Whats in the book

In this book, I’ll discuss how I went about building a data product from scratch.

And in between I'll talk about a lot of other things that have captured my interest and imagination. Like the origin story of many Internet companies having their start in garages. And how I find oil canvas paintings fascinating and my tryst with getting a few crazy ideas commissioned into canvas art.

I was inspired by an article I read many years ago.

The article was about BuiltWith.

BuiltWith is a SaaS product that allows users to track Internet technologies. While there are many such products, the article mentioned that BuiltWith was being run by a single person. The revenue generated seemed to be many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

After single-handedly founding the company, the founder still continued running the company all by himself.

I wanted to be that person.

At least in principle, I wanted to build a small enough project that touched upon the various parts of product development. I wanted to develop the UI, the web service, and the data layer and most importantly, extract the intelligence from the raw data to deliver value for users.

I deliberately wanted to focus on building the product and did not wish to focus on monetization.

After all, this was a side project and I wanted to keep it that way.

And while I was working on this side project of mine, I also blogged about some of what I was learning. And I also posted thoughts on other life aspects on various social media platforms.

This book is a collection of all of those writings. Some chapters are technical while others are not.

Hope you enjoy reading this book.