Product

When you build a product with 10k or 100k users, it’s a matter of skill. But when you are planning to build a product with 1 million or 10 million users, luck is a factor that one cannot neglect. During my short time of working at ByteDance (Gauth, TikTok), I caught glimpses of what the early days of the company looked like. However, as the company grew, the early product culture slowly diluted. What does it feel to have worked at such a company during the early days, and how does one go about finding such a company? This is the question that I’ve been repeatedly thinking about recently, and trying to figure out through writing this post. ...

An analysis of traditional search paradigms and a framework for integrating AI capabilities into content discovery platforms. The Content Discovery Challenge Traditional search paradigms face fundamental limitations in today’s information-rich environment. Users often struggle to articulate their information needs precisely, leading to iterative query refinement and incomplete discovery. Current search systems prioritize keyword matching over intent understanding, resulting in high precision for specific queries but poor recall for exploratory or contextual searches. ...

In a world dominated by expert opinions and algorithm-driven content, there’s something fundamentally human about wanting to know what others think. Whether we admit it or not, we’re drawn to understand the collective mindset. There’s wisdom in crowds. While large groups may not always converge on absolute truths (in fact, many truthful views begin as contrarian positions), they provide something equally valuable: comfort and context. Being part of a group, understanding its thoughts and values, creates a sense of safety and belonging that’s deeply wired into our social nature. Even when we disagree with mainstream opinions, understanding them helps us navigate social landscapes and provides reference points for our own thinking. This isn’t mere conformity—it’s about contextualizing our experiences within the broader human narrative. ...

The Evolution of AI Value The first wave of generative AI focused primarily on content creation - ChatGPT writing articles, Midjourney generating images, essentially replacing traditional production roles. However, as these technologies mature, their greatest value might well shift towards distribution and personalization rather than raw production. From RSS to Recommender Systems The evolution of content distribution reveals how technology repeatedly transforms information access. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) represented an early attempt to solve content discovery, providing a pull-based system where users subscribed to feeds they cared about. ...

SEO Guide: Implementation & Best Practices Table of Contents Search Engine Basics Technical Implementation On-Page Optimization Off-Page Strategies Modern Approaches Analytics & Tools What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization improves website visibility in organic search results. Three core processes determine rankings: Crawling Process and Timeframes Search engines discover pages by following links. New websites typically take 4-6 weeks for complete indexing. Factors affecting speed include site structure, server response time, and internal linking. The more efficiently your site is structured, the faster search engines can discover and index your content. ...

Here’s a list of articles that I founding interesting. I’ve attached the original article / transcript for easy refernece as well. Gary Tan on Manus: The New General-Purpose AI Agent Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOYSDqJdiro Usable AI agents are finally here from deep research platforms out of OpenAI and Google to similar tools from XAI and DeepSeek. Joining the competition now is Manus, a brand new agentic AI platform that has taken the world by storm. ...

When you want to look for user pain points, go to a bar in the middle of the week, look for the most desparate looking person and buy them a beer. They’d probably have something substantial to talk about. While I don’t usually go to bars during weekdays, I’ve found some similar ways of identifying user needs, mostly through conversations or online forums. This is a running document of the user needs or pain points that I’ve found to be interesting. Perhaps some of them will turn out to be viable business oppportunities. ...

The Smart Expense Tracker with Auto-Categorization is a cloud-native application built on AWS serverless architecture. The system automates the tedious process of expense tracking by leveraging AWS services to process receipts, categorize transactions, and provide financial insights. The application offers several key features including receipt scanning and data extraction using AWS Textract, automatic expense categorization with AI (using AWS Bedrock), comprehensive expense tracking, budget setting with automated alerts via SNS, and financial report generation in CSV or PDF formats. ...

PepTalk: AI Journaling Tool Realtime conversation with aI companion to help you note down feelings and journals for the day. (Prototype: https://peptalk-navy.web.app/) What2Do: AI Trip Planning Tool A trip planning tool for generating itinearies based on article url input and content extraction. (Prototype: what2do-51224.web.app) OHours: Office Hour Scheduling Tool An office hour queuing system to improve student experience and help TAs manage questions more efficiently. (Prototype: ohours.web.app/) Credits: Lian Zhang, Janna Lee, Soham Shah, Jonny Kong ...

Exploring Unknown Unknowns: The Future of Knowledge Interfaces We live in an age of information abundance, yet many of us struggle with two fundamental learning challenges: we don’t know what to read, and we don’t understand what we’ve read. These pain points—“not knowing how to choose” and “not knowing how to comprehend”—represent a massive opportunity for reimagining how we interact with knowledge. The core insight driving next-generation learning interfaces is simple but profound: most people don’t know what they don’t know. We can’t formulate good questions about topics we’re unfamiliar with, yet traditional learning systems expect us to do exactly that. This creates a barrier that conversational AI can uniquely solve by flipping the interaction model entirely. ...