About
Fourteen years: engineer, architect, founder, CEO, and the executive who ran product and engineering for the company that bought mine. I’ve raised, hired, shipped, scaled, sold, and integrated afterwards — and I’ve made most of the expensive mistakes personally.
That’s the whole offer: you get the answer without paying the tuition again.
Piyush Pathak
Gurgaon · India
01
Strategy → MVP → production → your team
A strategist who has never shipped. An agency that builds but won’t hand over. A CTO who can scale a system but can’t tell you whether it’s worth building. I’ve worked all four stages, in order, more than once — and the handoffs between them are where I’m most useful.
01
“Is this even the right thing to build?”
What to build, what to refuse, and whether the business case survives contact with the engineering estimate. I've made this call as a founder spending my own runway, and as an executive spending someone else's — which are different disciplines.
Where it breaksStrategy done by people who will never have to build it. The plan is coherent and the estimate is fiction.
02
“What's the smallest thing that proves it?”
The smallest honest version that produces a real signal — shipped to real users, not demoed. Knowing what to leave out is the entire skill, and it's learned by having shipped the bloated version once and paid for it.
Where it breaksAn MVP that's either a prototype nobody can use, or a v1 so complete it takes nine months to learn something you could have learned in six weeks.
03
“Will this survive real traffic, real money and real support?”
The unglamorous stretch: architecture that holds as scale grows, payments and payouts that reconcile, observability, on-call, security, and the release process that stops shipping from being an event. CommerceUp went monolith → service decomposition → multi-region because merchants forced it, not because it was fashionable.
Where it breaksTeams that treat launch as the finish line and discover their architecture at 3am, six months later, with customers watching.
04
“How do I stop depending on an agency?”
The hand-off nobody plans for: moving from a studio or agency to an in-house team that owns the thing. Hiring, levelling, the scorecards, the architecture review, the on-call rota, the documentation — then a genuine handover. I built Aspire's India organization from zero after the acquisition and did exactly this.
Where it breaksThe agency stays forever because nothing was ever written down, and the code only makes sense to the people who wrote it.
02
Engineering · Product · Go-to-market
Running CommerceUp meant product strategy, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, hiring and fundraising — with the P&L on me. You learn quickly that shipping and selling are the same problem viewed from two ends.
Engineering
Intern to Principal Engineer and Architect over five and a half years, then a decade of building on top. I still write production code — this site included. It keeps the advice current rather than remembered, and it means engineers take the conversation seriously.
Product
At Aspire I owned the monetization roadmap — affiliate infrastructure, payouts, discounts, commerce integrations — with success measured in ARR, retention and expansion rather than features delivered. Roadmaps that aren’t tied to a number are wish lists.
Go-to-market
I sold CommerceUp’s first merchants myself, ran the marketing, handled customer success, and later partnered with Sales and Growth at Aspire on GTM alignment. Knowing what actually sells changes what you choose to build.
03
The work
This used to be a timeline. A timeline tells you when things happened; it doesn’t tell you why any of it matters when it’s your problem on the table.
Took a profitable but leverage-less consultancy and turned the pattern its clients kept paying for into CommerceUp — a multi-tenant commerce platform. Strategy in 2019, live in 2020.
What that means for you
I have made the services-to-product jump with my own money on it — including the parts that don't appear in the case studies.
Across the UAE and MENA, profitable and investor-backed. Architected it end to end — store builder, inventory, orders, payments, analytics — through monolith, service decomposition and multi-region as merchant scale forced each move. Owned the full P&L.
What that means for you
I know which architecture decisions actually bite at scale, because I was the one paying for them.
A San Francisco platform acquired the company in 2023. I ran the deal myself, then the post-merger integration of product, team and customer base — and closed the original company out properly.
What that means for you
I have been on the sell side of diligence. That changes permanently what you notice in a roadmap, an org chart and a set of numbers.
Once at my own company, then again at Aspire — founding their India org after the acquisition and later running global Product, Engineering and Design across India and North America.
What that means for you
Hiring, levelling, on-call and review practice that survives real headcount growth — and cross-border teams that actually ship.
Convertly — a Shopify-native commerce platform covering discovery, campaigns, storefronts, attribution and payouts. Live on the Shopify App Store, built solo with modern AI tooling.
What that means for you
An advisor who stopped building three years ago gives you 2023's answer. I'm in the APIs, the payout rails and the AI tooling now.
In order
2012 — 2017
Digital publishing, engineer to architect
Mediology Software Labs
2018 — 2019
Founded Notation Software Labs
Founder · registered December 2017
2019 — 2023
Built CommerceUp, Notation's SaaS platform
Founder & CEO
2023 — 2024
Acquired by Aspire
Closed June 2023 · announced October 2023
2023 — 2025
Director of Engineering
Aspire Inc
2025 — 2026
Head of Product & Engineering
Aspire Inc
Now
Advising — and still building
Founder & Principal Advisor, GK Tech Ventures
04
Where it started
I joined Mediology Software Labs as an intern in 2012 and left as Principal Engineer and Architect. In between: 70+ iOS and Android apps shipped for publishing clients, full-stack work in Angular and React, and cross-platform mobile and web initiatives across a domain with unusually hard constraints.
Publishing forced problems most product teams meet years later — offline-first reading, progressive web apps, sync and conflict resolution, aggressive payload budgets on bad networks, content pipelines, and the same product shipped across iOS, Android and web without three separate teams.
05
Hands-on stack
Everything below has been in my hands on something real — a shipped app, a production platform, a merchant integration, or a product I’m building right now. Where I’m rusty, I’ll tell you.
Where most of the last decade went — services builds, a SaaS platform, and now Shopify-native products.
Seventy-plus shipped mobile apps in publishing, then a decade of web product on top.
Monolith to service decomposition to multi-region, done once for real as merchant scale demanded it.
Merchant analytics, event tracking and the pipelines underneath them.
The part that decides whether a product survives its first real traffic.
Not a slide. This site and Convertly are both built this way.
Currently taking new engagements
Bring the decision you keep re-opening. No pitch, no deck — and if I'm not the right person for it, I'll tell you who is.