Riley Crabb is not an engineer, developer, or programmer. The Walla Walla, Washington-based serial entrepreneur built Seek, a low-code and no-code AI tool that helps people improve their everyday minds. Appsand then apple and Google Play Last August, he did just that with chatGPT, and the app was downloaded 500 times.
“I needed a way to guide me to peace and serenity,” one reviewer wrote on the Apple Store. “My life is stressful and I have little experience with meditation. This AI app guides me to reflect on different thoughts and situations. It has helped me to see different concepts and subjects from a different angle. This app is very subjective and speaks very matter-of-factly about spirituality, so it doesn’t matter what you think about spirituality or religion. I would recommend this app to anyone as it gives you knowledge about the history of spirituality and helps you learn more about yourself at the same time.”
Clubb attended the MIT Sloan School of Management and had entrepreneurial experience at the time he launched the app. HarvestIn 2017, he built an onboarding, safety, training, and communications app for farms, and in 2021, he was awarded Farm Bureau Entrepreneur of the Year. Though he studied business, he also got heavily involved in technology at MIT. “Python is a pretty common computing language, but I think that was my only real coding experience,” he says.
Clubb was inspired to start the app because of his own journey as a recovering alcoholic — he’s been sober for 12 years. “Spirituality has been a huge part of my experience in recovery and I’ve long felt that people could benefit from a lot of spiritual wisdom,” he said.
One thing Crabb has discovered through his recovery is that developing spirituality requires active effort. “I grew up thinking spirituality was like a light switch, but for me it was basically off,” he says. “I always envied people who had faith, and I just didn’t feel it. Now I think of it as like a muscle. Our physical health is either good or bad. I believe the same about mental health. You’re either good or bad, and your mental muscles are either trained or developed or they’re not. But it’s the challenges and the stresses in our lives that actually create the conditions to grow these mental muscles, to develop spirituality, and to get closer to God.”
With this in mind, he got excited about the potential of generative AI and came up with Seek. His vision was to enable users to chat with an AI-powered spiritual advisor to create daily spiritual and spiritual lessons. He saw the power of AI to personalize lessons for each user, differentiating his concept from many apps that are libraries of content that users have to sift through. “My brain was filling up with all kinds of ideas, but this one stood out,” he says.
Crabb quickly compiled a collection of 50 books by spiritual thinkers, writers, and philosophers across six spiritual and religious traditions: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Taoism. He began experimenting with chatGPT to turn the works into lessons. For example, he might write prompts like, “Write a spiritually-based lesson based on what you just read,” giving the tool instructions for tone, style, and sound. On the difficulty of drawing lessons from published works, he adds, “I specifically said, ‘Don’t plagiarize. You can’t copy verbatim.'”
After putting 50 books through chatGPT, the app has created over 4,000 general lessons. The app’s AI-powered spiritual advisor encourages users to chat about specific things going on in their lives, then offers spiritual lessons related to what the user shared. The app updates every night, creating new lessons from its database targeted to users’ interests.
Another key step was using chatGPT to set up hosting for the app’s backend on Google Cloud. “GPT4 is like an assistant to me,” says Clubb. “Anytime I want to use technology or software, instead of going to a support desk, I go to chatGPT, and chatGPT knows how to do it. In the case of Google Cloud, it helped me figure out how to open a terminal window, install source code into their cloud service, and connect to their APIs. The great thing is that chatGPT understands how these things work so well.”
That said, chatGPT has had a learning curve. “The value you get from generative AI is proportional to the value you put into it,” Clubb says. “Being able to ask really good questions means you get really good answers. Since the tool was released, I’ve spent hours every day trying different questions, digging deeper and reworking them. What really matters is how well you can interact with this intelligence. The output is a direct function of the input, so the quality of your input drives the quality of your output.”
Through this experimentation, he learned to frame his questions very carefully. For example, he might craft a prompt like, “I know I only have a few minutes, what apps would you recommend?” to ensure he receives a high-quality, concise answer from chatGPT.
FlutterFlow, a low-code tool, also helped: “You can build apps with minimal code, but when you’re working with cutting-edge AI and trying to integrate it with the Open AI API, you need custom coding,” he says. Unable to write code, he told chatGPT what he was trying to do and explained the results he was looking for.
For him, his first time using FlutterFlow often ended in failure. “It’s a very iterative process because you’re never going to get it right on the first output. But now that I’ve been doing this for a while and I come in with a bit of foundational knowledge, I think I’m able to spot mistakes quickly if I’m going in the wrong direction.”
The app’s images are powered by AI art generator Midjourney, and text-to-speech AI is used to power the app’s AI-powered spiritual advisor. “Every day, your advisor will talk to you about the importance of gratitude and how to deal with stress,” he says.
Another benefit of using AI is that it reduced the cost of developing the app, so Club didn’t need to raise capital. “AI can do so many things that we don’t need to hire developers or find co-founders who are technical,” Club says. “We don’t need to hire a whole team of writers to create content.”
Seek’s development costs were so low that he was able to bootstrap it: “It would have cost me $1 million to hire four co-founders, or at least three, over the past year to get this going,” he says. “It’s basically just me and some AI models.”
As chatGPT continues to improve rapidly, Clubb sees low-code and no-code tools as an equalizer, making projects like app development accessible to the masses for the first time.
“There’s no reason why coding should be a barrier between someone who has an idea for a product or service they want to bring to market and someone who can actually make it happen,” he says. “In an ideal world, it would be amazing if we could all just sit down on a phone or in front of a computer, describe the product or service we want to build, and it would spit it out.” That day may be sooner than we think.
