Thoughts from the build

The AKU Blog

WhatsApp
Product

Why WhatsApp is the best ERP interface nobody built yet

70% of our design partners take orders via WhatsApp. We stopped treating that as a problem to solve and started treating it as the interface.

May 2026 · 4 min read
SEA
Market

The 39% problem: why APAC SMEs are still digitally immature

A Cisco survey found 39% of APAC SMEs are "digitally immature." We dug into what that actually means on the factory floor - and what it costs.

Apr 2026 · 7 min read
Ops
Operations

How a 45-year-old garment factory became our best product tester

Nice Thot, our lead design partner, has run their factory since 2010. Here's what six months of dogfooding AKU taught us about what operators actually need.

Mar 2026 · 8 min read
Mobile
Design

Designing for thumbs in gloves: mobile UX for the factory floor

Your average ERP is designed for someone sitting at a desk. We designed AKU for a foreman with work gloves, bad Wi-Fi, and three batches to update before lunch.

Feb 2026 · 5 min read
Data
Insight

What 10 design partners taught us about inventory blind spots

Every one of our early partners discovered inventory discrepancies they didn't know they had within the first week of using AKU. Here's the pattern.

Jan 2026 · 6 min read
LLM
Tech

Using LLMs to parse order messages - what works, what doesn't

"Bos, 800 polo navy 18 Aug" is a perfectly good order. We explored what it takes to reliably extract structured data from mixed-language chat messages.

Dec 2025 · 9 min read