Interview with the Developer of Junia.ai

Introduction

Welcome to Junia.ai, an ingenious AI platform that revolutionizes content creation at scale. Developed by Yi Zhuang (@yizhuang1996), Junia.ai was born out of the need to simplify and streamline the process of creating, enhancing, and publishing content across multiple niche sites. From generating articles to adding visuals and links, from schema markup to content management system (CMS) integration, Junia.ai is the answer to the strenuous demands of digital content creation.

Product

Junia.ai

Developer

Yi Zhuang

Twitter Handle

@yizhuang1996

Can you share a brief overview of your AI app and the problem it aims to solve?

An all-in-one AI platform for content creation at scale.

I was building multiple niche sites all by myself, it wasn’t easy:

1. First, I would need to find ideas
2. After finding ideas I would need to create content
3. What happen after the content is created? Well, i would need to add visuals, add links(internal, external, product affiliate links), add schema markup and so much more with some a lot of manul editing.
4. After that I would need to upload the content to a CMS, in my case I use contentful heavily(previous platform).

This is hard, no platforms can do this for you. So I built myself a prototype in 2 days, the initial prototype I built can generate me 100 articles at once, once the articles are generated, it can add feature image and complementary images in the blog section where it needs and even does internal linking automatically for me! And it even let’s me publish them all to my website live with one click.

I saw an opportunity and wanted to expand the idea, so I built Junia to solve the problems to fully automate this process.

What sets your AI app apart from others in the same domain?

1. Affordable. Other platforms charged 29 dollars for a 3000 words long article. Register an account in Junia, you can generate one for free with our blog post workflow.

2. Mass quality content generation made easy. Generate months worth of quality content in a matter of hours. Soon with images, internal linking automatically done.

3. Our AI document analysis is more accurate compared to other platforms.

5. We have the same or more functionalities than other platforms of the same domain but cheaper and better quality content.

What challenges do/did you face during the development process, and how did you overcome them?

Tech wise:

I use Nextjs and Vercel as the hosting platform.

1. When i started, the latest version of Nextjs was incredibly buggy and still is now. Development has been very painful, but still the best framework currently in the market for building any frontend applications.

Some of the issues I faced and how I overcome them:

1. When making a change in the code editor, it takes 30 seconds more a less for nextjs to reflect the changes and most of the time with a hard refresh of the whole development server. Haven’t solved this yet

2. Vercel is very easy to started with, saves a lot of time but however incredibly troublesome when the application grows as the limitation starts to hit. My application was constantly timing out, generating a 1000 words long artcile was almost impossible due to vercel restrictions on a 30 seconds time out especially when my application uses langchain a lot under the hood.

3. Another issue was that I had to maintain multiple duplicate codes for the same feature. For example if you’re using Edge runtime in Vercel, you can’t use Prisma anymore, any import Prisma in your code anywhere would lead to a runtime error, so I had to resolve to use serverless postgres(supabase) in my case where I have some part of the features using Supabase and some part using Prisma. I am not an expert in serverless postgres, but so far i am not a big fan, primarily it doesn’t support transactions and it commonly requires you to predefine your query as a postgres function, leading to unmaintainable and vulnerable codes and potentially broken data in the production database.

4. Junia.ai is a pretty fairly sizeable app, we use code-splitting a lot to make the website load faster, unfortunately vercel has limited support for code-splitting as it doesn’t keep the previous versions of the js bundle available, as a result I received complaints from users that after they click on a button, the app is stuck and they have to refresh the page manually, this makes me scare of making any new deployment. I fix it temporarily by using a hack to preload most of the commonly bundles after the initial load.

To summarize, I am overcoming most of the issues by migrating Junia.ai to be a monorepo and start moving the application to AWS from vercel.

2. Product wise

I am very bad at marketing and have done a bad job at it. I have a good product but I need to do a better job of spreading the words out there. This is still a constant learning process.

How do you envision the impact of your AI app on users’ lives and the broader community?

Save time, money and never get stuck again.

Creating content in the future shouldn’t be a manual process anymore, we aim to liberate your hands and let you focus on business growth purely.

What future updates or developments do you have planned for your AI app?

1. Fully automatic bulk content generation. You should be able to generate many articles at once with images, internal/external linking included with little manual work needed.
2. Add more Integrations that allows you to publish your content to various platforms.
3. Team collaboration feature. You can add team members to your project and collaborate on the content creation.
4. Text to video and image to image functionalities.

Can you share one piece of advice for aspiring AI app developers?

1. Start your project with a monorepo.
2. Depending on your use case, but i would avoid deploying your application to Vercel if possible as the platform isn’t suitable for AI applications. Or at least build it in a way that you can switch to another provider easily when the limitation hits.

Conclusion

As we look to the future, Junia.ai aims to make content creation a fully automated process, freeing up your time to focus on business growth. Exciting new features are in the pipeline, including fully automatic bulk content generation, additional platform integrations, team collaboration features, and text-to-video and image-to-image functionalities. Junia.ai is more than an AI application; it’s a tool that transforms how you create and manage digital content, enhancing productivity and creativity. Step into the future of content creation with Junia.ai.