manish

When Reality Strikes: Navigating Product Onboarding Challenges

🚀 Having your first beta customer try out your product is an exhilarating experience! 😍 It’s a validation of all the hard work you’ve put in. But what happens when your product fails in the most basic ways? 😔 It’s a humbling experience that grounds you in many ways.

This happened to me with Amplifeed this week.

New user onboarding is a problem that gets more and more complex as the product functionality grows. Yet, it’s the problem that gets less and less attention as teams go deep into solving specific use cases.

I am learning firsthand, why it’s important to prioritize onboarding and make it a seamless experience for your users. You might be building this awesome fancy feature in the product but what if users can’t even get to it?

The Synergy of Mentoring, Prompt Engineering, and GPT Models

💡 Mentoring, Prompt Engineering, and GPT Models: What They Have in Common?

A 20-minute conversation with a mentor can either keep you going for the next six months or completely confuse you and sidetrack you. It all comes down to the questions you ask and the context you provide.

When seeking advice from a mentor, it’s crucial to articulate the challenge you’re facing and provide the necessary context. Similarly, when crafting prompts for GPT models, setting the right context and asking the right questions can make you lot more productive.

Andrew Ng emphasizes the importance of prompt engineering in his course. He suggests imagining a smart friend who lacks context on the job you’re trying to accomplish. By setting the right context and asking the right questions, you can make the most of GPT models.

Riding the Startup Rollercoaster

Starting a startup is like being on a crazy ride, and I’m experiencing it firsthand.

🎢 Some days I’m super pumped up to get things done, but the other days, I question if I’m on the right path. It’s not always as glamorous as those founder stories we hear. But every time I bounce back from a tough time, I learn something new.

💪 One thing that’s been a huge help is having a supportive partner and surrounding myself with mentors and friends who can cheer me on and give me honest advice and feedback. It’s important to have people who believe in you and your dreams.

🤔 Another piece of advice I received from a close friend and mentor is to be clear on why I’m doing this. The drive to work on something needs to come from within. External factors can only hold you accountable temporarily. I’m still learning how to stay motivated all the time, but every time I come out of a low moment, I feel stronger and ready to take on the next challenge.

👉 All the hustlers and entrepreneurs out there, what techniques have worked for you that keep you going?

Finding Energy and Flow in Amplifeed.ai’s Journey

✨ The biggest joy I am deriving currently from working on Amplifeed.ai…

🕊 It is the autonomy and freedom to spend time on my craft – coding and building things the way I want.

⚡️ Yes, getting your product in front of customers asap is important for startups but you can’t ignore things that give you energy!

👌 Not having deadlines to finish something is huge! It gives you so much creative freedom to get something just right. The way you want it.

✅ Maybe it’s the way you want to organize your code that makes you happy 🧑‍💻️

✅ Maybe it’s you spending the whole afternoon crafting a perfect AI prompt so that you get the output you want from the APIs 📝

✅ Maybe it’s you trying out a new framework like LangChain primarily for learning and evaluating if it’s useful 📚

✅ Maybe it’s you taking a day to refactor the code so that it becomes easy to understand for a new developer. 🛠️

⚖️ There are things that you might be exceptional at but they drain energy and there are things that energize you. You have to strike a balance.

🚣 We have milestones and goals that we are working towards but the ability to hone my craft without any external pressure is what keeps me going every day!

It might be worth taking a pause and think what gives you energy and what drains energy in your day to day.

Introducing Amplifeed.ai: Elevate Your LinkedIn Presence with AI-Powered Personal Branding!

It’s been two months since I left Asana and have been exploring a few ideas to build something on my own.

After talking to many folks and validating the problem, I’m excited to share the problem I’ve decided to solve that I personally experienced while I was trying to grow my network.

📣 Introducing – Amplifeed.ai – Your Personal Branding AI Assistant!

💼 Many of us understand the importance of building a personal brand on LinkedIn and how this platform has become the primary channel for generating new sales and career opportunities.

However, despite LinkedIn boasting over 900 million members, only a tiny fraction of these individuals actively engage with content, and an even smaller percentage create their own. 🧐

Amplifeed aims to change that.

It’s an AI assistant that helps professionals to amplify their voice on LinkedIn.

It will help you in these 3 core areas:

1️⃣ Generate LinkedIn posts with the help of AI
2️⃣ Promote your LinkedIn posts with the help of your coworkers
3️⃣ Discover content from your coworkers to engage with

Now you might be wondering – why can’t I just use these new “AI content generator” apps? How is Amplifeed different from others?

The first key difference is – Amplifeed will help you generate content where you work – Slack. 😇

Secondly, Amplifeed not only will help you “generate” the content, but it will actually close the loop by “amplifying” and “promoting” your content. 📣

In upcoming posts, I will talk about each of the problems and the solution approach I’m taking to solve them.

I’m learning to build in public, and looking forward to sharing my journey and lessons with you all.

If you’re interested in amplifying your personal brand on LinkedIn, then sign up for an early access invite list on our website (link in the comment).

How ChatGPT Elevates My Workflow

ChatGPT is definitely making me more efficient as a developer!

There are times when I need to do something that I’ve done many times in the past but haven’t done recently enough that I can remember off the top of my head. That’s where ChatGPT comes in handy for me.

For example, I needed to write a SQL query to alter a bunch of tables and change field data types. I simply explained what I needed to ChatGPT, and it gave me the query within seconds. It’s also great for writing quick regular expressions, concise error messages, or solving a specific css issue using a given CSS framework or TypeScript errors.

Of course, I’ve also had instances where the answer provided by ChatGPT was completely wrong. So it’s still important to check what it’s giving you, but you can always have a dialogue and get the right answer.

While Google is still in my muscle memory, I’m finding myself proactively thinking “can I take ChatGPT’s help here?” I believe that soon GPT-based interfaces are going to be the default.

If you’re using ChatGPT in your day-to-day development work, where do you find the most value? I’d love to learn more tips and tricks.

Navigating Unstructured Time: Productivity and Time Management

🚧 Going from structured routine to unstructured is hard! 💼

🏠 As I moved from full-time job to working on something on my own I realized it is not easy to manage my time and stay productive when there is no structure to my day. 🤯

🤔 First few weeks, without a clear plan, I ended up working on things that interested me but had trouble finishing them. I realized that bringing structure to my unstructured day was harder than I thought. Dealing with a day full of meetings is in some ways easier! 🗓️

🎯 I have started setting one single goal every morning and focusing on accomplishing that. Anything in addition that I accomplished is a bonus. This seems to help so far. 🏆

💡 I would love to hear about any techniques or frameworks that have helped you manage your time and stay productive when dealing with an unstructured schedule. 🕰️

Supercharge Your Web Development with Vercel and Next.js!

I’m blown away by the power of Vercel and Next.js!

This combination is a game-changer for developers looking to increase their shipping velocity and speed of execution.

Vercel has simplified the development process with a focus on delivering results quickly, particularly when using tightly integrated frameworks and libraries like Next.js, Tailwind, Planetscale DB, and Prisma.

I remember feeling the same way when I first built something on AWS many years ago. But Vercel has taken it one step further by offering a complete toolkit— a set of integrated tools that allows you to build a full-stack application at an incredible pace along with many easy-to-understand tutorials and examples.

It’s not uncommon to come across independent libraries and frameworks that are well-made, but Vercel’s tight integration and emphasis on developer experience and velocity is what impress me.

If you’re looking to accelerate your development process, especially while building an early-stage prototype, I highly recommend exploring Vercel and Next.js today!

I would love to hear if you have come across any other tools/platforms like this that accelerate web app development in the early stage. 

From Managerial Role to Full-Time Coding: Navigating a New Journey

After years of working full-time in a managerial role, I’ve decided to take a break and explore something new. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been coding full-time for the first time in five years. It’s been a humbling experience, but also exciting to see how much the web app development ecosystem has evolved with new frameworks, hosted solutions, and seamless deployment platforms.

Returning to coding after a long break has been a challenge. It’s easy to forget how quickly skills can degrade when not put into practice regularly. The first week was tough, but now I’m slowly getting into a groove of things. Blocking off large chunks of time for hands-on work without any meetings on the calendar has been priceless! I’ll be sharing more updates on what I am building along the way. Stay tuned.

If you’re on a similar journey of exploring, ideating, and building, I’d love to hear about your experience.

Communicating technical complexity simply

When I was new to leading projects as a tech lead I thought showcasing my technical depth in front of my cross-functional partners and my manager by going into technical details made me look smart and important.

I was wrong!

Ability to communicate complex technical issues to all stakeholders in a language they can understand is far more important.

Understanding the technical complexity and distilling it down to simple words that your audience can connect with is the most underrated skill for engineers.

This skill becomes more and more important as you grow in your career.