I Was Building a Social App. Then I Accidentally Built an AI Startup.

A year and a half ago, I wasn't trying to build an AI company. I was building a small social platform called spritex-social — nothing fancy, just a side project a handful of friends were testing with me. No grand plan, no investors, no roadmap beyond "let's see if people like this." At some point, users started asking the same basic questions over and over: how do I change my profile, where's this setting, how does that feature work. Instead of writing endless documentation, I thought — why not just let AI answer this? So I wired up Google's Gemini API through Google AI Studio, built a small Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, and gave it context about the platform. It was supposed to be a support chatbot. Nothing more. That's not how it went. I found myself spending more time improving the chatbot than improving the actual social app. Every small upgrade made me ask another question: could it remember conversations? Could it use tools? Could it search the web? Could it do things instead of just answering questions? The more I asked, the less interested I became in the social platform I was supposed to be building. Eventually I had to admit it to myself: I wasn't building spritex-social anymore. I was building something else entirely. So I stopped. Not because the project failed — because my attention had already moved somewhere else, and I finally stopped pretending otherwise. That "somewhere else" became RexiO — a Bangla-first AI platform I've been building solo ever since: my own orchestration layer, an intent classifier, 30+ tools, model routing across providers, and eventually our own fine-tuned models trained from scratch on borrowed Colab GPUs. RexiO went public on July 10, 2026. This chatbot pivot is just one chapter of a much longer story — one that actually starts on a Nokia button phone, ২ টাকা data packs, and a ৳20 freelance job that became my first line of code in production. I wrote the whole thing down, unfiltered — the rewrites, the 12-hour