A friend recently told me he wants to build an AI chatbot for school websites.
I asked him one question: “Will schools actually pay for it?”
Because here’s the ground reality. In India, most schools:
Beyond that, spending on software is isn’t an accepted norms for them yet.
I was reviewing an app with a friend.The UI felt old.The flow felt like a long form with no real guidance.
I told him something simple: “Design it like Zomato or Swiggy.”
Because that’s what users are used to now. They order food, book rides, browse apps…All with smooth, guided, intuitive experiences.
Then they come to your internal tool…And face : Long form with no proper flow and no clarity on what to do next
A lot of people say: “Don’t build. Just buy existing software.”
They’re not wrong. Buying is faster. Cheaper upfront. Less effort to get started. But here’s the catch.
It only works if your business has no real differentiation. Because the moment you use the same tools as everyone else, you start operating like everyone else.
And then the only way left to compete is: Price.
I recently reviewed a product’s “report” section.But they didn’t call it reports.They called it Sales Insights.
And instead of dumping charts, they did something different.They asked questions:
And right below each question… was the answer with simple graph.That changed everything.
Because their users weren’t tech-savvy.They weren’t looking for in depth MIS report…They were looking for answers.
A client once reported a “bug.”
The feature wasn’t working the way they expected. I checked the code. It was doing exactly what was implemented.
The issue? The requirement was never clearly defined for this functionality.
All three were slightly different. And that gap became a “bug.”
I was talking to a tech founder about a B2B SaaS tool. He proudly said, “Our pricing would be ₹2,000/month per customer.”
Sounds reasonable. Then I asked one question: “How much does it cost you to get one customer ?” . We broke it down:
It was easily ₹3,000 to acquire + onboard one customer. And plan was to charge ₹2,000/month.
I said : This is how SaaS quietly enters the graveyard if not calculated even before writing single line of code.
Most apps think login is simple: Generate a JWT and you’re done.
That’s where things go wrong. JWT tokens are meant to be short-lived (2–4 hours for security reasons)
So if you rely only on JWT:
→ Users keep getting logged out
That’s what I told a founder who came to me with an AI-generated website.
He wanted 5–6 small issues fixed. But the real problem wasn’t the issues.
The site had no branding, no structure, and didn’t even work well on mobile. Fixing it wouldn’t change anything for his business. I explained the same to him
That’s when he paused… and decided to rebuild everything.
A client once asked for a small update: “Just add three extra fields on this screen.”
Sounds easy. But that one change meant:
What looked like a 10-minute UI tweak turned into a full system-wide update. And this happens all the time.
Because in software, nothing lives in isolation.Every small change has ripple effects. The problem isn’t the request. It’s the assumption that it’s “simple.”
Six months ago, a client was ready to pay me ₹1 lakh to start building an education portal.
I told him to pause. Because the core of his product depended on a third-party provider.
Instead of starting development, I asked him to sit with me and document everything:
The gap was huge.There were critical pieces the third-party didn’t support yet.
