I wasted a week.

Not in the dramatic, startup way. Just quietly, steadily, in the way where you feel busy the entire time and then sit down on a Sunday and go "wait, why did I build this."

Here is what happened. I had an idea. The models are good enough now that within a day I had something running. Within three days I had something that looked like a product. I kept going because the momentum felt real, and momentum is its own kind of drug when you are building solo. By the end of the week I did what I should have done before I opened my editor: basic first-principles thinking. Does this problem actually exist at the scale I need it to? Who is paying for it today? Why would they switch?

The answers were not good.

And the frustrating part is that I knew this. Not the specific answers, but the process. I have read enough, thought enough, been around enough early-stage stuff to know that you start with the problem and then find the tech, not the other way around. That was just the rule. For a long time it was the rule because it had to be. If building something took six months, you could not afford to be wrong about the premise. So people were careful. They did the uncomfortable thing of talking to people, sitting with a problem, making sure it was real before they committed.

Now building takes a week. And so somehow I convinced myself that the discipline could wait.

It cannot. The discipline is still the whole thing. The speed just makes it easier to skip it without realizing you have.

I think there is something specifically weird about this moment where the capability of the tools has started to feel like a reason to build. Like, I can build X, therefore there must be someone who needs X. That logic has never worked. It did not work in the early days of mobile apps, it did not work in the no-code wave, and it is not working now for me personally in the AI wave. The technology being impressive is not the same as the technology being needed.

Anyway, early days. I am not being hard on myself about it, just honest. The correction is pretty simple in principle: problem first, always, and then use the speed to get to an MVP that actually has a target. That part I am genuinely excited about. When you do know the problem is real, being able to get to something testable in days rather than months is still kind of unbelievable. That has changed something fundamental about what a solo founder can do.

I just need to make sure I earn that speed rather than borrowing against it.

I have always hated that word.

Not because the idea behind it is wrong, but because of what it felt like every time it was pointed at me. Like someone was quietly taking something away. Like every hard thing I had done, every uncomfortable decision, every late night - suddenly had an asterisk next to it. “Yeah, but you had help.” And I would get defensive. Every. Single. Time.

I think a part of me confused acknowledging privilege with discrediting effort. As if the two couldn't coexist. As if saying "I had some tailwind" automatically meant "the work didn't matter." That's the part I've been slowly unlearning.

Privilege is a wide word. It can be a network you inherited, money you didn't earn, a talent you were born with, or just the fact that your circumstances allowed you to make a choice that most people can't. It isn't always obvious. Sometimes it's invisible precisely because you've always had it.

Mine became obvious to me recently - when I decided to leave my job to take a shot at something entrepreneurial.

The moment I made that call, I realized something: no one's life changed because of it. No one was eating less. No one was stressed. No EMIs were in danger. No one was depending on my salary to get through the month. It was just me, making a decision about my own life, with no real damage if it didn't work out for a while.

That is privilege. Staring right at me.

And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. The freedom to be bad at something for a period of time, to figure it out, to iterate - that is not available to everyone. A lot of people are one bad month away from a crisis. I'm not. That gap is massive, and for a long time I just didn't sit with it long enough to appreciate it.

I want to use this time, this freedom, this unusual lack of pressure to build something that creates genuine stability - for me, and eventually for the people I care about. To never be in a position where I can't help someone I want to help. That feels like the most honest way I can honor what I've been given.

Acknowledge it. Don't let it make you feel small. And then use it like you mean it.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about showing people work that isn't done yet. We're trained from school onwards to present polished results — the finished essay, the final exam, the completed project. The messy middle is supposed to stay hidden.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I've started sharing things earlier. Not finished products, but works in progress. Half-formed ideas. Rough prototypes that barely hold together. And something interesting has happened: the feedback I get at this stage is far more useful than anything I receive after something ships.

The paradox of early sharing

When you share something polished, people tend to react to it as a finished object. They'll tell you it looks nice, or they'll nitpick details that are hard to change. But when you share something rough, people engage with the idea behind it. They suggest directions you hadn't considered. They point out assumptions you didn't know you were making.

This is the paradox: the less finished your work looks, the more honest and generative the feedback you receive.

What I've learned

Building in public isn't really about transparency for its own sake. It's about creating feedback loops that are tight enough to actually change the trajectory of what you're building. A two-week feedback cycle means you might course-correct once or twice a month. A daily feedback cycle means you're navigating in near real-time.

There's also an accountability element. When you tell people what you're working on, you're more likely to follow through. Not because anyone is watching — most people forget what you told them within minutes — but because you've made a small commitment to yourself.

The uncomfortable truth

Most of what we build doesn't matter as much as we think it does. Sharing early helps us figure out which parts actually do matter, and which parts we're just attached to because we spent time on them. That distinction is everything.

The next time you're tempted to wait until something is ready, consider showing it now instead. The worst that can happen is someone shrugs. The best that can happen is someone helps you see something you couldn't see alone.

If you've worked in e-commerce for the past five years, you've watched a tectonic shift happen in real time. The monolithic platforms that once dominated the space — the all-in-one solutions that handled everything from inventory to checkout to email — are being gradually unbundled into specialized services.

This isn't just a technology trend. It reflects a deeper change in how businesses think about their digital infrastructure.

The composable thesis

The argument for composable commerce is straightforward: no single vendor can be best-in-class at everything. A platform that handles product information management, search, checkout, content, loyalty, and analytics is spreading itself across too many problem domains. At some point, the compromises become visible to customers.

Composable architecture says: pick the best tool for each job, and connect them through APIs. Your search might come from Algolia, your content from a headless CMS, your checkout from a specialized payments provider, and your product data from a PIM built for your specific catalog complexity.

Where it gets complicated

The theory is clean. The practice is messy. Every API integration is a potential point of failure. Every vendor relationship is a contract to manage. Every data flow between systems needs to be monitored, versioned, and maintained.

I've seen teams adopt composable architecture and end up spending more time on integration plumbing than on the customer experiences they were supposed to be improving. The stack becomes the product, and the actual product suffers.

The middle path

The most effective commerce teams I've worked with take a pragmatic approach. They don't go fully composable on day one. Instead, they identify the one or two capabilities where their current platform is genuinely holding them back, and they swap those out first.

Maybe search is the bottleneck — customers can't find what they're looking for, and the built-in search is barely functional. So you integrate a dedicated search provider and leave everything else alone. You learn how to manage an API integration in a low-risk context before you attempt a full-stack decomposition.

What matters more than architecture

At the end of the day, the best commerce stack is the one that lets your team ship improvements to the customer experience quickly and reliably. If your monolith does that, keep it. If a fully composable stack does that, great. Most teams land somewhere in between, and that's fine.

Architecture is a means, not an end. The customers browsing your site don't care whether your checkout is a microservice or a module in a monolith. They care whether it works.

• Spearheaded the development of an outbound sales channel from inception.
• Closed over $1.5M in new business within 1.5 years, becoming the top revenue contributor.
• Scaled the flagship product POSx to 6 paying clients in five months, generating $40K ARR.

after a year in the founder's office, i moved into a full-time head of growth role.

it came with a lot more responsibility and a lot more pressure, which, strangely enough, is where i tend to do my best work.

while my previous role at devx was all about managing chaos across different functions, this one was much more straightforward on paper. i had clear kpis and a simple objective: bring revenue to the table.

the interesting part was figuring out how.

that's what i loved most about the role. no two days looked the same. some days were spent doing cold outreach. some days there were so many inbound leads that i didn't know where to focus my time. some days were dedicated to building partnerships that would pay off months down the line.

the role also involved a fair bit of travel. mumbai became a regular trip, and i found myself flying to bangalore and delhi quite often. i even ended up in las vegas for a convention, which was one of my first solo trips and probably the last. turns out i enjoy travelling a lot more when there are people around.

i also got to lead a lot of the marketing content we put out on social media. from collecting customer stories and ad collateral to writing scripts, coming up with hooks, and occasionally even appearing in the videos myself. it was a surprisingly fun part of the job and something i'd love to do more of in the future.

more than anything else, this role taught me a lesson i'll probably carry for the rest of my life: revenue solves a lot of problems.

every function in a company matters, but the ability to bring money through the door is what keeps everything moving. seeing that up close completely changed how i think about businesses.

during this time, we expanded to multiple cities, grew to a team of 150, moved into a new office space and went from working with early-stage startups to enterprises like raymond, cello, louis phillipe. stuff of dreams.

• Closed over $50K in projects while managing hiring, project execution, and full sales cycles.
• Drafted foundational processes from scratch, including brand playbooks and hiring workflows.
• Initiated strategic partnerships, including with AWS, leading to co-sell and referral opportunities.

what do i even say about this experience?

game changer is probably the right phrase.

until this point, life had been pretty structured. school, university, first job. every step was planned, predictable, and generally worked out well. i had great support from my parents, seniors, and a fair bit of luck too.

i had never really been exposed to chaos.

then came devx.

the founder of devx is a senior from my school. one day, while i was figuring out my exit from walmart and trying to decide what came next, we met for a casual conversation. he said, "while you figure it out, come work here for a bit. you'll learn a lot."

shoutout to pushpal.

considering the office was barely ten minutes from my house, i didn't need much convincing. the plan was simple. spend a few months here, figure out what i actually wanted to do, and maybe prepare for an mba or something similar.

instead, i ended up loving it.

i joined the founder's office and suddenly had exposure to everything. sales, hiring, project management, marketing, client conversations, internal operations, hr, and a hundred other things that don't neatly fit into a job description.

for the first time, i had a front-row seat to what building a company actually looks like.

i loved it so much that, to this day, i'm part of an admin whatsapp group that contains exactly three people: the two founders and me. i think that says a lot about the trust, involvement, and relationships that were built during that time.

i spent a year in the founder's office before moving into a full-time growth role, which is essentially tech consulting and something i still genuinely enjoy.

when i joined, we were a team of 10. by the time i moved roles, we were 60.

this experience didn't just change what i wanted to do next. it changed how i thought about work altogether.

• Worked as a Java Backend Engineer for merchant item setup orchestration team.
• Selected to join Akodo, a new backend team, as one of three initial members.
• Collaborated with Walmart US to design a new user onboarding system.

my first real full-time job was as a software engineer at walmart. i worked on a backend team responsible for the supplier portal used by companies to onboard produ………… zzz zzzz.

it didn't take me very long to realize that this wasn't for me.

i enjoyed coding when it felt like solving puzzles. give me a tricky leetcode problem, and i'd happily spend hours on it. but here i was at the bottom of a huge pyramid, far removed from any real sense of ownership or impact.

that said, it was a great first job. shoutout to walmart. it’s the largest company in the world so there was definitely a certain social validation that came with it. decent money, cool campus, free food, all the perks that seem incredibly exciting when you're fresh out of college.

i hated bangalore, though.

my team was great. i learned how large organizations operate. my first manager was incredibly supportive.

about eight months in, i moved to a different team. my new manager played a significant role in helping me realize that this career path wasn't for me. not intentionally, and definitely not kindly, but clarity arrives in strange ways.

i stayed long enough to collect my one-year joining bonus and then left.

i did my undergrad at IIT Bombay, where i studied metallurgical engineering.

if i'm being completely honest, i didn't have a particular passion for metallurgy. i simply chose the best university i could get into and trusted that things would work themselves out.

and they did.

the first year wasn't easy. it was the first time i'd ever lived away from home, and i was far more homesick than i expected. moving away is a funny thing. you miss home a lot, but it doesn't really help when the people back home miss you just as much. i found myself taking frequent trips back, which probably made the homesickness worse rather than better.

i was surrounded by the brightest minds in the country, and i can't overstate how much that environment shapes you. the friends, seniors, juniors, and mentors i met there are easily the most valuable part of the experience.

when i look back at my time at iit bombay, that's what stands out the most. not the courses, not the grades, but the people. it helped me find friends who are on my speed dial till date.

outside academics, i spent a lot of time playing cricket, tt and football. one of the more fulfilling experiences, though, was being part of the mentorship cell, where i got the opportunity to mentor a number of juniors. i'm happy to say i still keep in touch with many of them even today.

unfortunately, covid cut my time on campus short, and a few semesters ended up being online. but i was fortunate enough to spend my final year back on campus, making the most of one of the most beautiful university campuses in the country.

all things considered, probably the best four years of my life.

if there's one thing i took away from the experience, it's this: if you ever get the chance to live on a residential campus, take it. the friendships, memories, and late-night conversations are something you'll carry with you for the rest of your life.

• Ideated and strategized the Product Manager Dashboard to analyze sales effectively.
• Revamped the Growth Analysis Model via data-driven product development.
• Implemented Cohort Analysis to the company's financial model, benefitting 50+ employees.

covid had just hit, and i didn't really have much going on. every other day, i'd see a facebook post or a linkedin update from a batchmate. someone had landed an internship here, someone was working there. naturally, i started wondering, how do people even get started in the professional world?

i texted a friend who had landed a pretty cool internship, and she introduced me to the concept of cold emailing. that was all i needed.

i put together a list of companies offering internships and started emailing founders one by one: "hey, i'd love a bd internship. a social media internship. honestly, anything that's available."

part of it was wanting something productive to do, but i was also thinking ahead. internship season wasn't too far away, and i wanted a few resume points before it arrived.

that's how i landed this role at an edtech startup.

for a first internship, it was a fantastic experience. my manager gave me the freedom to explore all kinds of work. one day i was doing data analytics, the next i was running facebook ad campaigns, and then i'd be helping create content for courses i was genuinely interested in.

i even got the chance to speak with a well-known boomerang creator while working on an aeronautics course, which was pretty cool.

and somewhere along the way, i ended up building a snapchat filter for their online graduation ceremony. weird? yes, but why not?

all in all, a great experience. i'd recommend every college student spend at least one summer doing some kind of internship. you learn a lot, meet interesting people, and get a glimpse of what working in the real world actually looks like.

for a long time, i felt i wasn't as curious as i wanted to be.

growing up, i was never the person who read newspapers every morning or kept track of everything happening around the world. over time, i realized i wanted to change that. i wanted to learn more, understand more, and be more aware of what was happening beyond my immediate surroundings.

around the same time, i stumbled into ai.

i still remember seeing sam altman post about the launch of chatgpt and inviting people to try it. i started experimenting with it out of curiosity and very quickly became hooked.

what began as a curiosity soon became a major part of my work as well. towards the later part of my time at devx, we were helping companies adopt and use ai, which naturally pushed me to stay on top of everything happening in the space.

the more i used ai, the more interested i became in understanding how it actually worked. i've always believed that understanding the fundamentals of something helps you use it better, and ai was no different.

i don't think i'm the smartest person when it comes to ai, but i do think i'm pretty good at finding practical ways to use it. more than anything, ai sparked a level of curiosity that i feel was missing for a long time.

i plan to keep learning, experimenting, and finding new ways to put it to work.

my relationship with comedy goes back as far as i can remember.

i still remember watching the great indian laughter challenge with my dad back in 2007 or 2008. somewhere along the way, i became obsessed with anything that could make me laugh. sitcoms, stand-up specials, comedy movies, joke books, anything.

a lot of that probably comes from my dad, who is usually the funniest person in any room he's in. if there's an opportunity to crack a joke, he'll find it.

for most people, comedy ends at laughter. for me, that's where the interesting part begins.

over the last few years, i've become fascinated by the mechanics of comedy itself. why is one joke funny while another falls flat? what role do surprise, misdirection, anticipation, and timing play? the deeper i've gone into it, the more i've realized that comedy is far less random and far more structured than it appears.

there's an incredible amount of craft behind making people laugh, and i find that endlessly fascinating.

because of that curiosity, i've done a couple of open mics, some anchoring gigs, and occasionally tried my hand at writing and testing material of my own. not because i plan to become a comedian, but because understanding comedy feels like solving a puzzle that never quite ends.

it's one of those interests that i don't see myself growing out of anytime soon.

i genuinely can't remember the last time i was working and not listening to music.

at this point, music is so deeply ingrained in my day-to-day life that spotify wrapped has basically become an annual reminder of how absurdly many hours i spend listening to it.

my relationship with music probably started when my dad gifted me one of those tiny ipods that didn't even have a screen. it had a handful of songs loaded onto it, and i spent an unreasonable amount of time listening to the same tracks over and over again.

the interesting thing is that i've never really had a specific taste in music. my playlists jump from kishore kumar to prateek kuhaad, from elton john to kendrick lemar.

i've also never understood the idea of "music for a particular mood." if i like a song, i like it. happy, sad, excited, tired, it doesn't really matter.

some of the artists i keep coming back to are coldplay, john mayer, atif aslam, arijit singh, ed sheeran and the weeknd. i know some of those choices are incredibly cliché, but they're cliché for a reason.

the playlist is always running. i even have an alexa at home that's probably playing music more often than not.

and if there's one thing i enjoy even more than listening to music, it's hearing it live. i'll happily jump at any opportunity to attend a concert because i genuinely believe there's no feeling quite like hearing your favourite artist perform in front of you. nothing else comes close.

what would life even be without sports?

i've never really figured out why i love sports as much as i do. it's not like i come from a family of athletes or anything. sure, my dad and grandfather are massive cricket fans, and i've inherited that from them, but my fascination goes far beyond cricket.

give me any sporting event and i'll probably watch it. football, cricket, basketball, tennis, volleyball, olympics, it doesn't really matter. if there's competition involved, i'm interested.

for a long time, i wondered why that was.

eventually, i realized that it's not the sport itself that draws me in. it's the competition.

i love the fact that sports leave very little room for subjectivity. there are no opinions, no interpretations, and no debates about what should have happened. when the final whistle blows, there's usually a winner and a loser, and everyone knows the score. there's something refreshing about that.

sports have also become a bit of an escape for me. on a rough day, there's nothing better than watching one of my favourite teams play at night. if they win, suddenly the day feels a lot better. of course, it's a double-edged sword. i could be in a fantastic mood, watch my team lose, and spend the next few hours questioning why i care so much.

beyond the competition, sports teach lessons that carry over into almost every part of life: teamwork, discipline, resilience, perseverance, and the ability to keep showing up even when things aren't going your way. those ideas have always resonated with me.

there are a number of athletes i look up to and continue to draw inspiration from. people like luka modrić, cristiano ronaldo, virat kohli, and rafael nadal. each for different reasons, but all because of the standards they set for themselves and the consistency with which they've pursued excellence.

i don't think i'll ever stop watching sports. thankfully, there seems to be a game on somewhere in the world almost every day.