Rohan ran a salon.
He was paying $340/month for software.
In 2009, fourteen of us piled into Room 204 of Hostel Block C at our engineering college. We shared two ceiling fans, one bathroom, a kettle that never quite boiled, and an unspoken agreement that we'd figure life out together.
Fifteen years later, most of us are at tech companies you've heard of. Some are in California. Some in Bangalore. A few in London. We don't see each other as much as we'd like — but we have a WhatsApp group that never stops.
In that group, one October evening in 2025, Rohan Mehta — who runs a small beauty salon in Mumbai — sent a screenshot. It was an invoice from his software stack: booking system, receptionist service, review management, email marketing. $340 a month. His rent was $380.
Fourteen engineers read that message. We all knew the tools he was paying for had free equivalents. Good ones. Sometimes better ones. The problem wasn't the technology — it was that nobody had ever explained it to a small business owner in plain language, step by step, with the actual errors they'd hit and how to fix them.
So that Saturday, Vikram set up a shared doc. Priya started designing. Rahul figured out the payment backend. The rest of us wrote guides — one each. By Sunday night we had seven guides, a working website, and Rohan had cancelled four of his subscriptions.
He now pays $6 a year for his domain. Everything else is free.
We realised Rohan wasn't an edge case. He was the rule. There are 400 million small businesses worldwide paying for software that a Sunday afternoon could replace. Most of them don't know because the people who do know — engineers like us — are busy building enterprise software for companies that already have everything.
So we kept going. More guides. A proper backend. A support system. A way for people to get help when they get stuck — an AI assistant trained on each guide specifically, for $5, so we can keep the lights on without charging for the guides themselves.
We're not a startup. We don't have investors. We're not trying to raise a Series A. We're fourteen engineers with day jobs, building something useful on evenings and weekends, because one of our oldest friends needed it — and we suspect a lot of other people do too.