BuildingAI
from the user side.

My first job was sitting across from students as an education counselor. Officially it was business development, but the actual work was customer discovery before I had ever heard the term. I helped people decide which exam to take, which course to commit to, which version of their future to bet on. I had more than five thousand of those conversations, one at a time. After enough of them, you stop hearing the words and start hearing the patterns underneath: what users are actually afraid of, the goals they tell themselves they want versus the ones they are chasing, the way they make decisions when the stakes are real.

At some point I wanted to build the products users were asking for instead of selling them what was already on the shelf. That took me into enterprise sales at Mad Street Den, where I sold a computer vision platform into the US finance vertical. From there I moved into product at Basidia, a consumer learning app with 25,000+ DAUs, where I started running retention experiments and mapping funnels in earnest. I then founded DoubltClear AI, which Inc42 featured among the top upcoming startups to look out for, and wound it down to join SigIQ AI, where I now lead product.

Four industries in, the underlying job has been the same: customer development that actually changes the roadmap, market research that survives the data, and retention work that takes the months it needs to take. I built that muscle in education. It works wherever there is a product, a user, and a metric worth moving.