My grandmother (may Allah have mercy on her) used to lay us across her legs and gently swing side to side while cutting fruit. I’m doing the same with my son now — building Rawi in the same motion.
The Prophet ﷺ said: “Actions are by intentions.” That hadith has been sitting with me for months. It’s the reason Rawi feels like work I want to do, not work I have to do. The intention reframes everything.
Over the last weeks I’ve been deliberate with the attention and time I give to Rawi, given that my primary attention goes to my consulting job. There are infinite things I could be doing. I had a long conversation with my business advisor (his name is Claude, lol) about where to focus the little time I have. The advice was what I was naturally drawn to: focus on building a great product. Everything else follows.
So that’s where I am. Listening to users. Iterating fast. The same way I spent the two weeks between opening the beta and shipping v1.0. Jeff Gothelf calls this “sense and respond”: short loops, two-way conversations with users, small bets over big plans.
Five days after launch, around 200 people have Rawi on their phones. About one in three has written to me with something — a correction, a request, a note about an ayah Rawi got wrong, or one it got right at exactly the right moment. That last kind of message is why I build.
The unglamorous things continue in parallel: bug fixes, UX polish, content. That’s the job. You show up for the intention, and you keep the loop short.