Someone in my village

Every product I've built so far had a person attached to it before it had a feature list.

Sometimes that person is me. More often it's someone in my village.

I use the word loosely. My village is the kitchen I grew up eating from, and the phone call home when I can't remember how something is made. It's the friends and coworkers who treat a reality show like a league sport. It's my boss, who needed a tool for cheer coaches. And it's whoever walks in once the door is open.

Right now there are four products in motion at Samaan Technologies, and three of them are live in the App Store. That wasn't a portfolio plan. Each one started because somebody in the village had a specific problem, and I happened to be the person in the village who builds software.

That's the whole strategy. It makes a terrible slide. It's a decent reason to build.

Samaan Pantry is the one closest to home. It's for desi kitchens: the pantry, the shopping list, and the recipes you keep coming back to. It isn't a meal planner, it doesn't deliver groceries, and it won't track your kitchen on its own. It went live around September 25, after App Review sent it back over sign-in and over how the in-app purchase promotions were set up.

Somewhere in there I also pulled a build out of review to change "Saman" to "Samaan." The company is named after the Urdu word for provisions. You'd think I'd have the spelling down by now. You'd think. The legal entity is its own spelling conversation, and paperwork has opinions.

Version 1.2 went out on September 28 with recipe import from YouTube and website links, and recipe sharing. Sharing sounds like the smaller feature. In a village, it's most of how recipes travel.

Pantry is also the only one of the four that asks for money. Samaan Pro is $4.99 a month, $39.99 a year, or $79.99 for lifetime. Building subscriptions was its own learning curve: the purchase flow, the pricing tiers, the promo setup, and Apple's rules sitting on top of all three. I'd like this work to pay something back eventually. I'm just not building the village around the paywall.

I happened to be the person in the village who builds software.

H.I.M. has been with me longest. It's friendship-first, for gay men, and it's been live since July. From September 21 to 25, a backend outage took login down. The app was there. Nobody could get in. A friendship app you can't log in to is a very quiet room.

The outage also earned me an App Review rejection, which is excellent timing if you're collecting bad weeks. I explained to Apple what happened and resubmitted. 2.7 is in progress.

Round Table Draft is the most obviously village of the four. It's a private fantasy draft for friends and coworkers who watch The Traitors together and have strong opinions about who's lying. No affiliation with the show or Peacock. Just the group chat, with rosters. It's on the App Store and the web, and live score updates went in on September 28, so the arguing can happen in real time.

Setboard is the fourth, and the one that isn't in the App Store yet. It's a cheer formation playbook for coaches and captains: a mat planner, a roster, and routines in one place. It started because someone I work with needed it. It runs on the web at setboard.vercel.app, and I'm scoping native versions for iOS and Google Play.

Every one of these has something in it I had to learn how to build. Importing a recipe from a link. Scores that update live. A paywall that gets through review. A mat you can plan formations on. And, courtesy of H.I.M., the humbling lesson of keeping a login working.

None of it happens in a clean block of time. I build solo, around a full-time job, with AI agents helping. Some nights the coding tools run out of usage halfway through a feature, and the feature waits. App Review sends something back. A backend goes down. A name turns out to be spelled two ways.

None of that makes a good post. All of it is the job.

What keeps it worth doing is the village. It's also what keeps each product specific. If I know who it's for, I know what it's for, and just as importantly, what it isn't for. Pantry doesn't need to be a grocery service. Round Table Draft doesn't need to be a network. Setboard needs to work for a coach standing next to a mat.

The App Store changes the math a little. Once something is live, the village stops being only people I know. Anyone who downloads it and recognizes their own problem gets to move in.

That's the growth I'm after. More people in the village. More things built for them. And maybe, somewhere in the process, a little reward for the builder. I'd take them in that order.

More soon, assuming the login holds.

Haaris