Most of my work is AI agents in production. This isn't that.
I want to talk about a small thing I built recently — a wedding invitation tool — and the bigger thing I learned while building it. Specifically: one feedback question I think most product builders ask wrong, and what changed when I started asking it differently.
The cautionary tale
About a year ago I refined a certificate generator I'd built back in college. The original was a simple thing — fill in some fields, generate a PDF, done. When I came back to it a year later, I decided to make it better. More options. More customization. More configuration. More flexibility.
It came out genuinely capable. It also came out almost unusable to anyone who wasn't a developer. I'd added so many knobs that finding the one a regular user actually needed required reading the docs I hadn't bothered to write. The "improved" version was, in every meaningful sense, worse than the version I'd shipped as a sophomore.
Lesson absorbed. Sort of.
The wedding invitation
Last month I saw someone share a wedding invitation online — a digital one, sent over WhatsApp — and it actually looked good. Clean, well-laid-out, mobile-friendly. RSVP built in. I spent maybe ten minutes looking at it, thinking about what it would take to build, and decided to try the opposite of the certificate-generator mistake: ship a small utility tool that someone non-technical could pick up without me sitting next to them.
So I built Invitations.
The first weekend was the proof — two or three people used it without me hovering over them. That was enough to tell me the basic shape was right. The next two weeks were where the actual work happened.
The unlock
Here's the part I want to talk about.
The people who turned Invitations from basically works into genuinely usable weren't non-technical users. They were technical friends — devs, builders, people who could've quietly worked around any rough edge and never said a word.
I knew that's what they'd do by default. So I asked them a different question.
Not "what do you think?" — that gets you opinions, validation, and sometimes a polite "looks good!"
Not "any bugs?" — that gets you actual bugs, which is useful, but rarely tells you the product is hard to use.
I asked them: "anything that feels tedious or takes more effort than it should, just tell me."
That question changed what came back. Suddenly I was getting feedback like:
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"Why do I have to enter the date in this format?"
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"I clicked here and nothing happened."
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"Where do I see who's responded?"
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"Can the link be shorter?"
This is the kind of feedback you'd expect from a non-technical user. Concrete. Blunt. They don't accept friction as inevitable. They don't pat me on the head for almost-getting-it-right. They tell me, plainly, what's wrong.
Technical users normally don't behave that way. We work around things. We open dev tools, paste in a fix, file a mental TODO we'll get to in 2027, and keep going. We've internalized the idea that software is fragile, and our job is to route around the fragility — even when we are the user, of our own product.
But the moment I framed the question around tedium — not bugs, not opinions — they switched modes. They started complaining like non-technical users. And every complaint was a real fix that made the product better.
What I'm taking from this
The technical-vs-non-technical distinction is real, but it's not destiny. It's a description of how people typically engage with feedback, not how they can.
Ask a technical user "what do you think?" and they'll work around the friction and tell you it's fine. Ask the same person "what felt tedious?" and they'll hand you a list that's exactly what a non-technical user would have said — except they can also tell you why, and how to fix it.
The question matters more than the user.
If you've been asking your testers "what do you think?" and not learning much, change the question. The friction is in your product. They've already routed around it. You just need to ask in a way that pulls it back into view.
The product, briefly
Invitations is at invitations.ajmalaksar.com. Build a wedding invite, share the link, RSVPs come back to you. Right now there are presets for Christian and Muslim weddings, plus a custom option if your tradition isn't slotted in yet. Hindu and Sikh presets are on the way — there's a waitlist if you want me to ping you when they're live.
If you try it and something feels tedious, tell me. That's how this got good.