By Rob Skane.
Have you ever needed to make sense of a situation, get clarity on a message, or a decision? If you have, then Seltlox.com is what you’re looking for. I had the pleasure of sitting down for a brief chat with Seltlox founder Adrien Washington, and this is what transpired.
RRX: What inspired you to create Seltlox, and how did the idea first take shape?
AW: It actually started with me messing around in Google AI Studio and seeing what I could make with AI even though I had no coding background.
Before Seltlox, I was using Sora to create AI videos from prompts. I eventually got tired of constantly having to come up with different ideas for videos, so I started experimenting with making little tools in AI Studio that could help me generate them. I made a few different prompt generators and some completely random little apps along the way. One was for positive affirmations; one was basically a button where different random things happened when you pressed it, and another was centered around positive news happening around the world.
The main one was called Solnyx. You could give it almost any word or subject, and it would turn that one thing into six completely different cinematic situations that I could then use as ideas for Sora videos. I kept changing and refining Solnyx until it became exactly the kind of prompt generator I wanted. Once I had done that, I started wondering if I could make something completely different. Instead of another tool for Sora, I wanted to see if I could somehow make a tool for life.
That experimentation eventually produced the earliest version of what became Seltlox. It was extremely raw and unpolished compared with what exists today, but I still remember the first question I gave it. The way it broke things down literally made me stop and reevaluate my own question in ways I had not considered before.
That was the moment that got me.
I remember thinking that I had never really had something like this in my life before. If it could make me stop and look at my own question differently, what would happen if other people had a way to do the same thing with the situations, messages, decisions, questions, and patterns in their own lives that felt hard to read?
I named it Seltlox the next day.
What followed was definitely not a straight line from that first experiment to the Seltlox that exists today. Over nearly nine months, it went through many iterations, experiments, changes, pivots, and refinements. Ideas were added, removed, and completely rethought. The way Seltlox looked changed. The way it analyzed things changed. Its capabilities changed. Even my understanding of what the product should and should not be became much clearer over time.
The first version had the spark that caught my attention, but it was nowhere close to the finished product. The Seltlox that exists today came from nearly nine months of figuring out what that original idea could actually become.
RRX: Can you walk us through some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting Seltlox off the ground, and what kept you going during those early stages?
AW: The biggest challenge was probably how much I did not know when I started. I had no coding background. I did not know how to build and launch a web application, how the infrastructure behind one worked, how authentication worked, how payments worked, or how all of the different pieces of a real software product were supposed to connect.
At the beginning, even very basic things were new to me. I had to learn how to work with the code outside of AI Studio, how to use Visual Studio Code, how to use the terminal, how to make changes without breaking things, and eventually how to get Seltlox running locally on my own computer. Some of those early accomplishments probably sound incredibly simple to somebody who has been programming for years, but to me they were big steps because each one opened the door to something I could not do before.
As Seltlox became more real, the problems became more real too. I had to learn about hosting, databases, accounts, billing, security, privacy, legal requirements, trademarks, analytics, taxes, customer support, and all of the other things that exist around the actual product.
There were plenty of moments where something broke, and I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. I eventually learned that panicking did not make the problem any smaller. I had to slow down, figure out what was actually wrong, and work through it one piece at a time. By the time I was dealing with real production problems involving hosting, APIs, and cloud services, I was working through things I would not have even understood the terminology for several months earlier.
What kept me going was really the feeling I had on that first night. I believed there was something useful at the center of Seltlox, and I wanted to find out how far I could take it.
I doubted myself plenty of times. There were definitely nights where I wondered whether I was trying to build something I had no business trying to build.
But I kept coming back to it.
Eventually, all of those individual nights added up to a real product and a real company.
RRX: How does Seltlox serve or benefit the local community, and what role do you see it playing in the area going forward?
AW: Seltlox is an online product, so it was not created specifically for Schenectady or the Capital Region. Someone here can use it the same way someone anywhere else can. But I have deep roots here, and my business background is here too.
I grew up in my family’s business, Cappiello Foods, and started helping there when I was very young. The business was a big part of my life from the time I was a kid.
After graduating from Marist College in 2010 with a degree in business and a concentration in marketing, I joined Cappiello Foods full-time and spent more than a decade working throughout the business. I eventually became co-owner and operator alongside my mother until the business closed in January 2022. When Cappiello Foods closed, I did not immediately know what the next chapter of my life was going to be. I spent the next few years trying to figure that out and exploring different things.
In 2024, I launched an Etsy shop called ImaginedPrintz around another interest of mine, graphic design. I genuinely thought at the time that it might become the next big thing for me. It became a real little business; people bought things from it, and I still have it, but it did not turn into the next chapter of my life in the way I originally imagined it would.
I was still figuring out what came next.
Eventually I started experimenting more seriously with AI, which led to Sora, Google AI Studio, the different little apps I was building, and ultimately Seltlox.
As far as serving the local community, I do not want to exaggerate that when Seltlox is still brand new. Right now the benefit is pretty simple. If somebody here has a situation, message, decision, question, or pattern that feels hard to read, they can use Seltlox just like anybody else can. Beyond that, there is something personally meaningful to me about the fact that I built it here. I grew up around one kind of business in Schenectady, spent years helping run it, went through a period where I honestly did not know what I was going to do next, and eventually ended up building a completely different kind of company here.
If Seltlox grows into something significant, I would absolutely be proud for a technology company built in Schenectady to become part of the local business story. But I would rather earn that over time than make big promises about what Seltlox is going to mean to the community before it has had the chance to prove itself.
RRX: What has surprised you most about building and growing Seltlox so far, whether about the business, your customers, or yourself as a founder?
AW: Probably the biggest surprise has been realizing that building something and getting people to understand why they should use it are completely different challenges. For nearly nine months, most of the problems were things I could work on directly. If something broke, I could investigate it. If something did not feel right, I could change it. If a part of Seltlox was not good enough, I could keep working on it.
Then I launched it, and the problem changed.
Now I have to figure out how somebody who has never heard the word Seltlox understands what it is, when they should use it, and why they should care enough to actually try it.
That has been humbling.
I think before launch there was a part of me that viewed getting Seltlox live as the mountain. Once it was public, I realized that was one mountain. Getting people to discover it, understand it, try it, come back to it, and eventually pay for it is another one entirely.
Seltlox is still extremely new, so I am not going to pretend I have figured out growth or customers. I have not. What I have seen is that some people who actually use it seem to understand its value much faster than they understand how to describe exactly what kind of product it is.
That is really where a lot of my attention is right now. I am actively looking for better ways to get Seltlox in front of more people and, just as importantly, better ways to help people understand what it actually is and what it is capable of.
I think part of that challenge is that most people have become used to thinking about AI as a back-and-forth conversation with a chatbot. Seltlox is different from that. You bring it the situation, message, decision, question, or pattern that you are trying to make sense of, and it gives you one detailed read of it. Part of what I am figuring out now is how to communicate that difference in a way where the lightbulb goes off for somebody before they ever have to sit there wondering what they are supposed to do with it. I have also surprised myself.
I still do not suddenly feel like a traditional programmer or software engineer. There are also moments where being Founder, President, and CEO still sounds strange in my own head. But there are too many things now that I once thought I could never do and eventually did. I built Seltlox. I launched it. It exists on the internet, and people can actually use it. My brain is probably still catching up to some of that.
RRX: Looking ahead, what’s next for Seltlox, and what advice would you give to other aspiring local entrepreneurs?
AW: What’s next is figuring out how Seltlox earns a place in people’s lives.
For almost nine months, my main question was whether I could actually build this thing and get it into the world. Now that it is live, the questions are different.
How do people discover it? What makes someone decide to try it? What kinds of things do they use it for? What makes somebody come back? What makes somebody tell another person about it? What eventually makes somebody willing to pay for it?
I do not have all of those answers yet.
The long-term goal is for Seltlox to become something people naturally think of when something feels hard to read. A situation happens. You get a message you keep thinking about. You are stuck on a decision. A question keeps circling. You notice a pattern but cannot quite make sense of it. Eventually I want there to be a natural thought of, “Run it through Seltlox.” I want Seltlox to become a name, a brand, and a function people recognize.
As far as advice, I would probably tell somebody not to wait until they feel qualified before they begin.
If I had told myself that I needed to understand everything required to build a software company before I was allowed to start Seltlox, it would not exist.
I learned because I started.
At the same time, persistence does not mean blindly convincing yourself that everything you do is right. I have had to change things, remove things, abandon ideas I liked, admit when something did not work, and accept when the evidence was telling me something different from what I wanted to hear.
I also think there is an identity part of starting something that people do not always talk about. You can have the company, the title, and the responsibilities before you actually feel different inside.
I am the Founder, President, and CEO of Seltlox. That is factually true. But there are still moments where part of me feels like the same guy who was sitting there months ago wondering if he could figure out how to make any of this work.
Maybe you do not become ready first.
Maybe doing the work is what slowly makes you ready.
I am still somewhere in that process.
