Your @username is permanently yours now, and other grown-up things a real product needs

There is a moment in every product’s life when it stops being a demo and starts being infrastructure someone relies on. This week was a pile of exactly that: the unglamorous scaffolding that separates “fun side project” from “thing people trust with their livelihood.”

Your username, permanently

Your @username is your address. People bookmark it, print it on a card, drop it in their bio. So it is permanent now, with a full history and proper 301 redirects, which means if a link ever has to change, the old one still lands people in the right place instead of a dead end. Your identity here is something you can build on without wondering whether it will move under your feet.

The legal grown-up stuff

We shipped real Terms, a Privacy policy built for India’s DPDP rules and GDPR, and a refund policy, all linked from the footer where they belong. Not the most thrilling sentence I will write this month, but the first time a serious client checks whether you are a real operation, these are precisely what they look for.

Words, and a newsletter

We renamed the customer-facing “Vendor” to “Host” everywhere it shows. “Vendor” makes you sound like a stall at a trade fair, and “Host” is what you actually are to the person booking you. There is a newsletter now with a proper welcome email, plus a phased 60-category industry taxonomy so services get sorted by what they genuinely are, which quietly helps guests find you.

None of this is a headline. All of it is the reason the headlines later get believed. Foundations first, always. If you have not claimed your handle yet, now is a good week for it, because permanent means the good ones go once.