30-Day Journey to Life-Changing Apps for Millions

In my childhood, I always used to daydream about how could I change this world. In every class, I always used to daydream about how it would be if we could convert the trash into energy, sometimes I used to daydream about how it would be if we build an Analytics tools for our Govt. and there were no special occasions in my life as a student I stopped day dreaming and concentrated toward the lecture. Now I am grown up, yet I didn’t stop dreaming for the better world.

Sleepless nights, restless days and pouncing hearts may seem to be the signs of deep love. But in my case its the love and passion for building my startup which kept me going for nights, writing thousands of lines of codes every day to build 15 life-changing apps.

Two years ago, I had almost zero knowledge in Computer Science(CS). Damn it! I didn’t know why DB or JSON or HTTP are used. All that I knew was how to build circuits or how to code hardware using HDL as I was from Electronics & Comm. background. I was crazily curious though which pulled my interest in CS stuff(Read how crazily curious I was which made me invent a device which could save 2.5 million people every year, here ). Seven days later… TADAA!!! wrote my first Android app which aggregates data from online e-com stores, wrote my first web crawler which crawls and scraps details from websites and was already into live project of building world-class Android app. All thanks to Y Media Labs and to my stubborn curiosity :)

Two years ago, when I didn’t had an idea about CS.

Days rolled on and within 1.5 years I along with the coolest team at Y Media Labs built 5 world class apps like Staples, NEST app, Google Chromecast app, IoT Project etc... While everything was going totally fine, that day on Feb 7th 2015, it was the day I was introduced to my first every hackathon in my life and it was from Ola-the biggest cab aggregator in India and hosted by Venturesity (Thanks to Venturesity for approving my unfilled resume). Hacking through the code and building an awesome product from the scratch in just 48 hours with zero sleep and lots of caffeine, that moment I felt like let this gush of passion for coding keep on going forever. We built an Augmented Reality based Android app for tourists which can show places around on Augmented Reality and also allows to book a cab with a single click. We also developed cab sharing feature, which is now exactly same as it is there in current Ola app . Not to under-estimate ourselves, we came second place in Ola hackathon, not bad though(makes ‘Not Bad Obama face’).

Since that day, I never said no to any hackathon whenever my colleagues call for. I along with my coolest team lead named Karthikeyan and super Android dev Amlan at Y Media Labs had made up a team for all the hackathons. We built ‘Whistler, an automated bug tracker’ at YML Hackday which automatically rising an alarm when there is critical bug in live build. We also build ‘Big-O, an Offline Wallet’ at API Hackday and won first place;)

Nov 26th 2015 , it was my last day at Y Media Labs and my first day of my journey to fulfill my childhood dreams which I dreamed of to make this world a better place. On the day two of my entrepreneurial journey, I had a serious problem. Oops!! I hadn’t saved any cash and I was left with just Rs. 7000 in my bank. Because my decision to quit YML was a last moment decision. I think that is what 'leap of faith' is. I was alone in my journey yet I didn't lose my hope and I sat down and listed out all the options to make real quick money. I had one option in the list which I loved the most, that is hackathon.

On day three of my journey, I registered for 20+ international hackathons which had cool cash prizes and started working on them. For every two days from then, I completed an application per contest and submitted it. Approximately after 30 days and 15+ application, I along with my small team won 10 hackathons out of 12 and made the sufficient money to bootstrap our company for 1.5 year. VOILA! Leap of faith worked.