The Student Startup That Raised ₹15 Lakhs From Seniors and Burned It in 8 Months

In the summer between my second and third year at IIT Delhi, my co-founder Ankit and I raised ₹15 lakhs from a combination of alumni angels, a college fund, and one extremely optimistic family friend of Ankit's who had read too many startup books. We were building a peer tutoring marketplace for college students. We had a clean deck, a compelling narrative, and approximately no understanding of how to build a marketplace.

Eight months later, the money was gone. The company was not exactly dead, but it was in that particular liminal state of a startup where the founders have stopped working on it but have not yet formally shut it down, because formally shutting it down requires acknowledging something that is easier not to acknowledge.

What We Got Wrong

Marketplace problem number one: the chicken and the egg. We built a tutoring platform and then tried to acquire both tutors and students simultaneously. This is the thing that everyone who has studied marketplaces knows and that we had somehow convinced ourselves did not apply to us. Without tutors, students had nothing to book. Without students, tutors had no reason to list. We tried to solve this by subsidising both sides simultaneously, which meant our unit economics were broken from the start and we were essentially paying for growth with capital that should have lasted twice as long.

Problem number two: we had funded assumptions rather than real validation. We assumed students wanted to pay for peer tutoring. We assumed tutors wanted the administrative overhead of managing bookings and payments on our platform. We had spoken to exactly twelve potential users before raising money, all of whom were broadly supportive in the way that people are broadly supportive of ideas that do not cost them anything.

The ₹15 Lakhs Breakdown

Infrastructure and tooling: ₹2 lakh. Design and development (we hired two freelancers): ₹4 lakh. Marketing, primarily Instagram and Google ads: ₹5 lakh. Operations, tutor incentives, and platform credits to acquire our first users: ₹3 lakh. The remaining ₹1 lakh went to co-working space, lawyer fees for company registration, and coffee, the last of which was probably the best investment of the bunch.

What Came After

Ankit went into product at a funded startup, which is where the things we learned at the wrong scale became useful at the right scale. I took the technical path and spent six months working through everything we had built and asking why it had not worked. The answer, each time I came back to it, was the same: we had built before we had understood. We were very smart 20-year-olds, which meant we were very good at reasoning from premises, and not yet good enough at questioning the premises. That balance shifts with experience. I would do it again, differently.