DAPPA shut down after Google entered the AI try-on market. In 1.5 years, I shaped product direction through multiple pivots, built a design system from scratch, and learned how to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

The biggest shift in my thinking was around simplicity. In a startup full of ambition, the instinct is to cram features into a product and ship fast, but I learned that slowing down to research and keeping flows lean saves more time than it costs. Towards the end, our Chrome extension was gaining real traction before the shutdown, which proved to me that this approach works.