My 2024-2025

A. I build and ship products.

Not sure this is always a good thing, but I’m getting better at saying NO to ideas that float into my consciousness.

Building anything good takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy.

My first web app was Clarana AI, and I had to rely heavily on ChatGPT (earlier versions would lose context after ~1,000 lines—what a time!), Visual Studio, Postman, and coffee.

I was on holiday visiting family in San Francisco—that’s where I started building the chatbot. It felt magical to have an API manipulating info based on instructions, building and storing data on MongoDB, learning how to build context, layers of memory to enrich each result, and a few other things. I had a few versions offline, then used tools like Bolt.new for the beautiful UI and front end. I even hired a team from India to resolve last-minute bugs and testing.

I was absolutely lost after release on how to promote it. I could win by running ads—I’ve done it for years—but for others, where product–market fit was already there and people wanted to buy.

I’ve marketed high-end appliance brands on Google Ads and real estate on Meta Ads.

So I paused, made a few videos, shared on social, sent a few DMs in niches where I knew people would see value, even got a few people interested—free users—but this is my first time building a product with no GTM in place. Since I didn’t keep the momentum, it died for a while. I do want to bring this back to life—just not sure when, because what’s worse than a product failing is not knowing whether it failed or still has a lot of potential.

Second product (still building): Makevo.app

This will help you build kick-ass funnels in under 10 minutes, backed by the best conversion principles, frameworks, templates, and more.

I don’t have early feedback yet, but I moved after speaking with a founder who said: go B2B first. (Clarana was B2C.)

My only GTM is to talk about it publicly and make content. I’m sticking to that until the first 100 users not only sign up but actually build an end-to-end funnel and send feedback. The ICP is agency owners and freelancers who build funnels for clients.

Third product: the one you’re reading this on. I released the MVP on 13 November. By the third product cycle, I’m not even looking at whether I have a cool domain or how many things are rock-solid—I just wanted to ship. There’s a good chance that if you use thoughtforge.app, I’m improving something in the background. This was just for me to keep all content in one place and publish to LinkedIn; I’ll add more platforms later.

If you start using this platform and love it, write to me at ankit@observantconvo.com. If enough people love it, I’ll ship a white-label version so you can publish your website under your own domain from this platform. Lots of sick ideas—just say the word.

B. I operate an agency that produces results in product or marketing services.

In the last 2 years, I’ve only charged clients for two services so far—which, in itself, is many small things done properly.

Web apps. Developing web apps for others is fun—seeing ideas come to life. The harder the specs, the harder it is to find out-of-the-box solutions. I research as if I need to build this MVP in the next 24 hours. That alone gives me a clear idea of whether I need to hire, who and why, what specifics I should collect as a PM, and the technical checklist.

Things were hands-on with way too many tabs before AI came along; now MVPs are done in one tab using IDE platforms and can be live on Vercel from GitHub in minutes.

Lead generation (Meta Ads). Build audience segmentation from the start so emails are super relevant to the recipient.

Some of the more comprehensive automations are built around the qualifying answers that matter most to the client. Then everything else in the workflow is just building blocks: waits, emails, SMS, AI steps, calendar links, reminders, survey forms. It’s fun building these systems, tracking response rates, and connecting the dots to the bottom line.

I shared this others know my agency services and passion to build products, automations. Also, if you are trying to learn new skills, building in public, ignore the noises when you hear someone saying this is a Wrapper or this is not a real product. Anyone has made a real product and themselves will never talk down on person who is trying. I don't have enough content on socials to get that type of hate but it won't bother me. I am pretty sure even when you will hit MMR to multiples someone will always have something to say.