No Free Ratings
Banning a digit doesn't kill the cowardice — it relocates it. I banned 7s on my bake ratings, and the middle 6 inherited it. The rule is a lens, not a fix.
Ayush Saraswat
Essays on product management, startups, and building software.
Latest posts
Every Story Needs an Earned Secret
STAR-perfect interview answers fail because they're recall, not insight. The two-sentence rule that makes a story memorable: a counterintuitive POV plus the proof only you could have.
Retiring Products That Work
Squarespace had five mobile apps. Three had 4.9-star ratings. I retired all of them. The retirements worth getting right kill the seam, not the product.
Reverse-Engineering Google Flights
Every legitimate path to flight pricing data was too expensive, too unreliable, or dead. So I reverse-engineered Google Flights' undocumented API and built swoop, an open-source Python library for programmatic airfare data.
Open Hours: An Exercise in Building and Learning Quickly
Building an app for spontaneous phone calls with friends, and what we learned about network effects.
pee(k)
An IoT device concept that analyzes urine for health indicators, targeting adult children caring for elderly parents.
on Universe
A detailed product analysis of Universe, a mobile app for creating websites.
the splitty chronicles
Building an AI-powered receipt scanning app for splitting bills with friends.