About

I’ve been on your side of the table.

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

Strategy → MVP → production → your team

Most people cover one of these four. The gaps between them are where projects die.

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.

Strategy

“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.

MVP

“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.

Production

“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.

Your own team

“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.

Engineering · Product · Go-to-market

I’ve worn all three hats. Usually at the same time.

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

Still in the code

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

Tied to revenue, not output

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’ve had to sell it too

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.

The long version

Fourteen years, in order.

2012 — 2017

Mediology Software Labs

Digital publishing, engineer to architect

Joined as a mobile applications developer and left five and a half years later as Principal Engineer and Technical Architect. Shipped 70+ iOS and Android apps for publishing clients and designed the architecture for the Readwhere mobile content management system — the CMS behind national newspapers, including the Indian Express group. Built reusable components and tooling that carried into 50 other projects, and ran the iOS, Android, backend and design teams for the product.

70+ mobile appsCMS for national newspapersEngineer → Architect

2018 — 2019

Founder · registered December 2017

Founded Notation Software Labs

The company. Registered at the end of 2017 and working properly from 2018 — which is the whole reason different sources give different founding years. The first stretch was services work, custom mobile and commerce builds for founders across India and the UAE, alongside a run of product experiments while I worked out what was actually worth building. Profitable early, and that is what funded the product that came out of it.

Parent companyServices + product experimentsProfitable

2019 — 2023

Founder & CEO

Built CommerceUp, Notation's SaaS platform

Strategised in 2019 and launched in 2020, live with the first merchant in Dubai that August. A profitable, investor-backed multi-tenant commerce platform that grew to 70+ mid-market merchants across the UAE and the broader MENA region. Built the store builder, vendor management, inventory, order management, payments and merchant analytics end to end, and wrote production code throughout — through monolith, service decomposition and multi-region as merchant scale demanded it. Grew the team to 25 and owned the full P&L, plus sales, marketing, customer success, hiring and fundraising. The product was only half of it: merchants needed advising on how to actually run ecommerce once procurement and fulfilment were solved — how to list, how to price, how to sell, and which tools were worth paying for.

70+ merchantsTeam of 25Full P&LUAE & MENA

2023 — 2024

Closed June 2023 · announced October 2023

Acquired by Aspire

Negotiated and executed the acquisition by Aspire Inc, the San Francisco influencer-marketing platform, then ran the post-merger integration of product, engineering team and customer base. I kept the company running through the transition and folded it in December 2024. Being on the sell side of a deal — and then closing a company out properly — changes what you notice in someone else's roadmap, org chart and numbers permanently.

Negotiated the dealPost-merger integrationFolded Dec 2024

2023 — 2025

Aspire Inc

Director of Engineering

Founded and scaled Aspire's India product and engineering organization from the ground up after the acquisition, establishing it as a strategic delivery hub. Built and mentored engineering leadership; instituted the hiring, onboarding, performance, architecture-review and on-call practices that survived significant headcount growth.

Built the India orgHiring & levellingOn-call & review practice

2025 — 2026

Aspire Inc

Head of Product & Engineering

Led the global Product, Engineering and Design organization across India and North America — one roadmap, one hiring strategy, one execution model across distributed teams and time zones. This is where cross-border operating stopped being theory: an India engineering team and a US commercial team, EOR and payroll across jurisdictions, and the coordination overhead nobody budgets for. Owned the monetization roadmap across affiliate infrastructure, payouts, discounts and commerce integrations, tied to ARR, retention and expansion — and drove AI tooling adoption across engineering.

Product · Eng · DesignCross-border teams & EORMonetization & ARR

Now

Founder & Principal Advisor, GK Tech Ventures

Advising — and still building

GK Tech Ventures is the company — an LLP in India and an LLC in the US. Advisory and fractional leadership are what it sells; Convertly is what it's building, a Shopify-native commerce product covering creator monetization, affiliate workflows, attribution and payout infrastructure. That is deliberately the same shape as last time: Notation Software Labs was the company, CommerceUp was the product. Building keeps me current on the creator economy and on AI-native delivery from both sides at once — what it takes to build, and what the market will actually pay for.

Advisory & fractionalIndia LLP · US LLCConvertly in build

Where it started

Five and a half years in digital publishing.

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.

What that decade taught

Cross-platform is an architecture decision, not a framework choice
Offline-first and PWA patterns, before they were a trend
Performance budgets on networks you don’t control
Shipping the same product to three platforms without three roadmaps
Mentoring engineers and owning architecture, not just code
How to go from intern to architect by shipping, not by title

Hands-on stack

Not a list of things I’ve heard of.

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.

Commerce & Martech

Where most of the last decade went — services builds, a SaaS platform, and now Shopify-native products.

Shopify Admin API
Storefront API
Liquid
Shopify app development
App Store publishing
Shopify Plus
Magento
Headless commerce
Stripe & payments
Affiliate & payout systems
Subscription & retention
Multi-tenant SaaS

Frontend & Mobile

Seventy-plus shipped mobile apps in publishing, then a decade of web product on top.

React
Next.js
Angular
Vue.js
React Native
Ionic
Capacitor
Progressive web apps
Offline-first
TypeScript
Tailwind
ShadCN
Material UI
Ant Design
Storybook
Webpack
ESBuild

Backend & APIs

Monolith to service decomposition to multi-region, done once for real as merchant scale demanded it.

Node.js
NestJS
Express
TypeScript
Python
Java
C#
.NET
Swift
PHP
Laravel
REST
GraphQL
Serverless (Lambda, GCF)
Event-driven architecture
SQS · SNS · Kafka
OAuth · JWT · Okta · Auth0

Data & Search

Merchant analytics, event tracking and the pipelines underneath them.

PostgreSQL
MySQL
MongoDB
DynamoDB
Redis
Elasticsearch
Algolia
Firebase
pgvector
Pinecone
Data pipelines
Event tracking

Cloud & Delivery

The part that decides whether a product survives its first real traffic.

AWS
Google Cloud
DigitalOcean
Docker
Kubernetes
EKS / ECS
Terraform
GitHub Actions
Jenkins
CodeBuild
CloudWatch
Datadog
Prometheus
Jest
Playwright
Cypress

AI, in production

Not a slide. This site and Convertly are both built this way.

Claude API
Claude Code
Cursor
GitHub Copilot
MCP servers
RAG pipelines
Agentic & tool-use patterns
Structured outputs
Prompt engineering
Vector stores

What I'm building

One company. Advisory pays for it. Convertly is what it builds.

GK Tech Ventures is the company — an LLP in India and an LLC in the US. Convertly is its product: an AI-native creator-commerce platform for Shopify brands covering creator discovery and recruitment, campaigns, storefronts, order attribution, commissions and payouts, run by AI agents where the human approves rather than operates.

That is the same structure as last time — Notation Software Labs was the company, CommerceUp was the product — and it is deliberate. It also means the payout rails, the attribution edge cases and the Shopify App Store review process are things I am dealing with this quarter rather than remembering.

Why this matters to you

An advisor who stopped building three years ago is giving you 2023’s answer. I’m in the Shopify Admin API, the payout rails, the attribution edge cases and the Claude API this week — which is the only reason I can tell you what AI-native delivery actually costs and where it actually breaks.

It also means I’m spending my own runway on the same decisions I’m advising you on.

Press

Founder profileCEO Insights IndiaPiyush Pathak: Transcending the Ordinaries of the eCommerce Market

The acquisition, 2023PR NewswireAspire.io Acquires Indian SaaS E-Commerce Team from CommerceUp

Also ran inMarTech360 Aspire.io

MENA launchGulf NewsCommerceUp debuts in MENA region to provide end-to-end e-commerce technology solution

Verify for yourself

LinkedIn ↗Crunchbase ↗

2 embedded engagements at a time — building Convertly with the rest

Start with a free 30-minute call.

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.

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