The feed of updates to Harsha Halvi's Blog
I was an avid gamer growing up. Most of my childhood was spent inside games of every kind. I quickly learned which ones I was good at, which ones I genuinely enjoyed, which ones I loved to hate, and which ones I wouldn’t touch again. On second thought, it was more granular than that. I was good, bad, and occasionally terrible on a per-level basis. That distinction decided whether I replayed a…
title: My Notes from Getting Real date: 2025-09-30 I know I’m late to the party, but I recently read Getting Real by Basecamp. I ended up treating it more like a manual for building and doing things than a book. Many of its core beliefs struck a chord with me. Here are a few gems that stood out: Getting Real Build Less: The fewer features, the less code to maintain, the less overhead, and the…
title: Scale of Things That Don’t Scale date: 2025-09-30 Doing things that don't scale One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned — in life, in startups, in anything serious — is the value of doing things that don’t scale in the beginning. I first came across this advice in Paul Graham’s essay Do Things That Don’t Scale . My initial reaction: why would anyone do that? Over time, I realized how…
title: Making Productivity Work date: 2025-09-30 Productivity After years of trial and error, I’ve found the trifecta that drives my personal productivity: Prioritization, OKRs, and Progress Tracking. The key is breaking big goals into smaller, manageable chunks. Not All Goals Are Equal Every project, big or small, ends up on a list. Then I ask myself: Why am I doing this? What outcome am I…
title: A Year of Writing date: 2025-09-30 A Year of Writing I remember it as if it were yesterday when I was still trying to find a good WordPress theme. I decided that I would finally stick to writing rather than experimenting. One random day while lurking on HackerNews, I came across Blot.im. For some reason, I loved the pitch — it felt like Postach.io/Ghost on steroids. One of the promises I…
title: Obvious Lessons I Have Learned Over the Years date: 2025-09-30 Lessons Learned As I write this, I realize that in less than 2 months I’ll turn 23. I remember the 19-year-old (naïve) me who self-nominated for Forbes’ 25 under 25 . Among my old files, I found a letter to my 21-year-old self, full of do’s and don’ts. Here are the obvious lessons I’ve (re)learned — sometimes the hard way,…
title: The One That Never Was date: 2025-09-30 The One That Never Was Naval Ravikant often talks about living in the present. It resonates with me, but there’s a problem: I love control, and I think a lot about the past and future. Time and space fascinate me. My watches remind me of this obsession: every watch I own is set 5 minutes ahead and 1 day behind. Five minutes ahead → reminds me to…
title: 30 Day Challenges: One Month at a Time! date: 2025-09-30 30 Day Challenges I once heard that we typically overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in 5 years (or even a decade). I now understand this better than ever. At the start of 2019, I set ambitious expectations for myself — aiming to grow 10X instead of 10%. Suffice it to say, that came back to bite me.…
title: Curious Case of Smartphone Addiction date: 2025-09-30 Smartphone Addiction About a year ago, I bought an Apple Watch on sale — no real reason, just an early birthday gift. A week later, I couldn’t imagine going back. Screen Time I turned on Screen Time to track usage. The results? Six hours a day on my devices. The biggest time sinks: WhatsApp, Mail, Instagram, and Chrome. The Push & Pull…
Superhuman If conversations in 2014 were all about Slack and its clones, come 2019 and the talk is all about an email client. Did you get any mails that had a “ Sent via Superhuman” signature? When I heard about it, I wanted to understand the hype around it and see if the famed Inbox Zero was my forte. After using Superhuman for over 2 months I was surprised at their Growth Rate than their…
The best product marketing campaigns follow a very simple road map: “ Show it, sell it; hide them, keep them” Show it : Optimize your marketing to get to the “ Aha, i knew this was a problem i have and this thing solves/improves it.” Sell it : Sell them, the problem,culture or whatever your products/processes can do for them. Hide Them : Hide your customers from other (hopefully inferior) ways of…
Always add a touch of madness Recently I was talking to a friend of mine and recounted my startup experiences, this time there was a slight difference: I was proud of all of the things I had done instead of being embarrassed about it. Somewhere during that call this post started constructing itself in my head, I had to write it down & hit publish. In retrospect, I was bound to mess up somewhere or…
I was talking to a friend and recounting my experiences building multiple SaaS startups and why SaaS is generally a tough nut to break into. While I was talking to her, I started asking myself with the benefit of hindsight “ What would I do differently the next time?”. Here are a couple of things I would have done differently, irrespective of what I was building. Start with the price: This was the…
title: Start, Stop and Improve date: 2025-09-30 Perspective can change everything Back when I was running Contactz, I faced chaos: too much to do, too little time, and no outsourcing options. I tried Agile. It failed. We moved from Jira to Asana to Trello, but things still broke down. What’s the Problem? I wanted a simple, scalable system to track everything. But I realized the real issue was me.…
I have started a couple of SaaS startups, consulted and worked with a few more over the better part of the decade and most of my learnings come from running SaaS products. Here are a few I have picked up over the years: The 80:20 Anything: Top 20% of your customers will be radically different from the others and in some sense as they are likely to be your power users. Sit with them often if you…
Checking off the checklist It doesn’t matter if joined a new workplace, took on the responsibilities as a Product Manager for the first time or are joining another team in the same org as a PM . Here are a couple of things you can do on your first week to supercharge your work so that you can get started as soon as possible. Stack: If you are working on a Product, it would be built on top of one…
Be a broken record! The most common question folks ask me is some variation of “ How do I become a Product Manager” & “ How did I land up a Product gig”. I usually tell folks I am an Accidental Product Manager and there are times I wish when I was not as clueless as I was. There is a whole dynamic of leading products & influencing different teams to build right things at the right time that gets…
Its hard to admit a couple of things for me but one of the things I have come to terms with is acknowledging the flaw of me taking the first step and then not looking back. Anything I want to do, I take the first step after a lot of hesitation and thought and once I go through motions of starting the first step its gone.. swoosh! Un-Wooshing it! I wanted to become fit, something I have never given…
The iPhone XR I recently picked up an iPhone XR and I just realised that I have been using it for nearly 2 month now as my Primary Device. Moving away from OnePlus 6 has been bittersweet, so here are the list of hits and misses for me of using XR as my primary driver and t(rusty) OP6 as my secondary driver. The hits: The Platform : I love the apps and the platform since I already work on a MacBook…
It was drizzling in an evening sometime this June or July where i found myself in a rather peculiar situation of sorts. I had been down to HSR Layout to meet up with my friends , once i was done with meeting them up it was time to go back to the hotel. I had a lot of time at my disposal but the same couldn’t be said about my wallet tough. After 2-3 cancellations when i tried to book a cab i…
Don't sweat it out yet “ Being a founder isn’t easy” is something that I heard a million times but did not completely understand the sentiment before I actually became one. When I compared notes with fellow founders I realised that most of the things were very common with most of our experiences so here are the list of truths I wished I knew before hand: No one gives a fuck (at first): If you are…
2019 is just a few days away and I ended up retrospecting my life, goals and the events that have got me through the year. Most of the guiding paths remain the same for me but i have realised writing them down somewhere is the best possible thing i can do so here they are: Velocity over Speed : I love measuring impact and impact are akin to outcomes they tell about the direction and speed at the…
I still remember asking my physics teacher as to why can’t I throw my pencil into space when I was in 6th grade: That day I learnt something called Escape Velocity . Couple of years, as a founder and product owner I asked my engineering team why can’t we ship X in a day or a week. When I finally understood everything about Gravity, Mass and Velocity a lot of things made sense and a lot did not.…
An interesting conversation is around app discovery and is one I ended up having with some friends of mine post Mac OS Mojave’s release. With the new App Store re-do a lot of the questions I had was will it help with discoverability ? Okay we are getting way out of topic for now another day another blog post (promise!). But most of the apps I use today are because of Word Of Mouth referrals in one…
It’s almost a year since I have been using Xbox Games Pass and lord knows how much I have saved over the course by paying 10$ over buying 25-50$ worth individual games and I think the present selection is really good. If you want to get an incredibly cheap way to play games, just get an Xbox One S and Xbox Game Pass. There are shit tons of titles for you to play and here are a few of the ones I…
Andrew Chen recently talked about “ The One That Didn’t Work Out” on Twitter and the whole thread hit me. I could relate a lot to the whole thing. My first startup, the first everything and then telling everyone that this is it, we are going to do this for the rest of our lives until it doesn’t work out. Chen summed perfectly ” The product that you stared at, every day, for years, gets shut down.…