Product

The hardest engineering problem in building Revarta wasn’t making the AI smart enough to evaluate an interview answer. The models are already good at that. It was making the AI willing to tell someone their answer was bad. Ask a stock model to grade an interview answer and it will tell you almost anything is “a strong response.” A vague, rambling story with no result lands a cheerful 4.5 out of 5. This isn’t a capability gap — the same model can dissect exactly why the answer is weak if you ask it to critique a stranger’s. It’s a disposition. These models are trained, through human feedback, to be agreeable, and that training has gravity. It’s the same instinct that makes a coding agent say “you’re absolutely right” the moment you push back on its design — it would rather agree than hold a line. ...

A product can be perfectly compliant — every screen reader satisfied, every contrast ratio passing, every guideline met — and still be completely out of reach for the person who needs it. When most people hear “accessibility,” they think of the first part: designing for people with disabilities. That work is real, it matters, and I’m not here to relitigate it. There’s a second sense of access that gets far less attention: whether a genuinely good thing is reachable by an ordinary person at all. Not “is the interface usable,” but “can you get this in the first place.” By that measure, most high-quality services quietly fail. The best interview coaching runs two hundred dollars an hour and books weeks out. The best of almost anything is gated — by price, by availability, by the unspoken assumption that excellence is for people who can pay for it. ...

After a talk I gave at NewTech NorthWest, someone asked: “Why interview prep? Why this problem?” Fair question. There are a lot of problems to solve. I had 5-6 different ideas that were energizing to solve. So I pulled up Maslow’s hierarchy and started mapping where each would sit. Most products optimize for one or two levels. Fitness apps touch physiological needs and esteem. Social apps hit belonging. Then I looked at jobs and careers. ...

I picked up work on Revarta’s organic traffic strategy in the last few days and got a solid reminder and learning on early product development. Here’s what I discovered while implementing a sustainable, cost-effective approach to content generation and keyword research. Effective SEO doesn’t require expensive tools or complex workflows — especially in the early stages. The Sophistication Trap I started by looking at the “standard” SEO toolkit. The reality hit quickly: quality SEO tools easily run $250+ per month just for data and insights, before you even think about content generation. For an early-stage product like Revarta, that’s a significant investment with uncertain returns. They also didn’t seem to get me all the way there and left the execution bits out. ...

It’s January. Everyone’s thinking about the “1% better every day = 37x improvement in a year” math. It’s inspiring. It’s also not how improvement actually works. The math assumes every gain stacks on the previous one. But most improvements don’t compound. They reset. You get better, then you lose the thread. You make progress, then you can’t tell what’s working. You ship something, learn nothing, and start over. James Clear said it well this week: “New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do.” ...