This one started from a very ordinary campus problem: every semester, thousands of IIT Kharagpur students either haul stuff home they'll never use again, or buy new when a senior literally has the same thing sitting unused two hostels away. There was no trusted way to buy and sell second-hand on campus, just scattered WhatsApp groups where you can't verify who you're actually dealing with. I built ThriftKGP to fix that, a campus-only marketplace where every listing is tied to a verified institute identity, so you're never buying from a stranger off the internet, you're buying from another IITKGP student. Beyond the basic buy/sell flow, I built out four core modules that make it actually usable at scale: request boards (post what you're looking for instead of only browsing what's listed), wishlists, a review system so reputation carries across transactions, and an admin dashboard for oversight. I also automated listing moderation and buyer-request matching with event-driven background jobs, which cut down manual moderation work substantially, important once you're serving 16,000+ potential users and can't manually vet every post. Stack: React, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Tailwind CSS It's since been recognized with a SELF RISE Innovation & Prototype Grant as a campus-wide second-hand marketplace concept. If you're building a marketplace, community platform, or anything that needs trust and verification baked into peer-to-peer transactions, that's squarely in my wheelhouse.

0

5

Cover image for During my internship at Neosophical

During my internship at Neosophical Labs, I single-handedly built Sabse Bada Fan (https://sbf.ahoum.com)(SBF), a live multiplayer quiz game, taking it entirely from an initial idea to a fully launched application. I designed the system to handle over thousands of people playing at the exact same time without slowing down, and I made sure the live leaderboards update instantly for everyone. To make the game accessible everywhere, I integrated Capacitor to seamlessly package the web platform into native Android and iOS mobile apps. Finally, I built an automated background system that perfectly runs our scheduled live quizzes and handles all the scoring completely on its own without any human effort.

1

46

I built this because I was annoyed. I was paying monthly for a study library seat, and I still couldn't reliably tell if a seat would be free when I showed up. No way to check online, no way to book ahead just calling around or walking in and hoping. I figured if this was frustrating me, it was frustrating thousands of students across India who rent library/reading-room seats the same way. So I built Studoo (https://studoo.aithro.in/ ) and Padhloo (https://padhloo.aithro.in/ ) two connected products at Aithro (https://aithro.in/products) - Padhloo (student side): search study spaces by city/price/amenities, see a live seat map, request a specific seat for 1-12 months, and track your bookings, dues, and payments in one place. It also gamifies actually showing up — QR check-in/out, study streaks, points, badges, a leaderboard — so students stay consistent, not just book-and-forget. Studoo (owner side): the dashboard library/reading-room owners use to list their space, manage seat inventory and pricing per slot, approve or reject booking requests, chase due payments automatically, and see real analytics (occupancy, revenue, which slots to reprice). Free tier + two paid plans. You can see product demo video here - https://youtu.be/9Yex73MIYqQ?si=jfWqLxisRTM9N_28 I designed and built the full product end-to-end — the booking/approval workflow, the seat-and-slot inventory model, the QR-based geofenced attendance system, the payments/dues tracking, the subscription tiers, and the whole gamification layer (points, streaks, badges) on the student side. Where it stands: Got our first paying customer, a real library owner in Patna paying for the Growth plan, which is the moment this stopped being a side project and started being a business. Reached the Grand Finale of Empresario 2026 (IIT Kharagpur E-Cell), selected out of 3,000+ global registrations. Won the Platinum Jubilee Innovation Challenge (Deep Tech) at IIT Kharagpur's 75th anniversary event. What I'm good at, based on building this: turning a messy real-world workflow (owner approves seat → student pays offline → both sides need to trust the same numbers) into a system that's simple enough for a small business owner with no tech background to actually use — while still handling the edge cases (partial payments, overlapping slots, expiring bookings, geofenced check-ins) correctly under the hood. If you're a small business or founder who needs a web app or an AI-automation workflow built and shipped fast, not just prototyped that's exactly the kind of problem I like solving. Happy to talk about your project.

1

34

Durgesh Kumar

Full-stack developer and founder building real-world product