A Year of Building, Learning, and Redesigning
It's been almost a year since I last wrote here. From then to now, I've been working on redesigning the blog to something which resonates with me better.
For people checking out my blog for the first time, welcome. I'm Rajath Chandrahasa, and I'm a Product Manager at Neosapien. We make this AI-native device that transcribes your conversations so you can actually be present without getting distracted by note-taking.
To my old readers/friends - quick life update: I joined NeoSapien as a Product Manager back in March, moved back to Bangalore after working in Hyderabad for 2 years, and I've been living and enjoying life here. I have a lot more to write about the city and its startup culture, but let me start with quickly updating on what I've been doing and what's happening.
Techno-futurism: the design ethos that defines this stage of my career and the blog's new identity
What I've Been Building at NeoSapien
I started at NeoSapien in March 2025. At that point, we had just received orders post Shark Tank hype, and the companion app was just ready. Since I joined, I've not only seen us ship the first devices, but I've seen the company grow multifold.
Neo 1 in copper, my favourite color. Credits to PK, our amazing motion designer
The first big thing was making the product actually stable. Our early customers can speak for the quantum leap we've had in both the stability of the app and the quality of transcripts. We went from buggy to something people actually depend on daily. Our DAU grew 3x since March. That's been the most rewarding metric to see.
The Language Update on Neosapien
One project I've worked closely on has been support for Indic languages. Earlier we only had English and Hindi, but since September, we've been supporting over 140 languages. All major Indian languages are now supported.
But here's what makes it interesting: Indians don't speak in one language in a conversation. We code-switch constantly. The specific request we kept getting was: Can your device handle when someone's mixing English, Hindi, and Kannada in the same conversation?
So we built that. We now support code-switching between any number of languages, while some of our competitors fail at doing it between even 2 languages. Also, we decreased our Word Error Rate (WER) by 2-3x, which puts us in best-in-class territory now.
The technical challenge here was that language models assume you're speaking one language. Building something that handles seamless transitions, including sounds that mean different things in different languages, meant rethinking the entire transcription pipeline. But that's a deeper post for another day.
Neo 1 post-language update compared to our competitors
App Redesign
The other major project has been the app redesign. This wasn't just visual - we improved stability, rethought the experience, and honestly, the customers love it. To keep things simple, we made the app consume less memory and CPU usage just by updating the design. This brought down app kills significantly, which overall led to the app stability I was talking about earlier. This is ongoing, and I hope the app continues to get better as we score other wins.
Evolution of our app design: from a hodgepodge of styles to unified "Neomorphism" (yes, different from neumorphism—I'll defend this)
What I've Learned So Far
The major learning has been being customer-obsessed. I've always been an intuitive person when it comes to product. Compared to my previous company where the number of users were much fewer, at NeoSapien, we have this passionate community. Meeting them and hearing their pain points has been crucial in building high-impact features. In addition to fixing their issues, I also get to see the impact of shipping a feature, which has been crucial. I also love to look at the feature adoption and the way feature discovery has been working, especially since some of the features are so unique to AI products and there is a lot of education around the feature and then finally the adoption. So learning and experiencing building a product where the features aren't well thought out has been great.
Intuition is great, but grounding it in actual customer conversations? That's where things click. I hope to continue this further.
The Blog Redesign
So while I was building at work, I was also redesigning this blog in my off time.
The word I had in my mind for this stage of my career was "techno-futurism." Inktrap fonts (which I love) have been a thing for a while, but I see widespread adoption in most AI-first companies and in the design circles. It gives that sense - clean, modern, slightly unconventional. The colorful logo and gradients are something I plan to gravitate towards, showing my colorful side - the gradient in the dark mode is literally the hue of Bangalore evening sky. I also thought this would be the best time to finally launch dark mode on this blog, something which my friends had suggested and requested, and this is also my customer obsession phase.
It's not just aesthetic, it's about aligning the blog with who I am now and where I'm headed.
What's Next
I needed this post to get started with writing again. Hopefully I get time, or more accurately, I make time to write more this time around.
I plan to share a lot about my product management learnings here. I've also been researching and working on note-taking. I've been journaling for the last 5 years, but this year I've had my largest streak where I haven't missed a single day of journaling and daily sketching. I'll write an update on this and how it can help unlock not just writing but creativity.
I'd have loved to read a lot of books this year but that's one front I'm lagging behind on. Hopefully writing here compels me to read more.
I've also been researching form factors a lot. Now that I'm in consumer tech, it makes more sense to put my thoughts on form factors here. That's hopefully going to be the next post.
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