I talk through a bit about HistoryPal
I just counted.
75 unfinished SaaS demos sitting in my Replit account. Half-built productivity apps, abandoned dashboards, shopping cart prototypes that never saw a real customer.
Sound familiar?
Here's what changed everything: I stopped trying to build the next unicorn and started building things people might actually want to talk to.
Meet HistoryPal (still deciding if it goes live, but hear me out).
I grabbed this idea from Ideabrowser.com.
You pick a historical figure. Lincoln, Cleopatra, Tesla, whoever. Then you just... talk to them. Ask Lincoln about leadership. Ask Tesla about innovation. Ask Cleopatra about running an empire while everyone underestimates you.
The magic isn't just the AI conversation. I'm using the Library of Congress API to keep everything factual—no made-up quotes about how Napoleon invented the croissant.
Here's why this works:
✓ Clear value: Learn history through conversation
✓ AI does the heavy lifting: Natural language processing
✓ APIs handle accuracy: Real historical sources
✓ Simple to explain: "Talk to dead people, but like, historically accurate dead people"
The whole thing took me a week to build, at night, while on vacation. Not because I'm fast, but because I finally stopped fighting the tools and started using them.
Replit did the heavy lifting of building the entire thing. The Library of Congress API handles the fact-checking. I just connected the dots.
The real lesson?
Your SaaS idea doesn't need to be revolutionary. It needs to be useful.
People don't need another project management tool. But talking to Teddy Roosevelt about dealing with difficult people? That's something you can't get anywhere else.
HistoryPal may become a real thing. Maybe it stays in demo purgatory with the other 75 projects.
But for the first time in months, I built something that made me think, "Huh, I'd use this."
What's sitting unfinished in your development folder that might be worth finishing?
– Jimmy
Building the future, one conversation with the past at a time.