Ajith, Cactus C.E.O, asks Avinash, Cactus co-founder and C.T.O, to name the principles that guide his product thinking. Avinash offers three: do not build every request, build fast enough to learn, and keep the product focused.
These are Avinash's views from the conversation, not a feature announcement or customer case study. Together, they reveal the tensions behind deciding what belongs in a product and what does not.
Ajith and Avinash first met while studying computer science together in Kerala, a state on India's southwestern coast. After college, their paths separated until a shared mentor brought them back together at an earlier startup, where Avinash joined as a founding engineer. Years later, they built Cactus together.
That history gives them room to disagree. Avinash is candid that he does not question only customer requests. He challenges Ajith's ideas and his own ideas too. The goal is not to defend who suggested something. It is to understand whether the idea belongs in the product.
Avinash's first principle is the one most likely to be misunderstood: do not build everything a customer asks for.
This does not mean ignoring customers. It means listening for the problem beneath the requested solution.
As Avinash frames it in the episode, what a customer wants and what a customer needs can be two different things. One request may describe one person's preferred answer. Similar requests from several customers can reveal a pattern. Usage can help the team understand whether that pattern reflects a broader need.
His argument is that treating every request as a specification produces one-off features. Waiting for the pattern gives the team a better question to answer: what is the customer actually trying to accomplish?
Avinash uses a notes feature as an example. It was already an idea he had considered when two customers asked whether Cactus could support more CRM-style use cases. He describes that as a moment when a customer request matched a problem he already understood and an idea he believed fit the product.
The lesson is not to delay every decision. It is to separate a requested feature from the job the customer needs to complete.
Avinash's second principle creates a useful tension with the first: build fast.
He argues that AI tools make it possible to move an idea from conversation to prototype faster. Instead of debating a concept only in the abstract, a team can put a version on a screen and learn from it.
But speed is valuable only when the team is willing to discard what does not work.
Avinash puts it plainly in the episode: "You should be really excited to drop things."
A prototype is a question, not a commitment. It helps make an idea concrete enough to evaluate. It does not mean every experiment should become a permanent part of the product.
That is how Avinash reconciles his first two principles. Listen before committing, but do not let endless discussion prevent the team from testing an idea.
Avinash's third principle is direct: "Keep it simple. Don't build toggles."
He is wary of products that grow into collections of disconnected sub-apps, settings, and switches. Cactus is currently being built as a single application on Ruby on Rails. Avinash does not present that as a permanent rule or a model every company should follow. It is the architectural choice he believes supports coherence for now.
He compares product quality to plumbing. A customer may never see the pipework behind a finished wall, but the quality of that hidden work still determines whether the system performs as intended. A polished faucet cannot compensate for careless work behind it.
Software works the same way. The visible experience matters, and so do the architecture and decisions underneath it. His point is that the customer experience and the inner workings should receive the same level of care.
The three principles are not a checklist. They push against one another.
Listen long enough to understand the real need. Build fast enough to make the idea concrete. Remove what does not belong. Protect the coherence of the product while continuing to learn from the people using it.
That tension is the heart of Avinash's product philosophy in the first episode of Prickly on Purpose.
Watch or listen to episode one for the full conversation between Ajith and Avinash, including their journey from college classmates to Cactus co-founders.
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