I am Karan Bhakuni. I build products and write.

This site is where the writing lives. Everything else on it, the tools and the book picker, came out of an essay that needed a diagram and then kept going.

The writing

The oldest essay here is dated September 2025. There are 96 of them now, which works out to roughly one every four days for a year.

They are short. Half are under six hundred words and almost none run past fifteen hundred. Each one argues something rather than surveying it, and each one carries a diagram or an image, because some arguments are easier to see than to read.

By subject, 31 of them are about relationships, 24 about growth, 21 about wisdom and 20 about work. The rest divide between self-respect, the mind, discipline, fear, time, purpose, money and solitude. All of them are here, newest first.

Free tools

  • When will you be forgotten works out the year your name is likely to be spoken aloud for the last time, based on how long families actually remember.
  • Life in weeks draws your life as a grid of 4,420 weeks and shades in the ones you have already spent.
  • What should I read next asks three questions and picks one book out of the 167 I have actually read.

All three run in your browser. What you type never leaves your device, and none of it is saved.

Projects

I build software. These are mine:

  • SmoothClip, which turns long videos into platform-ready clips
  • Flyn, branded short links and click analytics
  • Poper, smart popups and widgets for websites
  • Grigora, a WordPress alternative for blogs and websites
  • SaveSaas, for finding the best SaaS products
  • Stuff To Do Near Me, city guides and trip-planning tools

Elsewhere

New essays go out by email, and you can subscribe at the bottom of this page. I am also on X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Reddit, and there is a podcast.

You can reach me on X or LinkedIn.