Building a broker in public
Builder's Lab
A product community I founded and ran at Punch, where traders asked for what they wanted, argued about priority, reported what was broken and watched it get fixed. It sat at the core of the organic flywheel the company was betting on.
Why it existed
Punch switched off paid acquisition and bet on building an organic flywheel.
In October 2025 the company stopped growing on paid advertising. Build a good product, price it at almost nothing, spend nothing on marketing, ask traders what they want and build it. That plan has one weak link: the asking has to be real and visible, or none of the rest turns. Builder's Lab was my bet on that part.
Most of the work was keeping four easier things out of it. Not a marketplace of ideas, because a board that runs on volume builds for whoever has the most time. Not a dump for requests, because one that goes in and never comes out teaches people to stop posting. Not a support channel. And not a place to talk about the market, because the moment that starts there is nothing left worth reading.
Decided by you, built by us.
Punch put this on its marketing site. A line like that is only worth anything if someone can go and check it, and the board was where they checked.
One I backed, one I got wrong
The board was never a vote count.
Smart Money Concepts indicators read a chart for the traces institutions leave behind. On the board they came from a small number of traders posting, with very high vote counts behind each post. That is a loud minority, and on vote volume alone it would not have got built. The board was not the only signal: influencer videos about SMC were climbing, search volume with them, and no other broker platform had it. I spent the engineering on positioning, and co-created a three month webinar series to teach it. Adoption came in just under 20% and traders later named SMC as a reason they stayed.
The scalper joystick was the opposite. One of the most requested things on the board, from most of our audience, and it landed at about 30% adoption. Two things caused it: I overestimated the signal, and the design and user flow got in the way of the feature. Set next to SMC, that is why I stopped asking how many people wanted something and started asking who was asking.
How it ran
Four surfaces, and a changelog every Wednesday.
A request board, an issue board, the roadmap, and a changelog out every Wednesday evening whether or not the week had gone well. The changelog held the rest up: if traders post and vote and nothing visibly ships, a board like this dies inside a month. A roadmap that only shows the flattering parts reads as marketing, so the unflattering posts stayed up. I ran the board and I set the roadmap, so there was no relay between the two.
What I learned
What running the board taught me.
Every company says it listens to users. Very few own the place where the listening happens. When the surface belongs to somebody else you get a summary of what people said; when it belongs to you, you get what they said, and prioritisation stops being an argument inside the company and becomes something you can point at.
It only works if you keep turning up, because a board with nobody answering on it is public proof that nobody is listening. And it worked partly because Punch was playing catch up. There was a lot users wanted that we did not have, and that steam went down as we delivered. I am not sure how the bet would have held for another year.
Switch to the broker that listens.
Punch ended up leading its marketing with this. The board was the only place a trader could go and check whether the line was true.
About
Most of the seven years was spent alongside the CEO, the head of design, engineering, business analysts, subject matter experts and growth.
What I want next is AI-native product work, and a place where I can keep building great products myself.
Education
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MS, Cognitive Science
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar2015 to 2017
Thesis on the cognitive system of musical improvisation, read through phenomenology.
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BS, Life Science and Biochemistry
St. Xavier's College, Mumbai2012 to 2015
- sunat.archit6@gmail.com
- +91 99136 42634