In June 2016, at the start of my second year of engineering, I applied for the wrong internship. I meant to click on a technical role. I clicked on marketing instead. A more sensible student would have withdrawn. I showed up, and I liked it. 

That mistake set the pattern for the next decade. By the end of that year, I had done 43 internships, almost all non-technical, almost all work-from-home, most of them unpaid. My professors thought I was wasting time. My parents asked, politely, when I would get serious. What none of us could see was that I was learning things an engineering syllabus never covers: how companies actually get work done; how badly they manage the students they hire; and how many students wanted to work but couldn't find anyone to pay them. 

A WhatsApp group as a business model 

By 2017, I had noticed two things that didn't add up. Companies wanted cheap, flexible talent for small, repetitive jobs. Students across India found it extremely difficult to get paid work. The gap between them was administrative: sourcing, briefing, tracking, paying, certifying. Nobody wanted to do that work. 

So I built a WhatsApp group of about 200 students and walked into a company with an offer: pay me what you would pay them, and I will get the work executed end-to-end. They said yes. A second client came by referral. With no product, no team and no degree, that group did around Rs 20 lakh in revenue in my third year. I took losses, saved almost nothing, and learned more than in any classroom. 

Killing Plan B 

July 2018 was placement season. My roommate was practising interview answers in a borrowed suit. I was onboarding a client. I didn't fill the placement form. Instead, I registered a private limited company. 

I want to be honest about the reason for doing so. Not because the numbers justified it: Rs 20 lakh of messy, freelancer-style revenue is not a business. I did it because I had realised that as long as I had a backup, I would never fully commit. Every risky client I declined, every experiment I postponed, traced back to the quiet knowledge that placements were there if this didn't work. Removing that option changed the quality of my decisions more than any amount of money would have. 

The name Picxele and its logo came in November 2018. I paid friends to build an app that would replace the WhatsApp chaos: Tasks listed with clear steps; instant submission; backend review; money straight into the user's bank account. I moved to Noida in March 2019, and we launched that June. 

The year it nearly didn't work 

2019 was brutal. We ended the year with 10,000 users. Against what we had invested, and the salary I had walked away from, we needed ten times that. Investors were polite and unanimous: interesting, not scalable, come back with traction. Batchmates were posting about first appraisals and international trips. I was in a shared flat wondering whether I had been foolish. 

I couldn't quit, though, and that constraint became the point. When COVID arrived in March 2020, millions of people suddenly wanted to earn from home doing simple, verifiable work. We had spent a year building exactly that infrastructure. We crossed 50,000 users on 1 December 2020, two lakh by May 2021 and 3.5 lakh by October, bootstrapped and profitable throughout. If I had held a stable job to fall back on, I would have taken it in 2019, months before the product found its moment. 

Plateaus and second acts 

I moved to Bengaluru in May 2022, and we crossed seven lakh users by December. Then 2023 arrived, and growth flattened. Sensible advisers said pivot or shut down. I paused the app instead and used the year differently: I invested in around 60 startups, ran a fellowship for student founders, and experimented with managed freelancing, vetting freelancers delivering skilled projects for companies, with us handling the process end to end. 

On 22 January 2024, we relaunched as Picxele 2.0. We have since crossed a million users and over $5 million in revenue. I stopped angel investing to focus, took a proper office in HSR Layout in April 2025, and added a video production arm. 

What I would tell a student 

None of this was a plan. It was a wrong click; a WhatsApp group, and a refusal to keep an exit open. Comfort, I have come to believe, kills more ventures than failure does, because failure teaches, while comfort just waits. If you have a Plan A worth anything, the most useful thing you can do for it is stop investing in Plan B. 

The author is Founder, Picxele. Views expressed are personal.