u/pranaywankhede

The longer I build product, the more convinced I am that taste is the thing that actually separates good from average. Not frameworks, not process, not the tool stack. Taste. Knowing which problem is worth solving, which feature to kill, which detail the user will feel even if they never name it. Eight years in across a few domains, and that is the muscle that compounded the most.

So I am starting a product consulting studio built around exactly that. Not quitting my job, this runs on the side for now, deliberately. I would rather find the shape of it with real constraints than bet the rent on a guess.

The part I am still working out is where the actual opening is for a solo operator. A few directions I keep circling:

Fractional product help for early startups that cannot justify a senior hire yet.

Short zero to one sprints, a few weeks to take a fuzzy idea to something real and then leave.

Product taste audits for teams that ship constantly but never move a metric, where the problem is judgment, not velocity.

For context on how I think about this, the last thing I built was Orlog, a free PM personality test that maps you across six product archetypes. A few hundred people have run it now. I built it partly to force myself to get opinionated about what good product judgment even is, which is the same thing I would be selling.

For anyone who started a studio or went solo while still employed: where did the first real demand actually come from, and did you niche down early or let the market pull you there?

Starting the ride-along here because I am at day zero and would rather log it honestly than post a win six months from now.

Background: 8 years building product, a few domains, some launches that worked and a couple that taught me more by dying. I am now building a solo product consulting studio. No team, no co-founder, just me and a very short list of things I am actually good at.

The first move I made was not outreach. It was building a small free tool called Orlog, a PM personality test with six archetypes and real workplace scenarios. Around 130 people have used it. The bet is that a stranger trusts something they can try in 10 minutes more than a landing page full of adjectives about me.

Now the hard part. Turning “I built a thing people liked” into “someone pays me to fix their product.”

For those who went solo: did a free tool ever actually convert into paid work, or is it just a vanity top of funnel? And what was your real first client channel, network, content, or cold outreach?

I built a PM personality test a few weeks ago. Nothing fancy. Six archetypes, hybrid blends, real workplace scenarios instead of abstract questions. 133 people have taken it so far, which is more than I expected for something I made on the side.

Now I am stuck on two questions and this feels like the right room to think them through.

First, the hard one. Can a test like this ever be good enough to actually evaluate a candidate, not just entertain them? Right now it is a mirror. Fun, a little flattering, decent for self awareness. But assessing someone for a role needs something else. It needs to predict how they behave under real pressure, not how they describe themselves on a calm afternoon. The obvious risk is that people answer as the PM they wish they were, and you end up measuring self image instead of skill. So the scenarios have to be sharp enough that the correct sounding answer and the actually good answer are not the same thing. That is the part I have not cracked.

If any of you have used personality or judgment tests when assessing PMs, I want the honest version. Did it predict anything real? Or did it just give the panel a vocabulary to rationalize a decision they had already made?

Second, the awkward one. Where is the money in something like this, if there is any? A few directions I can see:

Charge the individual for a deeper report. Feels weak. Nobody pays much for a personality result.

Sell it to companies as a top of funnel screening layer for product roles. Stronger, but only if it actually predicts performance, which loops back to the first problem.

Keep it free for individuals, charge for a team version that maps a whole product org and shows gaps in how it is staffed. This is the one I lean toward, but I am not sure teams would pay.

Genuinely asking. If you were building this, where would you put the price, and who would you put it on?

I’ve been chewing on this for a while. We all kind of know the types in our orgs, the vision person who can’t ship, the execution machine who never questions the roadmap, the data one who wants a test for everything, the one who’s really just a founder in a PM seat. But I’ve never seen a clean way to describe where someone actually sits, or admit that most of us are a messy blend of two.

So over the last couple months I built a small thing on the side that tries to map it: you go through real workplace scenarios (not “rate yourself 1-5”) and it spits out your dominant type plus your hybrid. Building it forced me to get opinionated about what actually separates, say, a Discovery-leaning PM from a Growth one, and honestly it made me rethink my own defaults more than I expected.

Two questions for the room:

1. Do you find archetype frameworks useful, or are they just flattering noise?
2. If I were to share it here, would any of you actually be curious to run through it and tell me where it’s wrong?

Genuinely more interested in whether the mental model holds up than in the tool itself.

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I am okay paying 30k or a little more if the place is good and giving a private room.

Any leads would be appreciated.

Hi People of Powai,

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What is the rent I should expect and any tips for house hunting?