Notes on building
Notes from building businesses, products, and teams: from defining the problem and learning from users to making hard growth decisions.
This is where I write about the work behind building: defining problems clearly, learning from evidence, and turning the next decision into a small, measurable step.
Point of view
01
Every project has a gap between the team's assumptions, market behavior, and today's decision. The work is to shorten that gap.
Problem Define the problem by current behavior and cost, not by the solution we already prefer.
Learning Talk to real users every week, test one hypothesis, and change the next decision based on what you see.
System What should become process, and where is human judgment still the advantage?
Experience
These are more than resume labels: they are contexts that taught me about markets, products, capital, and trust.
Basalam is a social commerce marketplace that connects small sellers and buyers in a more human shopping environment.
At Basalam, growth was not only a matter of adding features. Seller and buyer trust, cross-team coordination, and small operating mechanisms shaped the platform experience every day.
100Startups was a platform for investing in and working with early-stage teams as their businesses were taking shape.
At 100Startups, working with early teams made one thing clear: capital is not only money. Feedback speed, relationship quality, and access to better decisions are part of the real support.
Hamyan was an experience in designing financial and Qarz-al-Hasanah mechanisms where trust and transparency were core parts of the product.
At Hamyan, transparency was not an add-on. It was a condition for trust, so every step of the process had to remain understandable and traceable for users.
EduTech Accelerator helped teams turn education ideas into products and businesses.
At EduTech, the gap between an education idea and a sustainable business narrowed only when learner need, revenue model, and daily execution were considered together.
Hayat is an experiential learning environment for children, bringing nature, play, making, and hands-on learning together.
Children learn through gardens, animals, a greenhouse, cooking and woodworking workshops, and shared activities; parent programs extend that experience to families.
Method
Not a formula; these are criteria for making better decisions when the answer is not obvious.
Before building a solution, clarify where the pain is, who feels it seriously, and which behavior proves it.
Every process should clarify a decision or reduce a repeated mistake. If it only adds another layer, it is too early.
When the team shares definitions for the user, the goal, and the success metric, disagreement turns into decisions faster.
Notes
Readable adaptations of credible work on entrepreneurship, products, and company building, with practical takeaways and a clear original source.
Article archive
A brief adaptation on presentation clarity, with an independent exercise for testing audience understanding, tracing claims, and turning meeting ambiguities into assigned work.
A short adaptation on social acceptance, followed by an independent field exercise for technician voice reports: observe usage context, check report quality, and set a continuation rule.
Understanding before changing a product: a short adaptation and an independent booking-software exercise covering rules, interpretation gaps, and rework decisions.
Make an idea choice reviewable: a short adaptation and an independent order-returns exercise with stalled-case records, ownership, and a decision to continue or change the trial.
A free adaptation of Tom Blomfield's guide to choosing a small set of metrics that reveal startup health, then connecting revenue, burn, runway, and retention to weekly decisions.
From hearing feedback to a reviewable decision: a short adaptation and an independent procurement-software exercise separating customer statements, team interpretations, tests, and follow-up.
How should a first version be evaluated? A short adaptation and an independent print-shop order-board exercise: separate appearance from handoff errors, log hidden assistance, and define the next trial decision.
Is the evidence behind your plan still current? A short adaptation and an independent meeting-room booking exercise: date evidence, distinguish cancellation reasons, and set a review trigger before expanding.
A short adaptation about effort and quality, with an independent product-team exercise: follow one data-import failure through to a verified fix and track rework alongside output.
Prepare for a fundraising conversation with a short adaptation and an independent evidence-file exercise: define real usage, log staff assistance, and recheck one claim before presenting it.
How should a team investigate an unconventional idea? A short adaptation with an independent repair-coordination exercise: a clear hypothesis, real customer commitment, and a bounded trial.
An exercise in finding a decision buried under routine tasks: inspect one customer case, assign a decision owner, and check for an actual change rather than another completed checklist.
An exercise in revisiting an old decision: scope the earlier evidence, test one customer segment again, and define when to continue or stop before running the trial.
Turn a sales–product disagreement into a reviewable decision: a free adaptation with an independent exercise in recording assumptions, designing a bounded test, and assigning a decision owner.
A classic reminder for founders: in the earliest stage, the unscalable work is often what creates learning, trust, and real growth.
Defines a startup by its capacity for rapid growth, not by size or technology; a clean frame for thinking about venture-scale ambition.
A sharp argument against forcing founders into professional-manager habits as a company scales; staying close to detail is not always micromanagement.
A compact definition of a strong founder: someone who refuses passivity, meets new obstacles directly, and keeps finding a way forward.
Instead of forcing ideas, it argues for living in the future and noticing what is missing, especially problems you personally feel deeply.
A reminder that many valuable startup ideas are ignored because they require tedious, messy work; that avoidance can hide the real opportunity.
A practical guide to treating an MVP as the smallest useful learning vehicle, not a half-finished product or an overbuilt first release.
For founders pulled between building and managing, it explains the maker/manager rhythm and why meetings can carry hidden costs.
Why small, focused teams are regaining an edge, and how founders can narrow scope to learn faster.
For community-led and creator-led businesses, it shows why depth of customer relationship can matter more than raw audience size.
The classic product-market fit essay: without a real market and strong pull, even a good team and product may not be enough.
A sharp training document on product ownership: good PMs understand the problem, market, team, and outcome without diffusing responsibility.
A practical story of turning product-market fit into a measurable system for teams that want to read market pull more precisely.
A practical frame for testing early ideas with small real-world experiments before committing to heavy product buildout.
A practical essay on how small but real revenue can buy a startup time, focus, and better decision-making power.
A practical reminder for founders: without better questions, users rarely give you the truth you need.
A practical frame for knowing whether a startup can survive on its current path or is dependent on raising more money.
A dense collection of company-building advice, especially useful once a founder has moved past the idea and into operating.
Before talking about the big market, it zooms in on the users who truly want the product, which is useful for early focus.
A classic reminder that startups are not built from inside the conference room; the truth about the business model lives outside the building.
A rigorous checklist of mistakes that pull a team away from making something users truly want: vague users, derivative ideas, slow launch, bad hiring, and poor money discipline.
A practical questionnaire for clarifying goals, roles, equity, work location, collaboration rhythm, and conflict handling before committing to a co-founder.
Early growth is not about buying more noise; it is about moving trust through credible people and networked rooms.
A compact set of counterintuitive startup lessons: launch early, improve quickly, make users happy, fear the right risks, and pair commitment with flexibility.
A guide for the period before starting up: do not rehearse startup theater; build user understanding, cofounder trust, and the capacity for a long hard path.
A compact map of what founders discover after starting: cofounder intensity, emotional swings, long timelines, user acquisition difficulty, and the value of community.
A practical map for starting up: get the right people, build something customers truly want, and keep spending low while market evidence gets clearer.
A tactical guide for founders to stop waiting for automatic acquisition and personally learn from early customers, early sales, and real market resistance.
Instead of turning universities into entrepreneurship-class factories, it argues for deep builder education and enough free time for real projects.
A practical guide to treating fundraising as a focused, time-bounded process: start when the evidence is credible, run conversations in parallel, and return quickly to building what users want.
A practical guide to the hardest early hires: define the bar, work the personal network deeply, sharpen the recruiting pitch, and keep the founder directly involved.
A guide to finding ideas inside lived experience: build what you personally miss, even when the first version looks too small or toy-like to become a company.
A guide to finding the intersection of aptitude and interest, choosing ambitious projects, and building a rhythm that turns curiosity, serious effort, and feedback into durable work.
Paul Graham's bus ticket theory explores how deep, disinterested curiosity about something that matters can drive discovery alongside ability and effort, without guaranteeing success.
A sharp but useful reminder for companies running on old assumptions: revisit the market, technology, pricing, and team before defending a plan that may already be obsolete.
Exploratory acquisition talks are not free when you are not planning to sell: a guide to protecting focus and separating initial interest from a serious sale process.
A framework for equity decisions: dilution makes economic sense when the added value makes your remaining stake worth more, whether you are raising capital or hiring a key colleague.
From choosing cofounders and launching early to understanding users, measuring progress, and surviving: a compact operating framework for weekly startup decisions.
The problem that occupies a founder's unprompted attention shapes the company's progress; protect that attention from fundraising, disputes, and other costly distractions.
Fundraising is not only a pitching problem; without boundaries, it can consume a startup's focus, morale, and ability to survive.
Practical lessons from first-time founders: learn from customers instead of borrowed analogies, price decisions by their real cost, and improve one thing every week.
Business wealth starts with creating something people genuinely want, then combining a small team with leverage that multiplies good decisions.
When spending outruns revenue, hoping for another funding round can consume the time needed to change course; plan survival around committed cash and concrete choices.
An operating framework for difficult weeks: a four-field update, observation of real customer tasks, and explicit continue, change, or stop decisions without treating exhaustion as commitment.
From good intentions to observable outcomes: a practical exercise in defining user benefit, testing a narrow promise, and setting cost and trust boundaries for product decisions.
A practical communication exercise: turn a vague update into an explicit request, assign ownership and a review date, and check how customers understand your commitments.
From seeking approval to checking results: an operating exercise in spotting gameable metrics, defining data, and turning a weekly report into a decision.
Instead of asking only how to sell more, ask what would make the company more powerful for customers over time—from ownership of the relationship to data, networks, and extensibility.
Contact
Share the problem, the current stage, and the decision you want to make clearer. That short context is enough to start.
