Ian Hsiao’s work and projects

Apr – Sep 2026

Idea. An AI-native content engine for B2B SaaS companies: Posting Machine turns company context into LinkedIn content for founders and executive teams.

Work. Co-founded with my friend Hank as CTO. Built the agent harness and the product end to end (context management, drafting, customer review, scheduling, and analytics), talked to customers, and made sales.

Result. $3k MRR and 14+ paying customers by the time I left, including YC companies and top Twitter personalities. Made the top 10% of YC applications.

Sep 2026

Idea. What if your agents had their own cloud computer that never sleeps, and you could take over the browser whenever you want?

Work. Built on E2B, a persistent cloud sandbox for spawning agents. Implemented importing all your cookies from your local browser (Chrome/Arc) into the remote computer, signing in with your ChatGPT subscription so it powers the agents, and human/agent handoff of the browser, plus authentication, resource locking, mobile access, and a macOS client.

Status. Not launched yet.

Sep 2026

Idea. What if I could talk to my audiobooks after they read to me, and internalize the content through discussion?

Work. Built PDF/EPUB upload, four-part AI audio digests, narration, and real-time voice discussion with recaps.

Status. Prototype; not launched yet.

Sep 2026

Idea. What if tools kept expanding what one person can do? A direction I'm exploring.

Work. Wrote and built an interactive essay, with interactive diagrams and a canvas ripple system.

Status. Work in progress.

Feb – Aug 2026

Work. Built and shipped a health-data MCP integration (OAuth/PKCE, scoped access, and cross-user access protection) that exposes health memories, nutrition, wearable summaries, biomarkers, and reports to AI clients. Then built an OpenClaw plugin for Compound, which grew into a standalone agent harness with its own health tools, open to anyone on WeChat with their own account.

Apr 2026

Idea. What if you could update your résumé just by talking to ChatGPT, and get a fully formatted PDF back?

Work. Built conversational résumé editing over MCP, with persistent structured data, Typst PDF generation, inline previews, and English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese templates.

Feb 2026

Idea. What if you could see all the curated places, event locations, and places to watch out for in one place, and plan your trip there? Designed for event attendees and people who value safety as a first-time visitor. Related thought: Agents as the new backend

Work. Built a trip planner with curated spots, event integration, and safety-aware routing.

Result. Ranked #10 on Product Hunt with 90+ upvotes in one day.

Jan 2026

Idea. What if your alarm can talk to you?

Work. Built an iOS app with iOS 26 AlarmKit and launched on the App Store in 7 days.

Result. Ranked #18 on Product Hunt with 96 upvotes.

Feb – Dec 2025

Purpose. Help researchers quickly understand academic papers through visual flowcharts of research ideas and methodologies.

Idea. Reading literature reviews is time-consuming and researchers need faster ways to grasp paper concepts and avoid redundant research - visual flowcharts could accelerate academic comprehension.

Work. Interviews 50+ researchers and students to understand their needs and pain points. Built web application with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Supabase, and major LLM APIs. Launch on major social media platforms. Sent emails to 7,000 students at PKU to get feedbacks.

Result. Users report spending 5x less time to understand a paper. 100+ daily active users within weeks of launch, 180 upvotes on Reddit. 1.4k users.

Nov – Dec 2025

Purpose. Explore tools for thought built around the belief that thoughts are non-linear, interwoven, and best navigated with extensive keyboard shortcuts support.

Work. Designed the system and interactions.

Result. Not launched.

Nov – Dec 2025

Purpose. Help myself read history books and other long, dense texts more easily

Work. Vibe-coded everything so Claude can reshape chapters into something navigable without losing the details.

Result. Not launched.

Sep – Nov 2025

Purpose. Built this for my younger self because I love to imagine stickmans fighting, and I'd absolutely love this if i'm a kid again.

Work. Built iOS application with AI integration for creative drawing tools.

Result. Available on the App Store.

Jun – Sep 2025

Purpose. To build a fastest and cheapest way for people to build their personal website.

Work. Collaborated with Enrico. I handled 100% of the technical work. Built a full-stack application; built a RAG system for style guide; implemented a payment system with LemonSqueezy; implemented data tracking system with Amplitude; implemented a double-click to edit & drag-and-drop to change image, online website editing feature; implemented a tenant domain system, one for displaying user-created sites, one for main app.

Result. We launched, got 43 users and realized that the giants in the website creating field is already moving into this AI-assisted area quickly, and that focusing on personal website only (where the giants overlooked) isn't interesting enough so we stopped working on this.

Mar 2025

Idea. Cross-domain learners need a way to understand unfamiliar concepts quickly. Learning by analogy is a powerful way to understand new concepts.

Work. Built a chat-based learning assistant using Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and major LLM APIs.

Result. No meaningful user engagement because of the lack of clear user persona and value proposition.

Learning. Product failed due to lack of clear user persona and value proposition - taught importance of market validation before development.

Feb 2025

Purpose. Help researchers efficiently filter daily ArXiv publications to find relevant papers in their field.

Idea. Researchers spend 30-60 minutes every 2 days manually screening 100+ new papers - AI could transparently filter and recommend based on personal research interests with clear reasoning.

Work. Developed recommendation system using LLM-based filtering with transparent reasoning, and personalized user preference learning.

Result. $10 in subscription revenue from 2 paying users, 62 email signups, 4% outreach response rate

Feb 2025

Purpose. Help cross-domain researchers quickly understand unfamiliar concepts by selecting text and getting tailored explanations.

Idea. Cross-domain researchers struggle with technical jargon when reading papers outside their expertise - contextual explanations could bridge knowledge gaps without switching to Google or ChatGPT.

Work. Built Chrome extension; talked to users

Result. Product went viral on Threads with 90K views and 325 reposts, 33 users on Chrome Web Store with 8 power users (30+ uses in 7 days), but the problem isn't painful enough for users to pay -> pivoted

Jan 2025

Idea. Cross-domain learners constantly encounter unfamiliar terms requiring manual lookup - AI could automatically annotate based on user background to streamline learning.

Work. Built Chrome extension using GPT-4o-mini to detect and annotate technical terms with contextual explanations based on user expertise level.

Result. 26 users on Chrome Web Store, 70% annotation redundancy due to AI limitations, negative user growth post-launch

Jan 2025

Purpose. Help users visually compare similar ideas and extract insights from multiple texts using a visual whiteboard that cuts text and organizes content.

Idea. Extracting useful insights from different long-form content, including cutting, categorizing, formatting, and organizing notes takes hours - a visual, smart whiteboard could help users focus on understanding and asking questions rather than manual knowledge organization.

Work. Built visual whiteboard application for text analysis and comparison. Launched on multiple platforms.

Result. No user feedback received; learnt that for a product to be successful, it needs to have a very clear target persona to start iterating with. I still adore this idea tho!

Sep 2024

Idea. Something useful that came out from experimenting with extracting insights in a lossless way from long articles.

Work. Experimented with different LLM APIs, different prompt engineering techniques, and different ways of understanding the structure of knowledges.

Result. Launched in production in Heptabase in Sept. 2024. The learning and prompts from my experiments were migrated to production in Heptabase. In 2024 this was a novel concept. In 2025, especially after the integration of other more general AI capabilities in Heptabase, this became more or less obsoleted.

Nov – Dec 2023

Purpose. Learning more about vector embeddings; participate in a hackathon

Work. Built matching system using Python, OpenAI text-embedding-ada-002, Pinecone vector database

Result. 9 github stars, and made some friends from people reaching out to learn more about this matching algorithm

Apr – May 2023

Purpose. Notion AI was launched, but I don't want to pay $10 a month so I built my own version.

Work. Built RAG system using Python, LangChain for text processing, OpenAI embeddings for semantic understanding, and Pinecone vector database for similarity search.

Result. 30 github stars. I learned a lot about RAG, LangChain, and Pinecone. It's my first AI-engineering project.

Aug 2022

Purpose. Share effective study methodologies and advanced physics concepts with high school students -- As a substitue physics teacher (I was in my second year of college)

Work. Taught 6 hours across multiple sessions using presentation tools, interactive demonstrations, and the Cornell note-taking system.

Result. 90% of students think my teaching is very helpful. Several students said they finally understood the concepts that they didn't understand in the past 3 years.