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The person, not the CV

Hi, I’m Asif

Curious for a living. Everything else is a side effect.

Why?What if?Could I?Who would buy it?What went wrong?What next?Why?What if?Could I?Who would buy it?What went wrong?What next?Why?What if?Could I?Who would buy it?What went wrong?What next?

I'm Asif. The honest job title is "curious". Everything else on this site is a side effect.

It starts with a question

Almost everything I've made began as a question I couldn't leave alone.

  • Could a deal site be a real business?
  • Would people pay up front for software I built?
  • Why aren't more perfumes made for Indian weather?
  • Can one person train a language model on rented GPUs?

I rarely know whether the answer is a business, a prototype or an expensive lesson until I've built the thing. So I build the thing.

What it has turned into so far

  • Diskountz. A deal-discovery website, sold through Empire Flippers in November 2016.
  • Content Boom. AI-assisted content and SEO software, sold as lifetime deals through private communities and then on AppSumo, where it went live in July 2024.
  • Software I'm working on now. Mostly about one stubborn problem: finding customers.
  • House of Sultan. A perfume brand, which is what happens when curiosity leaves the laptop.
  • The Lab. Experiments that haven't decided what they are yet, and a few that have decided to be lessons.

I've moved between writing software, selling it, marketing it and making a physical product you can hold. They are different crafts. Curiosity is the only thing that transfers cleanly between them.

What it costs

Curiosity is cheap to start and expensive to finish. I have more ideas than I can responsibly pursue, and working out which ones to leave alone is the skill I'm still learning.

The other thing I keep relearning: building is the easy part. It was getting easier long before AI, and it's very easy now. Finding the people who want what you built has not got easier at all.

Away from the screen

I live in Meerut, India, and I'm a father of two.

I'm also working on becoming physically stronger and more capable, which is its own long-running experiment.

Still figuring things out

I've been building things on the internet since long before AI made building easy. The tools keep changing. The questions haven't stopped. This site is where I keep track of them.

See the work →What I’m doing now →