In 2007, when Nirav left an IT consulting job to join a Fortune 500 software product company, he had a plan:
Utilise work-life balance to build a great product. And become free to work on things that mattered the most to him.
Everyone in his circle agreed about the latter part of the plan. But they were skeptical about the feasibility of the former part.
And they were right.
A tech company's work-life balance makes you physically available to your family.
But it prevents you from dwelling in your creation fantasies 24x7, iterations, and distribution.
His second transition turned him into an indie iOS developer. During the 2010s, he made 6 apps and games he didn't know people wanted. He kept shooting in the dark, spending less than 1% of his time on UX research, GTM or distribution strategy.
His last iOS game, Funny Brain, took about 2 years to build. It was an NLP product to make children enjoy quirks of language while having a hearty laugh. He shipped it in 2024, and took it down in under a month.
Reason? App Store had zero organic discovery. His ASO didn't work. GPT, the tech it didn't use, diluted its uniqueness. Turning it into a GPT wrapper wasn't a very amusing idea.
That was a turnaround moment for his career dream, clouded so far by the creation-plus-toiling myth: Have an original idea, work long enough on it. One day people will find it and validate you.
The tables had already turned. The problems that mattered earlier got downsized by several orders of magnitude. Big companies, including the makers of modern AI, were realizing it in a much harder way.
The only question that remained was: What's left to build? Where's the value that's yet to be uncovered?
Ideation was the problem hiding in plain sight - before and after AI. Everything else - model scores, orchestration technicalities and AI certifications - was secondary.
In its current format (meeting rooms echoing unrefined "ideas" between coffee sips), the ideation bullet misses 90% of its targets.
Most of these brainstorming failures come from lack of business knowledge or insights, which gets rarely discovered without management expertise.
AI would democratize it when builders ask it through unstructured queries. But it won't remove the chaos that will ensue.
It is this gap that he decided to address through the two offerings: DarkPixel (a SaaS platform) and Domain Knowledge Training (60–90 minutes one-on-one, with tools and lingo).