Overview

What started as a simple way to track my favorite quotes and sayings—words that truly resonated with me—turned into something more. I’ve always loved the idea of collecting wisdom and sharing it, not just with friends but with anyone looking for a spark of daily inspiration.

That’s how Proverbia was born.

Role

Co-founder & CEO

Platform

iOS

Deliverables

Product development, UI/UX, front-end, back-end, content, deployment.

Execution

Research

Before building Proverbia, I explored countless apps that offered a similar experience. While there were plenty of options, most followed the same formula—endless lists of quotes, cluttered with ads, and basic filters by genre or author. It felt transactional, not meaningful.

I wanted to create something different. A truly immersive experience that let people go beyond just reading quotes—to dive deeper into the words that resonated with them. And I wanted it to be free—no distractions, no annoying ads. That meant building it in a way that kept costs as low as possible, making it sustainable without compromising on the experience.

The basics

A foundation for a great experience should include tried-and-true features—the essentials that users expect:

  • Effortless browsing through thousands of quotes
  • Sorting by genre to quickly find what speaks to them
  • Favoriting to save the quotes that truly resonate

In addition to these must-haves, I wanted to be mindful of the user experience. Instead of requiring yet another account, I leveraged iCloud storage to sync favorites seamlessly across devices—private, effortless, and hassle-free.

The secret sauce

But I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted to give people more than just a browsing experience—the ability to truly immerse themselves in the quotes that spoke to them. To explore their meaning, understand the author’s life, and see the context in which the words were spoken. Because wisdom isn’t just in the quote itself—it’s in the story behind it.

But creating high-quality interpretations at scale is no small feat. Crafting insightful, meaningful content takes time. So, I turned to AI. By leveraging a Large Language Model on the back-end, I was able to generate consistently rich, thoughtful insights—bringing each quote to life in a way that feels natural and deeply resonant.

What started as an experiment became the app’s most beloved feature—a way for users to truly connect with the wisdom they discover.

Leveraging iOS ecosystem

As the app started to take shape, I still felt there was an opportunity to take it to the next level—to create serendipitous moments where people could stumble upon wisdom effortlessly and share it with others.

By leveraging the iOS ecosystem, I built features that make inspiration feel natural and ever-present:

  • Proverb of the Day – A widget that updates daily, delivering a fresh quote right to the home screen.
  • Proverb of the Moment – Siri integration that offers a random quote on demand, creating unexpected sparks of insight.
  • Seamless Sharing – With iOS sharing capabilities, users can save quotes in a beautifully formatted image, post them on Instagram, or send them to friends in Messenger—making it effortless to share words that resonate.
 

With these features, Proverbia doesn’t just store wisdom—it brings it into everyday moments.

Making it cheap

Since I offer Proverbia for free, I needed to keep running costs as low as possible—without compromising the experience. This meant making smart technical choices.

I leveraged Firebase on the back-end, taking advantage of its free tier, which includes a million free database lookups and serverless cloud functions. These functions handle requests to the OpenAI API for quote unpacking, but to keep costs down, I built an efficient caching system.

Instead of hitting OpenAI every time a user wanted to dive deeper into a quote, the first request would store the unpacked content in Firebase. Any future requests for the same quote would pull from Firebase first, only calling OpenAI if the content wasn’t already available.

With this approach, I was able to unpack thousands of quotes and serve hundreds of users—for less than $20 in total.