Akash Bansal·Just nowKeep, fake or cut: scoping a two-sided marketplace MVPEvery marketplace feature falls into one of three buckets. Most founders put too much in the first.
Akash Bansal·2h agoThe $50K agency disaster is a contract problem, not a people problemThere’s a genre of founder post that never goes away. On r/startups, one is titled “I wasted $50,000 building my startup.” Another is…A response icon1A response icon1
Akash Bansal·1d agoFirestore bills your read pattern, Supabase bills your instance: choosing a backend in 2026I’ve shipped both. At Urban Culture (an at-home salon marketplace, 500K registered users, 6 cities) the four apps ran on Flutter, Node.js…
Akash Bansal·1d agoSeven checks before you decide your vibe-coded app needs a rebuildA security-first way to decide whether to keep prompting, rescue or rebuild an app made with Lovable, Bolt, Cursor or Claude Code.
Akash Bansal·1d agoPaying for your app doesn’t mean you own itThe two kinds of code ownership every founder needs, and what changes when AI writes the code. (An engineer’s checklist, not legal advice.)
Akash Bansal·1d agoLLM-as-a-judge for grading people: the four biases and the pipeline rules that contain themLLM judges are good. Zheng et al. (2023) found GPT-4 agreed with human preferences over 80% of the time, about the same rate at which…
Akash Bansal·1d agoAn app cost estimate you can argue withThe bottom-up method behind my free app cost calculator, with every weight on the table.
Akash Bansal·3d agoYour MVP quote should be biggest in one place. Most aren’t.A builder’s line-by-line view of what an MVP app costs in 2026, and the scope decisions that move the price.
Akash Bansal·3d agoYou’re not choosing a developer. You’re choosing what to pay with.Equity, salary, cash or your own time: how non-technical founders should pick between a cofounder, a founding engineer, an agency and a…
Akash Bansal·3d agoAn 800 ms budget: notes from building a real-time voice interviewer on Pipecat, Daily and GroqI built NextMantra on my own. It’s an AI recruiter that runs first-round voice interviews, scores résumés against the role, and produces a…A response icon1A response icon1
