Year in Review - Products
Looking at my phone's home screen, I see 5 apps that became part of my routine in 2025. From a product craft standpoint, I will discuss 3: Granola, Found, and Cal.com. You will notice in all three cases that I am a solopreneur who needs to sell more, better manage client experiences, and deal with the legal requirements of running a business.
Granola - It seems to be one of the few standout winners that made AI work successfully. They did so by building a product that blended AI and human intelligence. The initial premise: let people take notes, and AI would augment them with the transcript. As a coach, they let me send notes customized to interview prep with a link that clients can use to ask questions about them. My two favorite features: (1) asking questions across all my notes (without it, I am lost) and (2) creating templates to allow for more customized notes (it was always there, but it became more prominent as the year went on).
I imagine an interview question: Tell me about a product that has made AI work, despite its inaccuracies.
General Answer Approach: Granola wins because they started and continue to work to augment humans, not replace them. They didn’t try to replace note-taking at the start; they built trust by keeping the human in the loop so the human could jump back in throughout the process. As a solopreneur, it makes me smarter by letting me (1) add to my notes without obsessing on every last word, (2) search my notes for themes and ideas, and (3) customize summarizations based on my different use cases. (Other ICP profiles would have different lists.)
Found - A banking platform that makes saving for quarterly taxes easier and provides basic bookkeeping features and business dashboard features.
I imagine an interview question: Tell me a product you think is great/wonderful/innovative but will fail (or is failing).
General Answer Approach: TL;DR - they have a great idea, but are building for the wrong customer. The product is built for SMBs, but it is a better solution for solopreneurs. I believe they will fail because they don’t have enough features for their ideal customer profile (ICP), the SMB, or the ICP I think they should be serving, the solopreneur. Found is innovative in that it automatically sets aside money for paying quarterly taxes, the biggest issue for solopreneurs. As a user, I get nice views of my business from my dashboard and from a weekly email with weekly highlights, which is better than the old bank account I had. It tries to provide basic bookkeeping services, but in today’s world, where 95% of businesses likely have a Stripe account, they can’t help you do proper credit card expense accounting, only cash-in and cash-out calculation, and so they come close but not close enough. And they haven’t figured out state taxes yet; once they do, it will become stickier for solopreneurs. But it is unlikely to win if they stay focused on larger SMBs, for whom they seem to be focused on 1099 employee management. It will not replace all their other tools, so it will be difficult to win that category. But in a world where gig work and the creator economy is king, they could be so much more even if their exit strategy was to get bought by a bigger bank.
Cal.com - The open source winner I never knew was there. I have struggled to find a calendar scheduling tool that worked for me. I have tried Calendly, but it wouldn’t let me sell packages. I tried CozyCal, but it will not let me easily create multiple types of products; it is meant for solopreneurs who have smaller businesses than mine. Or businesses that don’t change as much as mine. In a search for selling packages, I finally found cal.com only to find out it has existed for years.
I imagine an interview question: Tell me about a product you love.
General Answer Approach: In a world where Lovable.dev makes building customized products easy for anyone. I love Cal.com because it is open source and allows me to plug and play with solutions I build. Outside of being easy to embed in my custom solutions, it has all the core features a solopreneur needs: (1) calendar bookings with payments, (2) package sales, and (3) a fully functional app with editing capabilities. It brings together everything I was missing from Calendly and CozyCal, and it has a lower-tier pricing structure to start.
Now that I have shown you a way to think about the apps you have used through a product-sense lens, try at least one on your own. Find a product you used a lot this year. Explain who you are as you use it. Explain why you loved it. Or explain why you think it will fail or succeed. In short, focus on who the product is solving for and why.
