Four posts in, and I never said who I am
I've written about losing money and about being invisible. I never wrote the part where I tell you who is talking.
There are four posts on this page. Why I stopped chasing a salary. A hole in my own accounts that nobody typed wrong. A year of trades that lost to a fixed deposit. Six products you can't see.
Not one of them says who I am.
That is a strange way to run a blog. So, late, here it is.
The short version
My name is Lohith. I am twenty-nine. I live in Bengaluru. I am the founding engineer at Kinetic Blume, which is my job and, for now, my income.
I write software. That is the whole of the trade I have.
What I actually do
I ship whole products on my own. Not features inside someone else's product. The whole thing — the database, the server, the screens, the payments, the app in both stores, the boring part where the numbers have to add up.
That is a different skill from being a good programmer, and I think it is the more useful one. Plenty of people can write the interesting part. Far fewer will sit with the invoice that has to reconcile to the paisa, or the store review that fails for a reason nobody documented.
Tools write most of the code now. They do not decide what to build, and they do not finish anything. Those two jobs are still mine.
What I am doing it for
A stake. Not a bigger salary.
I did the sum once and it was small. Saving has a limit and the limit is low. A salary is rented time — you give hours, you get paid, and the day you stop giving hours the money stops. It is a floor, and a floor is not a ladder.
So I am trying to own a share of something real instead. That is what this blog is a record of.
What I have built, honestly
Six products. Two are live on both app stores. One is a jewellery ERP with a real client who pays me. One is a fully built job-matching platform that I own outright, eighty-five thousand lines of it, with no users at all.
That last one is the honest headline. I am good at building things and I have been bad at checking first whether anyone wanted them. All of nothing is still nothing.
Almost all of it is in private repositories, which means you have to take my word for every sentence above. I wrote a whole post about how stupid that is. I am fixing it.
What I am looking for
One person.
Someone who has spent years inside a trade — actually inside it, not reading about it. Who knows the thing that is broken because it has been breaking on them every week for a decade. Who has customers waiting and nobody who can build.
I have learned to be strict about this. Not the confident founder with a deck and an idea. The operator with scars. When I have ignored that rule I have built beautiful things nobody needed.
I bring one thing to that person: I can build the whole product, alone, and finish it. That is worth a share of the business. Sold by the hour it is just a bigger salary again.
Why I write this down
This is not a portfolio. A portfolio only shows the parts that worked.
It is a record of one attempt, written while it is happening, with the losses left in. The trading year that lost to a fixed deposit is here. The accounts that quietly went wrong are here. The six products nobody can see are here.
I leave those in because a version without them would be useless, to you and to me. If this works, the record should show how. If it doesn't, it should show that too.
I am somewhere in the middle of it. That is the only claim I can make honestly today.
If you are the person I described above — the one with the trade and the scars and no one to build — I would like to hear from you.