Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 20/09/2026Every product decision is a bet. Are you betting informed? MIT: data-driven firms are 5–6% more productive. In card programmes that shows up in activation and KYC drop-off. saadsalman.org/case-studies... 000
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 20/09/2026Winning your own name is an entity problem, not discovery. Google could already find me. The hard part was standing out from every other Saad Salman. Playbook (open-sourced): saadsalman.org/blog/winning... 000
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 19/09/2026I build payment products for a living. Huge talent goes into making spend effortless. Almost nobody engineers that same frictionless magic for your savings rate. Start ugly, start now. Compounding is the one thing money cannot buy back. saadsalman.org/blog/the-reg... 000
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 19/09/2026My About page had a complete Person schema graph and 162 words. Google skipped it anyway. Schema does not fix thin content. Word count, query intent, and whether two pages fight the same query come first. saadsalman.org/blog/schema-... 000
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 18/09/2026I see subscriptions from the billing side. Once revenue depends on people not leaving, incentives stop aligning with theirs. Cancellation mazes aren't retention. They're a liability. saadsalman.org/blog/the-sub... 000
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 18/09/2026That beep after a contactless tap moved zero money. It only reserved a hold and promised the merchant an answer. Authorization is a promise. Settlement is the payment. Most of what cards do that feels weird lives in the gap. saadsalman.org/case-studies... 000
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 17/09/2026"Walk me through a card tap at a coffee shop." That's the FizzBuzz of payments PM interviews — looks trivial, filters hard. 15 questions I compared notes on with other payments PMs: saadsalman.org/blog/payment... 000
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 17/09/2026In MENAP, cash is the competitor — trusted, universal, free at the point of use. You're not switching cards; you're asking people to trust a screen with money they can hold. What actually changes when you build card programs here: saadsalman.org/blog/fintech...saadsalman.orgFintech in emerging markets plays by different rulesMost fintech writing assumes a US context: cards everywhere, trust by default, one currency. Across MENAP the defaults flip. Here's what actually changes when you build where cash is the incumbent and... 010
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 16/09/2026An agent can book the flight. The moment money has to move, it stops and asks for your card. An agentic wallet is identity + scoped permissions + a rail. Miss one and you don’t have a product — you have a liability. saadsalman.org/blog/agentic...saadsalman.orgAgentic wallets: when your money gets an APIAI agents can now book, buy and pay. The missing piece was a wallet they can actually control. Here is the market being built around agentic payments, and where I think it goes. 020
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 16/09/2026MUFAP’s “API” returns 500s from anything that isn’t a browser. Their Fund Directory is just a public HTML table. So I scraped that and shipped a free MIT API + a daily dataset with NAV history back to 2022. saadsalman.org/blog/free-ap...saadsalman.orgI built a free API for Pakistani mutual fund NAVs (because MUFAP's own one doesn't work)MUFAP's own JSON endpoints reject any request that isn't a browser. So I scraped their public Fund Directory instead and open-sourced the result — a small, free API serving live NAVs for 500+ Pakistan... 010
Saad Salman @saadsalman.org · 16/09/2026A card tap moves zero money. The beep is just authorization, a promise. Clearing runs that night and settlement lands days later. That gap is why refunds are slow, hotel holds linger and chargebacks exist. I built the journey as an interactive ride: saadsalman.org/case-studies/anatomy-of-a-tapsaadsalman.orgAnatomy of a tapRide your payment from the terminal to your bank and back, loop-the-loop included. 010