500 Units, Cyplore, Fat Factory & Molecule of Month
#76 of 10+1 Things | Abu Dhabi
🏃 Slow grind.
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While last week was a bit hectic, this week wasn’t much different. But I still managed to run 3 times, which feels like a good achievement right now.
I’ve run a couple of half marathons in the past, but running really humbles you once you stop for a while. I’m back to running 5Ks consistently now, though the pace is very slow. Can’t wait to run fast again with less effort!
Speaking of work, as some of you might remember, I’m working on a few products as a side hustle, hoping to scale them and work on them full time someday. It’s been a month since I started, and I’ve already launched two products, so I thought I’d share my April update:
📊 StackStats: I’ve been building this analytics app for Substack writers based on my own frustrations writing on Substack for the last 5 years. I wanted something that gave me deeper insights into growth, engagement, and what readers actually care about.
→ I made $315 last month!
📬 FormBeep: I built this after realizing how many businesses miss leads simply because they don’t notice form submissions fast enough. It sends instant alerts when someone fills out your forms, so you can respond quicker and not lose potential customers.
→ Closed my first premium user at $4.99/month!
Not bad for month one! I’ll share my next update in June, so I’m excited to see how the next 30 days go.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
⚰️ A Family Project: Laurelyn writes about burying her mother at home. Her three brothers built a casket from a neighbour’s oak fence boards, they dug the grave by the vegetable garden, and buried her wrapped in red silk and flowers. No funeral director, no preacher. Just family, red clay, and flowers from the garden.
💡 500 Units: Simon shares his experience of building the world’s brightest lamp and shipping the first 500 units. Swapped PCB pins, scraping knobs, snapping screwdrivers, and tariffs jumping to 150% mid-production. Great read if you’re curious about what it takes to ship a physical product.
🧪 Molecule of the Month: This website by Bristol University has been featuring a new molecule every month since January 1996. Each entry is a fun, accessible deep dive into molecules like caffeine, LSD, the smell of mushrooms, or the poison that killed Socrates. Perfect rabbit hole material.
🌐 Your Website Is Not For You: I loved this piece by a web developer who argues that your website isn’t art, it’s a tool. Decision-makers overrule designers because they’re too close to their own brand, and the result is sites that look great to the boardroom but are useless to actual visitors. Quite the opposite of what I wrote on my blog: “My Blog Is My Greatest Art.”
🚴 Cyplore: Most e-assist systems I've seen have decent features but the retrofitting looks ugly and ruins the bike's overall look. This Kickstarter product solves that. It's a 1.7 kg system that fits your existing road or gravel bike, and the battery looks like a water bottle. There's a clutch so zero drag when it's off. In the demo they're showing it on a typical Scott road bike, which looks quite promising!
🐱 Bodega Cats of New York: This website documents NYC's bodega cats, the ones sleeping near the register, watching deliveries, or waiting by the ATM. Each cat gets a proper story with their name, routine, and the humans who look after them. There's even a book coming in October. Internet at its best.
💼 How an Oil Refinery works:I found this deep dive on oil refineries by Construction Physics fascinating. The world uses over 100 million barrels of oil a day and refineries are the massive machines that make it all usable. Even if you have zero interest in oil, the engineering scale alone is worth appreciating.
🦴 Fat Factory: Researchers found that Neanderthals were running organised "fat factories" 125,000 years ago in what is now Germany. They crushed bones from over 170 large mammals and heated them in water to extract calorie-rich bone grease. This kind of complex food processing was previously thought to be limited to much later human groups.
🗺️ The Grand Trunk Road: These beautiful illustrated maps by Perrin Remonté of the Grand Trunk Road, one of Asia's longest and oldest roads, are truly fascinating. The road connects Afghanistan to Bangladesh and dates back to the third century BCE. I love that they used a font by Ektype, a Mumbai design studio, inspired by the hand-painted truck art of North India and Pakistan.
🎬 Helvetica: Loved this video essay by Design Docs on the history of Helvetica. A typeface designed in 1957 to have no personality ended up on the NYC subway, the NASA Space Shuttle, BMW's logo, and every iPhone for nearly a decade. A typeface designed to mean nothing that ended up meaning everything.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."