What's the deal with samaan.tech?

I have resisted starting a newsletter for a while, mostly because the internet has become extremely efficient at turning any creative impulse into a business model.

Write consistently. Build an audience. Repurpose everything. Find a paid offering.

Somewhere in that process, you are also expected to have something worth saying.

That is not what I want this to become.

Samaan Technologies is a small product studio built around a simple idea: useful technology comes from paying closer attention to the people using it.

Not the vague, flattened version of a "user" that exists in a slide deck.

Actual people, whose lives already have their own logic.

People rarely need a product to impress them. They need it to make sense, fit into how they already live, and solve a problem without creating three new ones.

What will I write about?

samaan.tech has three lanes. They are not meant to fence the writing in. They are simply the clearest way to explain what belongs here, and the natural categorization of my sometimes chaotic thoughts.

• 01
  Building Samaan

  the work, while it is still happening
• 02
  Design With Context

  the details that are not side notes
• 03
  Things I Wish Existed

  thinking through the problem first

Why publish any of this?

Building privately has its limits. Ideas become clearer when you have to explain them to someone who was not present for every internal leap of logic.

I also think product writing could use less performance. There is enough content announcing that everything is transformational, disruptive, or powered by the future. I am more interested in whether something is useful, whether it respects the people expected to use it, and whether the problem was worth solving in the first place.

I do not plan to publish on a rigid schedule simply because newsletters are apparently expected to behave like houseplants with investors.

I would rather write when I have something worth the reader's time. That may not be the ideal growth strategy. I will cope.

What comes next

The first posts will introduce the products already underway and the problems that led to them. I will write about decisions as they become real enough to examine honestly, and I will make room for ideas that are still too early to deserve a landing page.

Samaan.tech is not meant to be a performance of building in public. It is a place to make the thinking visible while the work is still taking shape.

...That feels like a useful place to start.