Field notes.
§013
2026-04-25
Abhiraj Sakargaye
Five things we decline to build, and why.
SingleBit declines work on five specific shapes: spec builds, account-manager layering, post-launch ghosting, client overload, and feature-list briefs. Every one of them quietly trades short-term revenue for long-term damage to the product.
- process
- agency
- principles
§012
2026-02-10
Naman Barkiya
Shipping is a skill.
Shipping is a discrete skill, separate from coding or design, and velocity compounds faster than either. A team shipping weekly gets four times the feedback loops of one shipping monthly.
- process
- velocity
- heuristics
§011
2026-01-22
Abhiraj Sakargaye
Contracts before code.
A build stays on budget when the contract, not the codebase, answers every scope question, which is why SingleBit front-loads a one-page scope document before any repo is cloned.
- process
- scoping
- contracts
§010
2025-11-22
Naman Barkiya
Our opinionated stack in 2026, and what we stopped using.
SingleBit's default product stack in 2026 is Next.js with App Router, Postgres, Drizzle, Tailwind with shadcn/ui, TanStack Query, and Clerk or Supabase Auth. The tools we stopped using include Prisma, Zustand-as-default, custom auth, and Notion-as-CMS.
- engineering
- stack
- tools
§009
2025-10-03
Naman Barkiya
The RAG architecture behind LaunchProd, and three things we'd do differently.
LaunchProd, a Carnegie Mellon University founded creator-economy AI startup, runs on a section-level retrieval pipeline with pgvector and a refuse-to-answer threshold. Simplifying from multi-tier chunking and reranking cut latency by roughly 35 percent without hurting output quality, because the original complexity was fighting itself.
- ai
- rag
- case-study
- architecture
§008
2025-06-21
Naman Barkiya
When to use RAG, when to fine-tune, and when to just use a good prompt.
Start with prompting. Add RAG when the product needs answers grounded in private data. Reach for fine-tuning only after the first two options have been exhausted and evaluation shows they were not enough. Most founders reach for fine-tuning first, which is the most expensive mistake they can make.
- ai
- architecture
- decision-tree
§007
2025-04-28
Abhiraj Sakargaye
Tirth: building a multi-faith pilgrimage platform when the market ran on WhatsApp.
Tirth launched into a US$40 billion pilgrimage market that runs on trust rather than transactions. Instead of building a booking platform, SingleBit built a trust-layer product that makes existing relationships discoverable and hands off to guides via WhatsApp. The guide network grew 4x in the first quarter through referral.
- case-study
- market-research
- product
§006
2025-03-09
Naman Barkiya
The real cost of a Framer vs WordPress vs Webflow decision.
Framer wins for design-led marketing sites with low content volume. Webflow wins for structured content with an editorial team of one to three. WordPress wins for commerce, high content volume, and multiple editors, but costs an hour a week in maintenance forever.
- engineering
- cms
- marketing-sites
§005
2025-01-18
Abhiraj Sakargaye
Your MVP is probably too big, and here's how to cut it in half.
Most MVPs land on our desk at roughly twice the scope they should ship with. Running the spec through three questions (core action, competitor-driven features, fear-driven features) reliably cuts scope in half, and the features that get cut are almost never the ones users miss.
- product
- scoping
- mvp
§004
2024-12-11
Naman Barkiya
How we shipped SIT Manager, the institute system two agencies stalled on.
SIT Manager replaced an eight-year legacy PHP monolith with a Next.js plus Postgres system in under eight weeks. Two previous agencies stalled for nine and six months respectively; SingleBit shipped the first working version in fourteen days and cut over to production with thirty minutes of downtime on a Sunday night.
- case-study
- migration
- engineering
§003
2024-10-08
Abhiraj Sakargaye
What our first two weeks with a new client actually look like.
SingleBit's first two weeks with a new client run on a fixed rhythm: a live staging URL on day one, Loom walkthroughs on day two, an uncomfortable scope conversation on day three, weekly Friday demos, and a written retrospective at the end of week two. The rhythm, held, is most of the engagement.
- process
- client-work
- cadence
§002
2024-08-22
Naman Barkiya
Why we ship a staging URL on day one (and what it costs when you don't).
SingleBit ships a live staging URL to the client before the kickoff call is over, every engagement. The URL removes the ability to hide, sets the cadence for the rest of the build, and turns scope questions from memory exercises into click-through demos.
- engineering
- process
- cadence