Trial and Error

What nobody tells you about automating Zoho Campaigns — and how I figured it out the hard way

There's a saying in Chennai. If you've learned to ride an autorickshaw through T. Nagar peak hour traffic — dodging Saravana Stores patrons, Food carts in tricycles, that one uncle who parks his Activa exactly in the middle of the road — then you can drive anywhere in the world Zoho’s API is exactly like T. Nagar traffic. If you successfully integrate with Zoho Campaigns API, I promise you — any other API in the...

I Tried to Replace Zoho Campaigns with an AI Agent. I Gave Up Halfway.

Anthropic’s announcement about launching Claude agentic plugins was kind of an eye-opener for me. Before you mistake me for an AI expert, let me make this clear. I am not. I run a business. I experiment a lot. I try to automate anything that feels repetitive or expensive. With my limited coding skills, I’ve picked up this habit of playing around with generative and agentic AI tools. They’re mostly fun to work with, especially when...

Why Your Product Isn’t the Hero. Your Customer Is

Some time back I was at a home appliances shop to buy a couple of kitchen equipments. The salesperson was trying to sell the new food processor that had just come to the market. She had good clarity about the product. While at it, I didn’t find anything special about her sales talk. But after leaving the place, one thing struck me very hard. During the entire sales pitch, she didn’t say anything about the...

One Product Choice That Quietly Won My Loyalty

I almost always choose Rapido over Uber, and the reason is embarrassingly small. It has nothing to do with pricing, availability, or even loyalty. It comes down to the OTP. Uber gives me a new OTP for every ride. Rapido doesn’t. It’s the same number, every single time. On paper, that feels like a bad idea. We’ve been trained to believe that anything involving an OTP must be random, temporary, and treated like a state...

Every now and then, a random show or conversation sneaks up on you — the kind that you start watching casually, only to find yourself unexpectedly moved or inspired by the people in it. That’s exactly what happened when I stumbled upon Startup Singam a Tamil reality show I discovered through linkedinBut this one caught my attention for a different reason — the producer was Kumar VembuEveryone knows Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder of Zoho. But how many...