I'm a software engineer who keeps trying to build businesses.
Some of that has been client work. I founded a small software company, Yaks Inc., ran it for about a year doing consulting work, and did freelance engineering for US-based clients. Some of it has been my own products, like an AI PDF summarizer I built called Chhithi AI. And right now, most of it is HairOver, an AI app that shows you a haircut on your own face before you get it.
This masterclass is what I've learned from all of that, written down while I'm still in the middle of it.
What this is
It's a practical guide to going from an idea to a business. Not a business-school course, not a list of famous startup stories. Just the questions you actually run into, in roughly the order you run into them:
- How do I think about this at all?
- Is this problem real?
- How do I know if anyone wants it?
- Who pays, and for what?
- Where do the first customers come from?
- What numbers should I actually look at?
- When does a project become a business?
Each chapter answers one of those. They're meant to be read in order, but each one should also make sense on its own.
What this isn't
It isn't a victory lap.
HairOver hasn't "made it." It's live on Google Play, iOS is planned, and I've spent a lot of time on pricing, distribution, and the website. But the big questions are still open. Will people keep using it, and will enough of them pay? I don't know yet.
I think that's actually useful to you. Most entrepreneurship advice is written after the result is known, and it quietly makes the path look more obvious than it was. Here you get the version from before I know how it ends.
So when I use HairOver as an example, I'll be specific about what's real and what's still a plan. When something didn't work, I'll say so. And when I haven't figured something out, I'll say that too.
How this connects to everything else
There are three parts to this site that fit together:
- This masterclass is about building the business: problems, validation, pricing, customers, audience, metrics.
- A Product Building masterclass (coming next) is about building the product: MVPs, UX, tech stack, AI, launching, feedback loops.
- HairOver: Building in Public is the live case study, what I'm actually doing, in order, with the real screens and the real math.
The masterclasses teach. The HairOver guide shows the messy version. When a chapter here mentions something that happened with HairOver, it links to the full story there.
The one idea running through all of it
If you take one thing from this masterclass, take this:
You don't need to know everything before you start. You need a way to learn quickly.
Almost every chapter is a version of that idea. You pick a real problem so you learn from real reactions. You validate to reduce uncertainty, not to prove you're right. You price early because pricing teaches you what people value. You look at a few honest numbers instead of many comfortable ones.
How to use this
If you're still at the idea stage, start with Think Like a Builder and Finding a Real Problem.
If you already have something built and nobody's using it, you'll probably get more from Finding Your First Customers and Metrics That Matter. In my experience, that's where most builders get stuck. I'm stuck there too.
And if you just want to watch someone try, follow the HairOver journey. The goal there is $1M in monthly recurring revenue. That's a target, not something I've done. We'll see how far it gets.
Key takeaway
This is a founder's notebook turned into a guide. It teaches from what actually happened, keeps plans and results separate, and it's being written while the story is still going.