EDUTOR JOURNEY

Not a hero's journey. Just what happened.

2019: The Start (Sort Of)

Left MBA after 12 days of admission. Had zero idea what to do next.
No plan. No backup. Just knew I couldn't sit through two years of case studies.
Started messing around with education-related things. Nothing concrete. Just exploring.

Started working on Edutor at the end of 2020.
Didn't know what "startup" meant. Didn't know what founders do. Never worked anywhere before.
Didn't even join as a co-founder initially. Just... started building.
Had no idea about culture, team dynamics, or how products actually get made.

Built wrong. Optimized for vanity metrics. Celebrated achievements that didn't matter.
Corporate bullshit crept in despite being a startup. Multiple "teams" instead of one team. Culture was fucked.
Made every mistake in the book. Some mistakes we invented ourselves.
But one thing worked: We built a community of 6,000 teachers across India. Lived among them. Learned from them.
That community kept us honest when everything else was noise.

Tech team left. Actually, teams left; culture was so broken we had multiple tech groups instead of one.
Funding dried up. Suddenly it was just 4 of us. None from the original team except me.
Nobody knew tech. Code was alien to me. I'd look at GitHub and feel like I was reading Sanskrit.
No tech person. No money. No growth. Just 4 people and a strong teachers community that still believed in us.

Had to move. Went all-in on pushing Edutor usage without spending a single rupee.
Found someone who knew little web dev. Got him to join. Started building the team from scratch, totally fresh people.
Took bets on people with zero experience. Partly a necessity. Partly because conventional hiring wasn't an option. Partly because I'm wired that way.
Everyone on the team learned here. No prior work experience. We figured it out together.

These were survival years. Every day was "how do we not shut down today?"
I was crystal clear on the vision: personalized education for every student. But knew it'd take 8-10 years to build tech that could do that.
Then ChatGPT dropped. Everything I thought about timelines went out the window.
Got Chirag (13 years old then) to join. We started teaching ourselves AI. No courses. No mentors. Just docs, papers, and a lot of failing.
Spent months learning tech, then building products on it, then realizing it didn't work, then starting over.
End of 2024: Finally found something that worked inside Edutor App. Not perfect. But real.

Early 2025, we figured it out. Not just what to build - how to build it.
Product vision became sharp. Tech path became clear. Everything clicked.
Started growing fast. 129K teachers. 255K students. 250M tokens/day.
Monetization started working. ₹32K MRR in the first 30 days of trying.
Raised ₹1 Cr from an angel in a 30-minute meeting. Knew him for 3 months. He bet on the mission, the energy, and the goodwill Edutor built on the ground.

13-person team. Still small. Still fast.
Product is strong but needs a hell lot of improvements. We know that. Iterating constantly.
Have funding now. Not swimming in it, but enough to build what we need.
Clear product roadmap. Clear tech roadmap. Clear business path.
We're building a hyper-personalization engine for every student. Not using someone else's models. Not renting infrastructure.
By mid-2026: We'll own our entire stack; agents, models, novel memory, personalization and interface architecture & tech. All ours.

Fresh people outwork experienced people when the mission is real.
Community can make your survival go smoothly. Community matters.
Don't Die Mode builds resilience. Would I choose it again? No. But it made us who we are.
Speed matters, but direction matters more. 2022-2024 felt slow. But we were learning the terrain.
The ChatGPT moment didn't just change timelines. It changed what's possible. We're building things now that were science fiction 3 years ago.

This isn't a struggle story at all. It's just the process. I lived & enjoyed fully every bit of it - even the parts that sucked.

Still building.