What do a palm reading, a coloring book, and a fridge at 10pm have in common?
Me, apparently (and AI)
My brain is wired for people, product, and problems, and my career has been shaped by this. From product marketing to business development to partnerships, I’ve always taken pride in being the person in the room connecting what someone needs to what someone else can build.
But with problems, you hit a ceiling if it’s not your domain.
When I was a product marketer at Uber, I used to say: we can market the hell out of your product, but the product has to show up for the marketing. And so much of that was on engineering. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong side of the wall. I’d see the gap and I would know exactly what the solution should look like, and then I’d have to hand it off and wait and hope someone else prioritized it on their roadmap. I would wish I was an engineer so I could have just done this myself.
But I don’t have that constraint anymore.
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In December 2023, soon after ChatGPT launched, my husband and I were up late, playing with generation, marveling at what it could do. At the time, my son was obsessed with coloring butterflies and trucks together. Please note the emphasis on together. And we were always having to figure out how to make that happen. That’s when we landed on an idea for an AI-powered coloring page generator that we called ButterPuppies. Without any marketing or outreach, we had over 10,000 coloring pages in a month. The funniest moment was watching vendors in China and India using it aggressively to create and sell coloring books on Amazon.
Our day jobs got in the way and we stepped back from ButterPuppies. But we never stopped watching how fast everything was moving.
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Last summer, leading up to and during a very very long flight to India, I built Fate Lines, a website that analyzes your palm to give you an AI-generated palm reading. I wrote about this one in more detail last year, but the short version is: I described what I wanted, troubleshot errors by copying and pasting them into Claude, and iterated. I still don’t really know what React is (lol) but the app works and the goal is make people get a little spooked by their readings (which is kind of the whole point of a palm reading, no?)
This experience changed my confidence around building. ButterPuppies was very much a joint effort with my husband but FateLines was me, solo, trying to figure it out.
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This year, I didn’t need VS Code. I moved to Claude Code and the experience was mind blowing in the most underrated way possible. I started tinkering as usual, and I wore my PMM hat to ask “What are the user problems in my life right now?”
Two things immediately popped up:
First — the invisible overhead of running a household with another person. The appointments, the RSVPs, the renewals, the “did we ever follow up on that thing?” If you share a life with someone, you know there’s an entire operating system required to keep things running, and it mostly lives in someone’s head.
So I built Family OS. It tracks tasks, assigns owners, and every Saturday at 8am it sends my husband and me an email with everything that’s still pending. It also auto-schedules reminders on our calendars. It is very much a V1, but every Saturday morning when that email lands, I get a cheap thrill and reminder of something useful I built.
Second — meal planning. Specifically, the mental load of figuring out what to feed my son every single day. What did he have yesterday? Will he actually eat this? Does it fit our dietary preferences? I was so tired of staring at the fridge at 10pm trying to be creative.
Thus was born Lunchbox Hero. It auto-generates meal ideas based on our dietary preferences and takes the decision fatigue completely out of the equation. The relief of offloading even just this one daily decision has been disproportionate to how simple the tool is.
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The wall I used to stare at during my Uber days is barely there anymore!
I love that I was able to build all four of these in the margins of an already full life, knowing well none of them are finished products. But all of them work for me, and every single one started the same way: a problem that annoyed me enough to do something about it.
The distance between having a problem and solving it has gotten absurdly short. All you need is a problem and the willingness to start.
I promise you, the feeling on the other side is worth it :)
Until next time,
Shrikala