BITS Gave Me Freedom. I Used It to Build Something That Flopped.

BITS Pilani gives you something that most Indian engineering colleges do not: the freedom to structure your own semester. Between the PS1 internship and the PS2 placement-track semester, there are windows where a determined student can carve out time that is technically scheduled but actually fairly open. My co-founder Shashank and I used this time to build a study group matching app that we were completely certain would go viral. It did not go viral.

The idea was this: students at any college could sign up, input their courses and study style preferences, and be matched with compatible study partners. We had identified what we thought was a real problem — finding people to study with is surprisingly friction-filled — and we had a clean solution. We built it in eight weeks. We launched it on the BITS internal network. Forty people signed up in the first week. Seventeen came back a second time.

The Post-Mortem

We did the thing that every first-time founder is told to do and that nobody actually does properly: we talked to our non-returning users. What we learned was uncomfortable. The problem we had solved — finding study partners — was not actually the problem people had. The problem people had was that studying with people you did not already know was awkward and required social negotiation that the app could not automate. We had built a matching system for a social problem. The matching worked. The social problem remained.

We had also, in the classic first-product way, built too many features. The matching algorithm had six parameters. We had added a scheduling tool, a note-sharing feature, and a 'study session tracker' that nobody used. We had spent three weeks building things nobody had asked for.

The ₹40,000

We spent ₹40,000 total: ₹12,000 on a server that we could have gotten free, ₹8,000 on a design freelancer whose work we then redesigned ourselves anyway, and ₹20,000 on a small Meta ads campaign that we ran for two weeks to acquire users who signed up once and never returned. Looking back, we got the following lessons from each rupee: the server taught us about free tiers. The designer taught us to wireframe extensively before hiring. The ads taught us that you cannot advertise your way past a retention problem.

Shashank is building something new now. I spent six months at a product role at a mid-stage startup after college, and the experience of having already failed at something meant I asked questions in user research that other people skipped. The ₹40,000 and the flopped product are on my mental resume in the way that I think matters more than the official one.