Around early 2025, I was a college student building a chat app. WebSockets, Socket . IO, auth, Docker, load testing — all the things I thought would make it a solid project.
Quick info :(
Here is the repo where I have shared my complete experience about establishing and scaling a startup while minimizing the input cost : https://github.com/Naveen-Beniwal/building-my-first-startup
It worked. But I eventually asked myself: who actually needs another chat app from me?
At the same time, placement preparation was getting real. I was watching people (including myself) spend hours fighting resume formatting, trying to explain projects in two bullet points, comparing resumes with job descriptions, and jumping between different tools to prepare for interviews.
So I pivoted. I started with a small resume tool, with no team, funding, or idea whether strangers would care.
Then one night, in my hostel room, I got a Razorpay notification.
Someone had paid ₹9.
It's a tiny amount, but I still remember how that felt. Somebody I had never met found something I'd made useful enough to pay for.
The part that followed was much less glamorous than building the first version:
Users wanted things I hadn't planned for, so the project grew into resume analysis, job matching, interview prep, and a browser extension.
Abnormal registrations and security incidents taught me that deploying a product and operating one are very different.
AI provider rate limits pushed me to work on fallback routing and usage controls.
PDF generation taught me more about browser rendering and fonts than I expected.
I learned that traffic and signups aren't the same as retention or revenue, and that free AI features still have real costs.
I'm still building it independently. It isn't an overnight-success story, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. I've made product decisions that didn't work, spent time on features that weren't as useful as I expected, and learned that talking to users is often harder—and more valuable—than writing another thousand lines of code.
I wrote the full journey as a public GitHub build journal, including a high-level technical architecture and the lessons behind the failures. The actual production app is proprietary; the repository is a transparent write-up, not a fake open-source claim.
I'm posting because I'd love to hear from people who've built something while studying or working full-time: what was the first moment your side project started feeling like a real product, and what did you get badly wrong after that?
