1. List any relevant or impressive test scores
No standout standardized test scores. My time has been spent building and shipping products instead — I've found that building real things in public has been a better filter for what I can do than any exam.
2. List any entrepreneurship programs or clubs you have participated in
Completed Startup School by Y Combinator (online cohort), where I worked through frameworks on product-market fit, rapid iteration, and fundraising. More importantly, I applied those lessons immediately — I was building and iterating on products concurrently with the program, not just absorbing theory.
I regularly participate in hackathons and founder communities, which is where I've met collaborators and gotten honest feedback on what I'm building.
3. List any competitions/awards you have won, or papers you've published
Won Smart India Hackathon — India's largest government-run hackathon — by building an AI-powered travel planning app that recommends the optimal sequence of tourist stops based on distance, time constraints, and user preferences. The solution used route optimization logic to meaningfully reduce travel time for users. Competed against hundreds of teams nationally.
4. Tell us about things you've built before
Gram — A restaurant and food discovery platform I'm currently building to help small, offline restaurants get online visibility and drive orders through content, reviews, and social engagement. Most of these restaurants have zero digital presence. We promote them through short-form video and storytelling, which costs nothing but generates real customer footfall.
AI Travel Planner — Built and won Smart India Hackathon with this. Takes a user's list of places, time window, and preferences, then outputs an optimized visit sequence using AI-driven routing. Solves a real problem — most tourists waste hours on bad sequencing.
Pollution Monitoring Alerts — Automation system that monitors PM10 levels in real time and notifies relevant authorities and construction site managers when thresholds are crossed. Built to address a compliance gap in how pollution data actually reaches the people responsible for acting on it.
Local business websites — Multiple static and dynamic sites for small businesses and startups, including blog systems and SEO-focused landing pages that helped them rank and get discovered.
5. Tell us about a time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage
Small restaurants on our platform had no marketing budget and no idea how to get customers online. The obvious path would've been running paid ads — but we had no money either.
So we became their marketing team. We filmed their food, told their story, and published short-form videos on Instagram and YouTube Shorts. We figured out that the algorithm rewards consistency and authenticity over production quality — so we doubled down on genuine storytelling rather than polished content.
The result: restaurants started getting walk-ins from people who'd seen the videos. No ad spend. Just content that the algorithm wanted to push. We essentially built a free distribution channel by reverse-engineering what social platforms reward.
6. Most impressive thing you've built or achieved
Winning Smart India Hackathon is the credential — but what I'm more proud of is that I kept building after the competition ended.
The problem I care about: small restaurants and local food businesses in India are invisible online. They have great food, loyal regulars, and zero digital reach. I'm building Gram to fix that — a platform that combines content-driven discovery with ordering infrastructure, so these businesses can generate income without needing a marketing team or a tech background.
I'm building it scrappily — doing the restaurant outreach myself, filming content myself, talking to owners every week. The goal is to be the platform that gives a neighborhood biryani shop the same digital leverage that a funded cloud kitchen has.
A few things to add before you submit — these will make your answers significantly stronger:
Real numbers wherever possible — how many restaurants on Gram? How many views did the videos get? How many teams did you beat at SIH?
Timeline — how fast did you build the hackathon project? How long has Gram been live?
Current traction — any paying users, active restaurants, or orders placed on Gram yet?