TheSparseLabs

Tell us what breaks in your week

This is the most useful page on the site, and the only one that’s aimed at you rather than at us. Every product we’ve shipped started as someone describing a bad afternoon.

We’re not looking for product ideas. We’re looking for the thing you’ve already built a workaround for — the spreadsheet that shouldn’t exist, the step you do by hand every Thursday, the tool you keep open only because the other one can’t do one thing. You stopped complaining about it a while ago. That’s the one.

Describe the problem, not the solution. If you’ve already designed the fix in your head, tell us anyway, but lead with what hurts. We’re better at the second part than you’d expect and worse at guessing the first part than we’d like.

Happy for everyone to see it? Put it on the ideas wall instead.

The workaround is the important part. People only build workarounds for things that genuinely hurt.

We only use this to reply. No list, no newsletter, nothing forwarded to anyone.

What happens next

A real person reads every one of these. That’s not a figure of speech yet — there aren’t enough of them for it to be.

We reply to the ones we might be able to build, and we try to say no clearly to the rest rather than going quiet. If your problem turns into something we ship:

  • You get named as the person who found it

    On the product and here, unless you’d rather we didn’t.

  • You get it first

    Before the launch, while it’s still easy to change.

  • We build it with you, not at you

    You had the problem; you’re the one who can tell us when we’ve solved the wrong half of it.

The people who actually build this

A small group in India. Small on purpose — fifteen days only works if nobody has to be told what’s going on.

There’s no product team handing specs to an engineering team. The person who notices the problem is usually the person who ships the fix, which is why the products are opinionated and why they’re small.

  • Engineer

    Rishabh Gupta

    Takes the hardest problem on the board and makes it look like the easy one.

  • Engineer

    Hemant Yadav

    Won’t ship it until it’s right, and has a very particular idea of right.

  • Engineer

    Nanak Gupta

    Writes code that does exactly what it says, which is rarer than it sounds.

  • GTM

    Pratik Singh

    Could sell you this pen. Only sells the ones that write.

We’re not trying to become large. We’re trying to stay small enough that shipping in fifteen days is still physically possible.