here's the problem. How many people do you know that get together in 2025 to have discussions about old philosophical literature on a regular basis? I read now, I'm cool now, I see the benefit to reading these things...seven years too late. That's fine, I can build an app to solve all my problems. I've been learning how to build web apps for a couple years now…I literally took Harvard's CS50 class SO I THINK I'M QUALIFIED THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
Why Inkling?
The app is called Inkling, after the literary group (The Inklings) of writers and thinkers—C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and some other less important guys—who would convene in Oxford (fancy) to discuss literature, ideas, poetry, fiction, and the like. Some of my favorite modern thinkers all in one place, wow I better name an app after them.
Also doing some quick research, the name "inkling/inklings" is really only attributed to them and a character from the Splatoon video game. For SEO purposes and memorability, the name felt sticky. Plus, with a name like Inkling, the branding and mood boards just start creating themselves. Old literature, classical type fonts, ink bleeds on parchment paper, pens and quills, old wooden libraries...you get the vibe.
So I bought the domain Inkling.chat for $5.98/year and started building an app to recover all the lost learnings I had unknowingly let slip by me seven years ago.
The Problems I'm Solving
Let me distill my previous rant into specific, addressable problems:
Reading alone, you're trapped in your own interpretation. You miss nuances, alternative readings, and the joy of intellectual sparring. The best insights come from having to defend or reconsider your understanding.
People frame ideas from books through past experiences and biases, ignoring everything that doesn't support preconceived notions. Talking with others about how they read the same text can open your eyes to what the same words mean to different people.
In a world surrounded by rage-baiting and emotionally grabbing headlines, it's nice to take a break and just read something that doesn't profit off your attention. Inkling aims to encourage reading difficult texts.
Complex concepts need unpacking. It's nice to have someone there to help you break down Kant's categorical imperative or Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor without feeling stupid.
Typing out literary discussions kills the flow of thought. Voice is how we naturally process complex ideas.
Current AI voice features are slow and robotic, not customizable to different discussion styles, unable to handle full-text uploads in a meaningful way, and are generic everything-apps, not curated literary experiences.
If I upload a 300-page book to ChatGPT, it either tries to analyze the entire thing at once or forgets where I am in my reading. I need an AI that knows I'm on page 147 and won't spoil page 148.
Discussing personal interpretations of literature feels intimate. I don't want my philosophical musings sold to advertisers.
Core Differentiators (Our 10x Features)
Unlike ChatGPT's generic conversation history, Inkling personas build actual intellectual relationships with you. They remember that three weeks ago you connected Dostoevsky's suffering to your own experience with loss. They reference your previous insights. They grow to understand your thinking patterns, philosophical leanings, and reading style.
ChatGPT is built to help you code, plan trips, write emails, and discuss books all with equal priority. Inkling is built for one thing: deep literary discussion. The entire UX is designed around the reading experience.
Our RAG architecture knows exactly where you are in a book. Tell Inkling you're on Chapter 5, and it discusses Chapter 5 concepts without spoiling Chapter 6. The system chunks books by chapter/section, stores your reading progress as metadata, and the AI actively avoids referencing content you haven't reached.
Low latency voice chat (currently ~1.5s, targeting <300ms) with natural pauses, emotion, and human-like pacing. This isn't "talk to text then text to talk"—it's real-time conversational AI that feels like discussing books with a friend who's always available.
Want a Socratic questioner who challenges every assumption? Build it. Need a supportive guide for difficult texts? Customize it. Each persona maintains a consistent personality, discussion style, and memory across all conversations.
The Stack
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Why Now? The Cultural Moment for Deep Reading
There's a reason I'm building this in 2025 and not 2018. Something's shifting in the culture. People are getting tired.
You see it everywhere:
- The productivity space has evolved. It's not about "hustle harder" anymore—it's about deep work, slow productivity, and intentional living.
- Digital minimalism went mainstream. App blockers. Dumb phones. Social media detoxes. People are actively trying to escape the attention economy.
- Nostalgia for focus is real. Vinyl records. Film cameras. Physical books outselling e-books. People want to own their media again.
- "Intellectual content" is exploding. Philosophy and history TikTok gets millions of views. Long-form video essays on YouTube are thriving.
- The "cozy aesthetic" is Gen Z's rebellion. Cottagecore. Dark academia. Slow living. It's a rejection of the grind.
I feel this personally. The content machine fatigue. The sense that I'm consuming endlessly but never actually learning anything. The algorithmic rage bait designed to keep me scrolling but never satisfied.
There's a hunger for depth right now. For real knowledge. For understanding how to be human instead of just being a mind connected to a screen.
Knowledge is power. Self-knowledge even more so.
Use Inkling to understand the world around you by first understanding who you are, where we came from, and the beauty we're capable of creating.
Honest Self-Audit
- Latency might be impossible to get below 500ms (network physics)
- RAG system might not scale to 500-page books without degrading quality
- Voice AI might feel robotic no matter what we do
- API costs might make unit economics impossible
- People might actually prefer reading alone
- "Just use ChatGPT" might be an insurmountable objection
- Market might be too niche (literary discussion nerds + AI early adopters)
- Willingness to pay for this specific use case is unknown
- I'm a solo founder learning as I go
- No formal CS degree, just self-taught web dev
- Might take 2x longer than I think
- Burnout is real when you're doing everything
- OpenAI could add persona memory and book progress tracking tomorrow
- ElevenLabs could launch conversation features next month
- A well-funded team could copy this in 6 months
Final Thought
I don't know if this will work. I don't know if there's a market. I don't know if I can build it fast enough before someone else does.
But I know that seven years ago, I missed out on something profound because I was lazy. And I know that right now, there are people sitting alone with The Brothers Karamazov or Meditations or Infinite Jest, wishing they had someone to talk to about what they're reading.
If I can build that for even a few hundred people, this whole thing is worth it.
Inkling is my second chance at those humane letters discussions. And maybe, just maybe, it's yours too.
Last updated: October 2025