Openly

I was around 21 or 22 when I started Openly, and it was probably the most dynamic period of my life. I had moved to HSR before it became what it is today, gathered a group of friends who were still finishing college, and convinced them that we could build a company together. On the first day I was explaining to one of them what frontend and backend meant. Not long afterwards, he had become our main backend developer and was teaching me how to build better backend systems.

We were building a hyperlocal marketplace for neighbourhood businesses, but none of us had neatly defined jobs. We built the consumer app, merchant product, backend, operations, delivery systems, sales, marketing, and everything else that had to exist around them. I was the primary full-stack developer and cared obsessively about the quality of the apps. They were smooth, heavily animated, and polished enough that people sometimes asked whether we had built them natively. Watching a group that started with so little professional experience become capable of making something that good is still one of the things I am proudest of.

We hustled in every possible way. We put up no-parking signs because people actually looked at them. We used hoardings and local advertising. We went store to store. I went out and did deliveries myself because one afternoon talking to merchants, riders, and customers could expose problems that were invisible from behind a laptop. Eventually we had around 10,000 users, more than 200 stores, an 11-person team, a ₹50 lakh Karnataka ELEVATE grant, and additional outside funding.

We never had enormous amounts of money, but we had enough to build, live well, and have a good time as long as our expectations remained sensible. Eventually the company reached an awkward middle scale where the product worked but expanding across a city required more capital than the business could generate itself. Openly did not become the giant company I imagined when I was 21, but that is almost secondary to what the experience gave me. It was where a group of young people learned, from scratch, that we could actually build a company together.