Vishesh Duggar

5x founder. Co-founder & CTO Product @vamstar. 15+ years building and advising startups of all sizes. If you're building something cool, I'd love to hear about it.

Looking for advice on product, strategy or engineering?

Book Appointment

All Posts

2024

The ego has landed.

There are a lot of tasks where AI will replace us. However, there are things that make us special.

Short story 4050 - Part I

His attention is limited. Just like his predecessor.

12 years ago my CEO asked me what if I get hit by a bus.

Business continuity is not something you want to forget.

90% SaaS startup founders get this wrong with sales

Generating cash and revenue has never been more important. You can totally avoid this mistake.

2023

Resolving Column Length Issues in Prisma with MySQL for NextAuth

A common scenario is adapting authentication mechanisms, like NextAuth, to work with different database systems.

Run MySQL locally on macOS using Docker

Running a MySQL server locally can be a hassle, especially when dealing with different versions and configurations.

This simple productivity hack will change your life.

Simple productivity tip.

Handling Token Refresh with NextAuth.js and Prisma

Subsequent logins or signins have stale access tokens.

95% of people have got hiring backward.

The average cost of a bad hire is 30% of that hire's annual salary. The real cost could be your startup.

Elon Musk's Five Commandments for Entrepreneurs

The difference between success and stagnation lies in the approach we take to solve problems.

Don't build the next Jira / Salesforce despite their success!

Engineering is more than a feature factory. Product managers see new features as a way to improve the product. I've never seen criticism hurled toward a team...

Are you making one of these three mistakes while onboarding enterprise customers as a B2B SaaS?

It doesn't have to be like a high-stakes poker game. Onboarding isn't just a 'how-to' session for your product. It's your first real conversation with your c...

The cost of working on the wrong strategy

Even if you're not spending anything out of pocket visibly. It could be costing your startup dearly.

How to raise your game as a founder. 9 podcasts guaranteed to accelerate your business.

Some of the podcasts that I've really learned a lot from over the years.

Hiring more could kill your startup.

When to hire is as important if not more than who to hire. Keeping on eye on Revenue per employee allows you to do just that. Identify if the company should ...

5 Signs You're Not VC Fundable in 2023

There is little money around in the market. Do you know if you are you VC-fundable? Let's dive into the signs that might suggest otherwise.

The fastest path to making a difference.

We all want to make a difference yet somehow don't move the needle far enough and or fast enough.

Product market fit is as hard as weight loss, okay maybe a tat little harder. Typical mistakes startups make that you should avoid.

Product market fit is as hard as weight loss, okay maybe a tat little harder but a lot of similarities. Understanding what it truly means to be in product ma...

This is the no. 1 reason why startups fail. Learn how you can avoid it.

Ever wondered why a lot of startups are spend millions and still end up with something their moms won't buy. It's not because they're jinxed or lack coffee s...

2021

Generating GraphQL Docs

It is super easy to generate GraphQL docs using Docusaurus

AWS Xray outside express or without a supported middleware

Setting up AWS Xray

2020

The best typescript dynamodb ORM

In the last month and a half I have looked at multiple DynamoDB ORMs; Dyngoose is by far the best.

CRA fails on CircleCI because of Terser

Overriding webback config using customize-cra

peerDependencies Can't resolve module

The right way to use peerDependencies

Check if an object is an instanceof an interface

Checking interface type at runtime

Microsoft can save trees with a single notice

Why do companies publish useless information on the product?

Query or Field Projections in ElasticSearch

Don't return the entire indexed document to the client when you don't need to.

2019

Private CircleCI Orb

How do I create a private circleci orb?

Typegoose stuck on find* query

Been playing with typegoose lately. The library has it's quirks including this weird issue of queries stalling.

Throw away your to-do list

I just love tweaking how I deal with my productivity levels. It's probably not good for productivity :) ... In the past, I’ve run many experiments like waki...

2018

ReactNative bundling and build issues on a new machine

I started to setup a ReactNative project that we have been working on for a while now on my machine. The generated iOS native code was version controlled but...

Obvious business opportunities in healthcare in India

India has it’s share of problems in healthcare, with a large customer base looking for solutions; these are also lucrative business opportunities.

2017

Here's how we hire "A" players

Exceeding expectations and attention to detail are a huge part of our culture. We look for candidates who've done the same in the past positions, resume and ...

2016

9 Important lessons from the Lean Startup Week 2016 San Francisco

I was at the lean Startup week 2016 in San Francisco couple of weeks ago. It is a great conference to meet entrepreneurs and innovation teams at other enterp...

Lessons from the Yahoo data breach for startups

Data breaches are real, they have happened to companies with dedicated security experts trying to prevent it from happening. Sometime in the future, this co...

Wishful thinking - a programming skill that every entrepreneur should learn

Wishful thinking in the programming practice where a program extracts all complexities. Using this one will have a much easier time solving the sub-problems.

3 Common Misconceptions About Hybrid Apps

It is a great time to be developing using hybrid app technology especially now. Launch faster, run leaner, grow your development team faster pick hybrid!

What is a hybrid app?

Hybrid apps interact with your mobile operating systems indirectly.

Startup friendly analytics, finally! - Heap

If you're a preliminary Google Analytics users you will love this. In fact, you might even question why is Google Analytics still such a crap product.

How to attract top tech talent

Awesome analytical skills and passion for solving complex problems are actually not that common in developers. Instead of looking out for these people, focus...

Grails 3 - Making a bigger impact

We’ve been using Grails for over 6 years now. It is an amazing framework built on solid foundations and allows us to build massive systems at a very fast pace.

Are you wasting your coding chops? Spend coding time on real problems

As a developer, I never want to spend time doing things that a script or a software can do for me. But if you suffer from RSI the motivation to do this can b...