From Sarahah to Sarah

Hello everyone 👋🏼

I'm Zain. Many years ago, I built and scaled Sarahah to 300M+ without a marketing budget. It was a tough ride that taught me a lot.

I continued to build products and I learned that the playbook I used then isn't the playbook I need now.

Product Building: Moats Became Speed Traps

The Sarahah MVP took me about a month. Despite its simplicity, I had to wrestle with bugs, hosting configurations, and the nightmare of email delivery. My primary source of help was the now quite Stack Overflow.

Today, AI handles almost all of that. But back then, the difficulty of building was actually an advantage. It was a natural moat. Techies like me had a massive edge, which probably explains the collective denial many of us felt when AI coding assistants first arrived.

To show you how much things have changed: users had been asking for photo memories in Wallble for a while, but it felt like a distant milestone. I shipped it in a single day and even added a voice notes option just because I could.

The Danger: This speed can backfire. When you build everything instantly, you risk overflowing your customers. If you play all your feature cards on day one, what's left to keep them excited? Moving too fast can ruin your marketing beats and exhaust your audience.

Follower Counts No Longer Count

During Sarahah's rise, if someone shared a link, their friends actually saw it. Regular users with small followings mattered. People who built a massive following by sharing quality content were a treasure, and their followers genuinely trusted their recommendations.

Today, algorithms are the gatekeepers. Going viral now often requires "the dance", ridiculous hooks, and manufactured outrage. As someone who isn't comfortable marketing that way, it's a real challenge. Many of the connections I built during Sarahah can no longer help me spread the word for Wallble by simply sharing a link. The algorithm buries their content.

People Are Downloading Fewer Apps

Trending on the App Store used to be every builder's dream. People actually browsed the charts just to find what's "hot".

Not anymore. According to TechCrunch, global app downloads have declined for five consecutive years, dropping from 135 billion at their peak to 106.9 billion in 2025. Interestingly, consumer spending surged to $155.8 billion in that same period.

The Insight: People are spending more money, but they are doing it inside fewer apps. They've picked their favorites and they aren't looking for new ones.

I Lost My Entrepreneurial Innocence

This one might surprise you.

You'd think my experience with Sarahah made me a better entrepreneur. In some ways, it did. But it also robbed me of my "entrepreneurial innocence". After Sarahah, I felt a heavy pressure to follow "startup best practices." I focused on analytics, funnels, and conversion tracking way too early. That level of optimization only makes sense at scale, where a 3% bump equals millions of dollars. For a small startup, it's often just a massive distraction.

I miss the days when my focus was keeping my users happy, and product market fit was measured by customer complaints of a slow website, not by accessing Mixpanel.

What's More Valid Today

You don't need to leave your job. I was a big advocate for this even before AI. Today, it's undeniable. When building your product essentially costs you $100 and you can dedicate your free time to marketing, there is zero reason to risk it just to see if your idea has legs.

So, who is Sarah?

Well, I'm currently building Wallble, a virtual wall for meaningful moments where you can share warm messages with a departing colleague, comfort a sick friend, or celebrate another's graduation. It's a way to make people feel loved and appreciated. Users always surprise me with new ways to use it, though here are some ideas to get you started.

I've built Wallble's marketing around an imaginary employee named Sarah, whom coworkers say goodbye to (the similarity to "Sarahah" was truly accidental).

The thing is, building for Sarah is vastly different from building Sarahah. In many ways, I'm having to unlearn just as much as I'm learning. But the core mission hasn't changed: skip the noise, skip the theater, and build something that delivers value to people.