Saivvi

What I built, what I learned.

From August 2023 to 2026 I was CTO of Saivvi, an AI product company for non-technical operators — the marketing manager, the ops lead, the SMB founder. The bet: people who run businesses should be able to own an AI workflow, not just consume one somebody else built.

We built an iPhone app backed by AI workflows — the hard part was never the model. It was the orchestration: turning a draft idea or a shared link into polished, on-brand output a non-technical person would actually ship. Content production pipelines, brand-voice layers, the unglamorous glue.

How it ended

The product was good. Users told us so — the reviews praised the layout, the organization, and the content ideas it put in their hands. We were on the yellow brick road. What ended it wasn't the product: it was the price of reaching the next customer. Social-media advertising inflation pushed acquisition costs past what the economics could carry, and a good product you can't affordably put in front of people is a good product winding down. The app is still available; the company is closing its chapter.

Three lessons I carry into every engagement now

  1. A good product doesn't survive rented distribution. Our reach lived on ad platforms, and when their prices moved, our fate moved with them. It's why everything I build now runs on owned distribution — an audience, a library, a pattern shared openly — that no auction can reprice.
  2. The demo runs on capability; the finish runs on scaffolding. The model was never our bottleneck. The orchestration, the brand-voice layer, the pipeline glue — the unglamorous parts were the product. Budget for them first.
  3. Most "tech" problems are people-and-incentives problems wearing a tech disguise. Building for non-technical operators taught me where AI actually sticks in a business: not where the technology is impressive, but where someone's real workflow gets shorter.

That chapter is why the practice looks the way it does: I've been on the product side of the AI promises SMBs get sold. When I tell you what's real and what's theater, it's because I've built both.

What I do now