Building SGD Labs in public

I’m one engineer. There’s no growth team, no seed round, and no roadmap deck. There’s a laptop, two live products, and a stubborn belief that good software doesn’t have to be expensive to be worth paying for.

This is where I write about that out loud.

Why bother writing at all

Most “build in public” posts are victory laps. This won’t be. I’d rather show the parts that are actually useful to another builder: the pricing call I second-guessed for a week, the feature I shipped and then quietly deleted, the support email that changed how I think about onboarding.

If you’re building something solo, the loneliest part isn’t the work — it’s not knowing whether the trade-offs you’re making are the normal kind of hard or the you’re-doing-this-wrong kind of hard. Reading someone else’s decisions with the reasoning attached helps. So I’m writing the posts I wish I’d had.

What you can expect

• •Shipping notes. What went out, why, and what it cost me to get there.
• •Teardowns. Honest looks at pricing, positioning, and product decisions — mine and other people’s.
• •Guides. The occasional practical how-to when I figure something out worth passing along.

No cadence promises. When there’s something real to say, it goes here.

The thesis, stated plainly

Incumbent SaaS got bloated and overpriced because it could. The tooling to build lean alternatives got dramatically better, and the audience of people who just want a tool that does the thing — without a sales call — got bigger.

That gap is the whole business. This blog is the running commentary.

Thanks for reading. Go check out the products if you haven’t yet.