Field notes on SEO, software,
tech & the solo life.
Personal essays from a seven-year solo SEO consultant working out of fourteen countries. Practical tactics, opinionated takes, and the kind of thinking I wish someone had handed me when I was figuring this out at 23.
☁️ SaaS Products
The software we run the business on, what we build ourselves, and what we tried and dropped.
The SaaS stack a one-person SEO practice actually runs on
Every paid tool in the business, what each one costs a month, and the three I would replace tomorrow if something better existed. No affiliate links, because none of these pay me.
Build it or buy it? When writing your own tool is worth the weekend
I have bought software I should have built, and built software I should have bought. The rule I use now takes about ten minutes and has been right far more often than my gut was.
What one credit actually costs us to serve
An honest breakdown of what runs up a bill behind an SEO tool — search calls, AI reads, servers — and why some of the work our own engines do costs us nothing at all to run.
⚡ Technology
Tools I actually use, AI workflows that survived contact with real client work, and opinions you didn't ask for.
The 7 AI tools I actually use in daily SEO work
Not the trendy list. The boring, useful one — what survived after twelve months of testing 40+ AI tools on real client deliverables. With exact prompts and the three I deleted last month.
Why I stopped caring about JavaScript frameworks
After a decade of React, Vue, Svelte, Astro, Next, Remix, Solid — I went back to a static HTML + a tiny vanilla JS file. Page loads halved. Rankings climbed. Sometimes the boring answer is the right one.
Self-hosting your knowledge base with Obsidian + Syncthing
Three years off Notion. The exact setup that lets me sync 8,400 markdown notes across four devices in three countries — without ever trusting a vendor again. Free, fast, and weirdly empowering.
📈 Business
Solo consulting math, pricing experiments, the unglamorous truths about scaling a craft business.
How I cap my client list at 8 — and earn more than most 20-person agencies
The math of a deliberately small consulting practice. Why I turn away seven clients out of ten that approach me — and the spreadsheet that proved the smaller business made more money.
The three pricing mistakes that nearly killed my first year solo
I went solo in March 2023. By August I was working 60-hour weeks for less than I made as an employee. Here's exactly what I priced wrong — and the framework I rebuilt around in month nine.
Why I killed two profitable service lines (and slept better doing it)
Audits at scale. Outreach courses. Both were generating $4–8k/mo and both were quietly destroying my deep-work time. The math for killing them, the conversations I dreaded, and the work I do now instead.
📱 Apps
The apps we build and ship ourselves — what they do, why they work the way they do, and what we got wrong first time.
Kharch Manager: an expense tracker that understands Roman Urdu
Most expense apps expect you to type in English and think in dollars. This one lets you say what you spent the way you would say it out loud, in the words you already use.
Why every app we ship still works with the internet switched off
Patchy signal is normal for most of the world, not an edge case. Building offline-first is harder on day one and quietly saves you every day after that. What it changed in practice.
Shipping a desktop app that borrows the browser you already have
Packing a whole browser inside an app makes it enormous. Using the one already on the machine keeps it small and makes it behave like the computer it is running on. The trade-offs, honestly.
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