2026-08-10 · Abhijeet Kakade
I Built Breaking Ice Because I Had This Problem
How a small problem I had turned into a product used by people around the world.
I can start a conversation.
Keeping it going?
That is where I used to struggle.
There would always be that point where the conversation started getting dry.
I started noticing the same thing with some of my friends too.
People wanted to talk.
They just did not always know what to talk about next...
And I thought...
Why not build something for it?
That is how Breaking Ice started.
It wasn't supposed to be a "rizz app"
I did not want to build another app that tells you what pickup line to send.
The idea was much simpler.
Help people get to know each other a little deeper in less time and help them keep a conversation going when they do not know what to say next.
That was it.
No huge vision.
No complicated startup plan.
Just a problem I had and wanted to solve.
We just started building
I got one of my friends involved and we built a quick MVP.
This time I did not want to spend months making everything perfect.
The architecture was simple.
The feature list was small.
We built only what we thought was necessary and shipped it.
And honestly...
I was not even that proud of the UI.
Compared to some of the other things I had built, it felt pretty basic.
But it worked.
So I put it out there.
Then people actually started using it
This was the part I was not expecting.
People started coming to the website.
Not just my friends.
Not just people I personally asked to try it.
People from different parts of the world.
I opened the dashboard one day and saw users showing up from countries I had never expected.
It was a small number.
Around 100 users.
But they were real.
And some of them kept coming back.
That feeling was completely different from getting a project to work locally.
My code had left my laptop.
Someone somewhere had found it, opened it, and decided it was useful enough to use.
That felt really good.
Then I started thinking about the numbers differently
The average time people spent on Breaking Ice was around one minute.
At first, that sounds like a bad number.
But then I thought about what I actually built.
Breaking Ice was not supposed to be another website where people spend an hour scrolling.
The whole point was to help someone get a question, use it in their conversation, and go back to talking to the person in front of them.
If they got what they needed and left...
Maybe one minute was not bad at all.
Maybe it meant the product was doing exactly what I wanted.
That changed how I looked at analytics.
Not every product needs people to stay longer.
Sometimes leaving quickly means you solved the problem.
Then came the marketing part
Building the product was one thing.
Getting people to actually find it was another.
I got one of my sweetest friends to help me make some reels for Breaking Ice.
And she actually did a good job.
The reels came out really well.
There was just one problem.
Her followers were not really the audience I was trying to reach.
So I started a new Instagram account specifically for Breaking Ice and started posting there.
It was another small lesson.
Making something people might like is one thing.
Finding those people is a completely different problem.
The people behind it mattered too
One of the people helping us with the shoot had his college file checking on the same day.
He still made the reel shoot a priority.
I remember being genuinely proud that day.
Not because the product suddenly became successful.
But because people around me were willing to put their time into something I had started.
I also had people around me who wanted to work on the project.
But I decided to keep the team small.
At that point, I did not think making the team bigger would automatically make the product better.
If the product does not need more people yet, why add more people?
I wanted to keep moving fast and figure out what actually needed to be built first.
The part I didn't expect
Breaking Ice started as a small problem I had.
Then it became something strangers were using.
Then I started talking about it.
And that opened doors I did not expect.
It gave me something real to show when I talked to people.
Not just:
"I built a project."
But:
"I built something, shipped it, and people are actually using it."
That difference matters.
It led to conversations with founders, interviews, and opportunities I probably would not have had if Breaking Ice had stayed as another project sitting inside my GitHub.
But honestly, those were not even my favorite part.
My favorite part was still seeing those users on the dashboard.
What Breaking Ice taught me
I used to think a good product had to be technically impressive.
More features.
Better UI.
Better architecture.
More things to show.
Breaking Ice made me think differently.
The architecture was not complicated.
The feature list was not huge.
The UI was not the thing I was most proud of.
But it solved a problem I actually understood.
And people used it.
That taught me something I do not want to forget:
You do not need to build something huge to make something useful.
Sometimes you just need to notice a small problem...
and care enough to solve it.
I'm still building
I do not know what Breaking Ice will become.
Maybe it becomes much bigger.
Maybe it stays a small project that helped thousands of conversations happen.
I do not know.
But I am glad I built it.
Because somewhere between noticing my own problem and seeing strangers use the solution...
I stopped thinking only about what I could build.
I started thinking about what people actually need.
And I think that is a much better place to build from.
More coming soon.