Changelog

Changelog for the entreprenurial journey

8/2/2025

https://milan-2qhe.vercel.app/

we got ‘er done. not fully functional but So many lessons to learn here. 1. It always takes longer than it should, so triple time by defaultat the same time 2. be aggressive with timelines but have a scrappy version of an action plan and use that to govern timelines 3. Progress is better than perfection. 4. Use external accountability. 5. The basics of adi protocol. Don’t work from home. Don’t use social media in the morning or the afternoon. Workout first thing in the morning. Eat a good amount of food. Hydrate. Get good sleep. Decide on the next day’s plan the night before.

At the same time, don’t be too hard on yourself.I have a tendency to go very hard on myself and forget to give myself grace. That can lead to a weird situation where I’m not able to do work because I’m being too hard on myself and avoiding the issues.

7/21/2025

UGGGHHHHHHHHH

Too ambitous a target set again. The real ones know … (or the ones who read all of the below), this is my Achilles heel. I need to be better at being realistic. Yet, I’m persevering. Turns out, training and finetuning and hosting models is not as trivial as I thought. Even still, persevering.

And humbling myself. Meta Learning on estimation. I’m allowed to be wrong on estimates. That’s why they are estimates. I’m not allowed and it’s bad practice to be wrong if I look at things from the lens of handwavy arguments.

Yet, new timeline is end of this week for both projects. No matter how embarrased and half-baked it is, I will post it here and have some semblance of a product. On the 25th. I will do all it takes to get there and really scope out my work here.

N.B. If you look not too far away and read my blog on trust, you realize how annoying this is. This is not lost on me. Perhaps, that is why I characterize this habit of mine as an achiles heel. It’s a careless approach/hack at ambition. My ambitions/estimation of my abilities sometimes overxtends their true FMV. Yet this in and of itself is a learning.

7/15/2025

It’s been a minute. Lots of learnings. Here’s the quick rundown of the past few months.

Started and seriously worked on another idea with a friend. Was fun to work on but ended up parting ways with it.
Had some person stuff come up so decided to slow down for a month or so to tend to that garden
Back at it

It’s been hard to regain momentum with a lot of start/stops but committing to getting into a cadence. So using this changelog as a catalog/thought-partner/accountability buddy/motivational tool and then some. But for now, I’m happy with just being back on here and posting!!

I hope to ship two silly projects by the end of the week. I think the hope has been to find an area or a set of people that I’m obsessed to solve for. To the point that I can maniacally build and continue to build for. It’s surprisingly hard. So I’m hoping mini-projects can help spur that. If that’s the hope, I feel like many iterations can help. To that effect, I hope to build/do things to get me that confidence. Current the most atomic unit for progress there is to build and ship ideas.

Idea 1: Launch max Wed evening Idea 2: Launch max Sun evening

3/18/2025

Been a super busy past few weeks. Been busy building ideas in consumer and thinking about next-steps and talking to new collaborators (V and I parted ways in the most amicable of terms due to having different visions for company-building)

Back to the board. Having to practice a lot of mental resilience in the face of adversity. But focusing on keeping the main thing the main thing :)

3/5/2025

many many updates! launched - hoorahhh!! it didn’t go as well as we’d thought - less hoorah. upon thinking about it, here’s some hypothesises we made that were proven wrong.

1) if u provide enough value, ppl don’t care about privacy: turns out ppl do care - esp if u are a random company who have no credibility. 2) data exports would be fast: chatgpt and claude data exports were in fact really fast when we were playing around with it. they slowed down considerably afterwards - often taking a week; that killed us. 3) there’s never realllly a solid answer for when u should pull the plug on a consumer thing. consumer has the cold-start problem and we weren’t able to solve it/didn’t want to resolve it.

taking these learnings and applying it to for next step. now back to the drawing board again of trying things and finding new hypothesis. this time though, will think harder about hypothesis validation/invalidation.

2/13/2025

HIHI! Long time, so much has happened. It’s hard to keep updated. To quickly catch you up:

Chrome extension still in review
Talked to users and got feedback.
Implemented feedback.
Had a few personal fires creep up that I had to solve for a week.
Started GTM’ing! First time marketing a consumer product in a while. It’s a new world and it’s hard but I’m learning things.

1/26/2025

took the day off. i know the last few blog posts were lazy but just been heads down.

1/25/2025

worked on product stuff.

1/24/2025

MVP is done. We are now doing user interviews. I learned that I don’t know how to do good user interviews so trying to learn as fast as possible. hmu if u have tips on how to do good user interviews. bonus points for consumer

1/23/2025

change the design a little bit. reapplied for the chrome extension approval.

1/22/2025

First user interview. Got roasted!! Also ended up chatting with two other consumer founders. A few takeaways: 1. consumer playbook different from YC b2b 2. a lot of apps can go through spiky usage territory but the north star is consistency 3. We need to be more focused on the product and less on the tech.

Also had a VC dinner. When pitching the idea, a few folks seem to be ambivalent/resonated. It’s been an interesting experience to pitch.

1/21/2025

not much updates

1/20/2025

I accidentally locked my stuff out (laptop, phone, wallet, keys, everything) at my coworking space lol. Thankfully, I had a backup. Not much work was done.

1/19/2025

I got carried away yesterday and ended up staying up late. Rookie mistake. It’s ok to take mis-steps along the way; all part of the journey. I’m learning to be patient with myself. Having good friends and a good support system is crucial. Thank you to the real ones for sometimes listening to me rant and make space for it. I appreciate it v v much. It’s funny - I have such a different outlook on life now compared to when I was at Affirm. I feel more agentic about everything. Mood, sleep, my fitness, my work. I think the meta-skill of being able to make a step and break down each problem with step 0 is so good. I like.

Highlights: while working out of the commons, I ended up serendipitously joining a jam session with folks playing and playing the drums. So much fun and I felt so much better afterwards. Music is magical.

1/18/2025

Good day - got a lot of work done. Relearning that the last 20% of a project is the most important and the hardest and ends up taking the most time. The pareto principle at it’s finest. We are finding new bugs and fixing them as they come up and come along. We don’t really have a deadline anymore since we will just be waiting for the chrome extension to get approved. So we are just going to keep working on the product and keep adding/iterating as we go along. I do feel this pressure to ship (fully self-imposed) but it’s good to not let it carry me away.

1/17/2025

Yesterday was good - a lot of grinding but we ended up finding out that Google Chrome extension takes up to a week to get approved :(((((( Ended up stalling our release date. Sad dayyyyyy. Had we known this, we would have started working on the extension a lot earlier. Lesson learned - for the things that have external dependencies, we need to start working on them a lot earlier. Identify potential blockers and plan accordingly. Codewise we are complete for MVP save for final touches but we can’t launch without the extension. So planning to finish code and then work on the product side until we get approved and then ship. In the meantime, might hack around on other ideas as well.

1/16/2025

Ahhhh we didn’t hit it. The deadline was yesterday. I think we are still on track to ship soon. We are getting there. A few niggles and a few things to fix. But we are getting there. This was interesting - earlier me would have pushed to all extents pulling all-nighter to meet this. But I now realize the toll loss of sleep takes in the long run and it doesn’t help us. Rest assured - we are getting there.

1/15/2025

Hmmm - a rather worse day productivity wise. I think it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep last night + didn’t meditate and journal; went right to work. Reminder to prioritize sleep and meditation. Still managed to get a good amount of work done. Attended SPC Demo Faire which was cool - lots of fun projects and some market research on state of the art stuff going on. But it was a distraction - need to lock in and focus. Was going to pull an all-nighter but I think I’ll just go to bed early and get up early. Sleep is important and crucial. Also worked out of the Alchemist today which was cool; met some new people and talked a little about AI. I think discourse and meeting folks is cool - but I need to be more focused on the product. It’s always a balance trying to optimize for focus mode and talking about the product. I think execution comes first and then talking to focus. I know what I need to do and I should prioritize at all costs.

Success/Highlights: 1. Got out of the house 2. Found a cool new spot to work out of that I like - may get a membership here. 3. Attended SPC Demo Faire which was cool - lots of fun projects and some market research on state of the art stuff going on.

Lessons learned: 1. Prioritize sleep and meditation. 2. Know what the most successful version of Adi in current season looks like and emulate/embrace that. In this case, for another day, it is code monkey adi.

1/14/2025

Clarified priorities with V! I think we will hit our deadline. Finished integrating the backend with Frontend for most of the features. There’s a few calls that need to be tied up and some optimizations to be done. But we are getting there. Had a good sync with V and got aligned on the direction of the project and what we can do to make things faster. Still on track to ship by the 16th.

Lessons learned: 1. When you are working on a project, it’s always good to have a clear direction and a plan. We were laizze-fairing a little bit and had multiple balls in flight which made coordination difficult. Clarifying things made it difficult. 2. Really think about the unique insight/value prop you are providing and let that drive the product. 3. Make sure to peer out to see bird’s eye view every once in a while to ensure you are focussing on the right thing.

Struggles: 1. How to fuel myself (nutrition, sleep, exercise) for maxium productivity. I had been cutting weight for a bit but I realized that I was not eating enough to sustain my energy levels. I’ve been trying to eat more and I’ve been trying to get more sleep.

1/13/2025

Doing consistent syncs help - who would’ve thought. I REALLY HATE REMOTE WORK though - V still in Toronto and I’m in SF and it dampens productivity. Anyhow, backend stuff is finally working; chrome extension fully worked. Tomorrow, hoping to put a bow on UI/UX, add analytics and do some testing. We are getting there. I’m hoping we are feature complete by tomorrow. We are setting an internal deadline to be feature/code complete by the 16th.

Lessons learned: 1. Get out of the house ASAP.

1/12/2025

Synced up with V and got aligned on the direction of the project. Got started on OAuth and API calls for backend today (backend finally working after having db issues)- going to try to bang out all the backend stuff by eod tmrw. Still hoping to ship by this week. Feels good to be moving and motivated again. Caught up with some founder friends which is fun; dropped by Playspace as well.