Praveen Pendyala

Praveen Pendyala

@pkp.io

Ex-Google & Ex-Microsoft. Bootstrapping my own indie apps. Profitable 💰 Now Scaling up 🚀🤞 Transcriptions - https://transcript.lol Content repurposing - https://repurpose.lol Travel planning - https://roamaround.app Personal portfolio - https://pkp.io

1K followers 245 following179 posts

Praveen Pendyala

I'm glad I added dark mode to Transcript LOL. I spend most of day building / dogfooding transcript - cannot look at a bright screen for so long!

Praveen Pendyala

@remindmeofth.is in 2 months

Praveen Pendyala

Personal moats in tech are eroding fast! Are distribution and sales the only skills with long term moat? A year ago: skilled programmer is a scarce and sought after skill. Now: demand shifted and effective scarcity is low.

Praveen Pendyala

What’s your main motivation to work for yourself? I started out just for the fun of building. Freedom is another big factor I discovered along the way. It was rainy this weekend so, worked on Sunday and took Monday off instead 😅

Praveen Pendyala

Week 33: Email sequences - example where it really helps knowing how to code + sell 🔥 Spent a lot of time researching techniques specific to each sequence: - 🔢 # of emails in the sequence - 💬 Key message in each email - ⏱️ Timing the message

Praveen Pendyala

I knew follow up communication is essential but I didn't want to just send off 1 filler email and be done. So, took the time to research, write & rewrite copy, implement tooling and setup the sequences.

Praveen Pendyala

This took so much longer than I thought as I also had to create new functionality (in reporting or internal tooling) to support specific sequences like: - ⏳9 days before subscription ends - 🤑 Unique, user specific discount codes that expire in days

Praveen Pendyala

Week 32: Started off feeling defeated 😞 📢 Ad campaigns: Weeks of work leading up to this moment! Launched our first Google Ads campaign on Sunday. Got rejected with an inconspicuous policy error. I have tried everything I could think of to get around this - Google is very unhelpful here!

Praveen Pendyala

💪 Powering through Despite this, I have showed up everyday: Improved transcript for our users and tried things to get resolve the issue. PS: The campaign is live, for now (🤞 we don't run into this again)

Praveen Pendyala

Week 31: Bottom of funnel optimisations Moved to Spain for the next couple of months. Same consistency in the routine just a different location. Rebuilt the pricing page and upsell components. Focusing on the final step in the funnel: Visitor -> User -> Key feature use -> Subscriber

Praveen Pendyala

Who Is Your ICP? An onboarding survey can capture this! Inspired by @TallyForms I'm adding this. But... I don't want to overload the path to key feature usage. I plan to show this right after user requests their first transcript and waiting for the result. Are there better ways to gather this?

Praveen Pendyala

Week 29: No one cares about your product... It's your job to convince your users to care! We have to get users to the wow moment as quickly as possible! In practice, this means: keeping the funnel to key feature usage as short and distraction free as possible.

Praveen Pendyala

In Transcript v1, I have done this well using my learnings at SwiftKey. While building v2 from ground up, I haven't paid attention to it because I know I can always revise later. Sketched out the current flow to create a transcript for a new user. Spent this week to optimise this funnel.

Praveen Pendyala

Week 28: Marketing, marketing, marketing Word of mouth has been good but not enough for the growth I want to see in Transcript. This week's focus has been on doing some ground work to test new marketing channels. Excited to hit the ground running by next week!

Praveen Pendyala

Sleep hard, work hardly

Praveen Pendyala

Week 27: Marketing work Been doing some groundwork for a consistent marketing push. Need to crack the distribution problem well or everything else I’m building is for nothing Also, I have finally taken a few days off this week with a long weekend trip to Norway.

Praveen Pendyala

Recharging 🧠 with this little boy 🐶

Praveen Pendyala

Week 26: A slow week 🐢 🔢 Dashboard to track conversions per channel 📢 Prep for Ads and organic experiments 🚀 Fixed bottlenecks with database

Praveen Pendyala

The look and sound of real luxury…. I’m grateful that I get to wake up to this and build my company on my own terms.

Praveen Pendyala

I will give investor updates bootstrapping. I will give investor updates bootstrapping. I will give investor updates bootstrapping. I will give investor updates bootstrapping.

Praveen Pendyala

Just because I did not take outside investment, doesn't mean I'm absolved of most communication responsibilities. You must constantly stay in touch with your users. This is everything I do each month:

Praveen Pendyala

Daily: Respond to support requests Weekly: Evaluate product feedback Monthly: Send detailed product updates This is in addition to special announcements, onboarding flows, promotions etc.

Praveen Pendyala

Week 25: I survived a week without AI 🤖 Here's what I learned... Thanks to @EE I'm practically cut-off from internet this week so, I challenged myself to build offline!

Praveen Pendyala

✅ Optimised the auto-scalar (love algorithmic challenges) 🚀 Built a Zapier extension for Transcript LOL ⬆️ Cleaned up & upgraded dependencies 📝 Prepared release notes for monthly product updates

Praveen Pendyala

As for coding without AI: - Definitely doable with first principles - Harder and time consuming - Not worth doing in this age

Praveen Pendyala

I gave the same problem to ChatGPT, Deepseek R1, Claude and Grok. The results tell a very different story to benchmarks! Models tested: - o3-mini-high (ChatGPT) - DeepThink R1 (DeepSeek) - Claude 3.5 Sonnet - Grok 3 beta (thinking on)

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Praveen Pendyala

Claude: Fastest response and very similar solution to Deepseek. Optimal and usable as is. Grok 3: Thought for 120 seconds. Similar solution as above 2. But code conventions are very different to typical Typescript.

Praveen Pendyala

Conclusion: Claude still best at coding. Beats them all with speed and maintainable code. Deepseek thinks too long. But gave a usable solution. Grok 3 takes time and gives a solution that is logically correct but needs edits to make it maintainable. ChatGPT has fallen so far behind!

Praveen Pendyala

I gave the same problem to ChatGPT, Deepseek R1, Claude and Grok. The results tell a very different story to benchmarks! Models tested: - o3-mini-high (ChatGPT) - DeepThink R1 (DeepSeek) - Claude 3.5 Sonnet - Grok 3 beta (thinking on)

Praveen Pendyala

The problem: Using the state of current transcription jobs (active + pending), write a function which returns true if we need to add another worker, false otherwise. We also know the size and times of each job. And we have a target time per job size. (my actual prompt is much more detailed).

Praveen Pendyala

The output: ChatGPT: Reasoned for 68 seconds and gave a naive solution that aggregates all timings and far from optimal. Deepseek: Thought for 423 seconds and gave a usable function that simulates the state and returns the optimal answer.

Praveen Pendyala

One thing I learnt from successful founders and good programmers. Successful founders 🏎️ When building something, built it fast so you can do: users 🔁 feedback 🔁 improve Good programmers 🧠 When building something, build it right so you don't have to keep coming back to it

Praveen Pendyala

How I combine it 🔥 For new things: Like testing a new idea, pricing strategy, or copy; I follow the founders advice. For foundational things: Like building app architecture, background job framework; I follow the good programmers advice.

Praveen Pendyala

This allows me to move fast and also have a solid foundation to build further for longer.

Praveen Pendyala

0 ➡️ 25 ➡️ 0 - in just a few minutes. Very happy with the results of scaling work last week. Transcript LOL demonstrated it can scale, and more importantly scale quick! Onto improving other areas now!

Praveen Pendyala

What did you do last week? Everyone should be asking this question themselves. It’s a basic pulse check if you want to grow! I been answering this question every week, publicly, for 24 weeks now!

Praveen Pendyala

I been getting a lot of requests lately to chat about startups. I'm always enthusiastic to listen and share my experience! If you do book a meeting, please show up because, I will! And it's not fun sitting in a cold room (where I take my calls), in my weekend, waiting for you to never join the call!

Praveen Pendyala

I gave ChatGPT $500 budget. Watch me turn it into $50,000 - these are the FOMO bros I do not miss!

Praveen Pendyala

Week 24: Scaling up: millions of hours per year ⬆️ 💪 Transcript is now ready to handle ~100 hours of transcription per minute 🛣️ Clear path to scale this further 2-5x ⌛️ Cold boot optimisations Scaling is an endless pit of things to do. Will revisit after demand catch ups.

Praveen Pendyala

Stress tested Transcript LOL’s scaling mechanism today. Hit a peak of 200 hours per minute, no problems 🔥🔥 Making improvements to cold boot speeds before the next test.

Praveen Pendyala

The simple autoscaler we use in production. Can make it smarter as we know so much else that we don't use: - Size of each active job - Size of each queued job - Mean-time to completion per job per size

Praveen Pendyala

Unpopular opinion: Computer science fundamentals are useful and essential! I'm thoroughly enjoying building an auto-scalar for Transcript LOL workers. A very interesting scheduler problem. You can make it however smart as you want! And the impact is real and tangible!

Praveen Pendyala

- Save big money as a business 💰💰 - Provide faster transcriptions for our users 🚀 - I satisfy my intellectual curiosity 😆 WIN-WIN-WIN!

Praveen Pendyala

Before someone says, "use XYZ serverless": I have tried them all. The serverless offerings are typically 3-5x more expensive for the time they are active. Definitely better to scale up and recycle instances - of course the cost is higher engineering effort.

Praveen Pendyala

Fastest transcriptions without zero compromise on quality! 🚀 1.9 minutes to transcribe per hour of audio 🚀 13 seconds or less for files under 20 mins What's measured will be improved!

Praveen Pendyala

Week 23: Messaging automation setup (super useful tool at the end) There are so many scenarios for communicating to my users:

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Praveen Pendyala

If you are looking for something that does all these, be ready to churn out the big bucks (circa. $500+ per month at Transcript's scale).

Praveen Pendyala

I'm glad to report that I finally found a tool that can do it all and very affordable! - checkout @dittofeed. Live for Transcript LOL this week 🔥

Praveen Pendyala

Week 23: Messaging automation setup (super useful tool at the end) There are so many scenarios for communicating to my users:

Praveen Pendyala

➡️ Transactional (billing, transcription updates) - 💰 (many tools) ➡️ Broadcasts (product updates, broad marketing) - 💰💰 (few tools) ➡️ Automated flows (onboarding, promotions) - 💰💰💰 (fewer tools) ➡️ Selective comms (based on recent user actions) - 💰💰💰 (very few tools)

Praveen Pendyala

The best internal feature I have built into transcript, by far! - Imitate a user! Saves me so much time as I don't have to go back and forth when a customer writes to me with an issue. I can easily log-in as them and dissect the issue faster!

Praveen Pendyala

My complete strategy on how to win this year: Make Transcript a little bit better each day, everyday. These small improvements will compound and give the best value for money to my customers. It is really that simple. The key is consistency!