Lessons from real projects: what went wrong, what we fixed, and what founders can take from it.
Firestore · Cloud costs
A status page that cost us $2.17 in its first 22 hours was on track to cost about $2,300 over its first 30 days — and $9,200 by day 60. The problem was a tiny Firestore design mistake that got more expensive every minute it ran.
Jayen Ashar · 3 min read
SEO · WordPress
A WordPress homepage had disappeared from Google for two to three months. Paid SEO tools hadn’t found the problem. Chrome’s free Lighthouse audit did: the homepage was serving a noindex tag.
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
Scoping · Client work
Halfway through a build, we realised the product needed document uploads. It wasn’t in the scope, nobody had asked for it, and the product wouldn’t really work without it. That’s scope creep — but it’s also part of discovering what the product actually needs.
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
Client work · Communication
Contracts matter when a project has already gone wrong. Regular communication is what helps stop it getting there. Catch-ups, written correspondence and visibility into the actual work do more to prevent disputes than another clause in a contract.
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
Startups · Founders
Founders often ask people to sign an NDA before they’ll explain their idea. Most investors won’t sign one, and neither will most of the people a founder needs advice from. So the NDA mostly ends the conversations that would have helped.
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
Marketplaces · Leakage
On a marketplace I built, every message between users was CC’d to the operator by email, so they could remove any provider taking deals off the platform. That shows you leakage is happening, but it doesn’t stop it. Giving users a reason to stay on the platform does.
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
Startups · Validation
Before building an MVP, put up a landing page with a waitlist, run ads to it and charge a dollar to join. If you can’t get a hundred people to sign up, you’ve saved yourself the cost of the build.
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
Sharetribe · Payments
A marketplace client wanted to leave Sharetribe’s fees and take payments through PayPal. The custom build would have cost more than $10,000 USD, but most of their transactions were free, so the savings would take a long time to pay it back, if they ever did.
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read