getting in
It was a random day in August 2026 and I was literally doomscrolling through Instagram when I came across a Shark Tank pitch reel of HiveSchool of Business. It blew my mind because who the hell would have imagined a guy pitching a B school on Shark Tank? And the crazier part was that one of the co founders, Nikhil, was actually a second year MBA student at another B school. Goddamn crazy, right?
I started watching their content and this guy called Aman popped up on my feed. I liked his content, followed him, and within two days he posted a reel about HiveSchool's 5 day Build Camp. I casually applied without really thinking I'd get in. A few days later, I got an email saying I'd been shortlisted for an interview with Aman, the EIR at HiveSchool leading the UG vertical. I scheduled it for that evening. We talked about what I do, what I've built and all that stuff before getting into the case study.
I was given 10 minutes and an entire startup scaling problem. The goal was to figure out how I'd scale a business into a ₹10 crore business in one year with ₹2 crore of pre seed capital.
And yeah, I fucking fumbled it.
I'd give myself a 5/10 for the case study and maybe a 7.5/10 overall. I came out of it thinking there was no way I was getting in. A week later, I saw an email from HiveSchool saying I got in.
I genuinely didn't expect it. The camp got postponed by a week because of the peer interviews, and finally started on September 29th. I attended online because of some travel issues.
We had sessions with Nikhil Gaur on GTM and strategy, Simar Sekhri on marketing and growth, and Saurabh Sengupta, former VP of Sales at Zomato, on sales. Simar's session pushed me to start taking LinkedIn seriously, while Saurabh's session completely changed how I think about outreach. I've sold before through Building Anyways, but hearing how someone who had actually run sales at Zomato thinks about it was a different level.
Then came the AI masterclass. I ditched it. I already spend enough time building with AI, so instead I went to a mall to record a video.
figuring out
On day one, the 16 of us were divided into five teams. My team had me, Vanee and Shaunak. Three people who had basically never met each other before.
From the first night, we were on Discord almost every day from around 9 PM until 2 or 3 AM. We were researching ideas, yapping, building, breaking things and trying to figure out what the hell we should actually make. Eventually, we decided to build something I'd already made for myself: Invodex.
I'd originally built it to generate invoices and agreements and manage my clients. While talking through ideas with Vanee and Shaunak, we realised there might actually be a real startup hiding inside it, so we started turning it into a financial operations tool for freelancers and small businesses.
While Vanee and Shaunak researched the market and problem, I started updating the old product. It already had client management, lead management, invoice generation and automatic invoice emails. We just needed to reshape it around the new idea.
The next few days were basically the same. Research, build, test, repeat. We'd play songs, talk random shit, watch stuff for a while and then get back to work. It wasn't some perfectly structured startup process. It was three people in three different cities trying to figure things out together.
And somewhere in between all of that, I also started ditching college. Day 2. Day 3. Day 4. Yeah, don't ask.
120 hrs of building
By day three, while most teams were still building prototypes and doing surveys, we already had the first version of Invodex working. That made me realise something pretty quickly: building the product wasn't going to be enough. Everyone can build something with AI now. You can have an idea in the morning and a working prototype by evening. Getting people to actually care about it is the hard part.
Distribution. I became almost obsessed with it.
Since the three of us were in different cities, I decided content would be our distribution channel. I called a friend and told him, "Bro, we need to shoot something." We went to a mall, shot the reel, and somehow spent two hours bowling for what was supposed to be a 1.5 hour shoot. I came back at night, realised nobody was awake to edit it, and ended up sitting there until around 3 or 3:30 AM doing it myself.
The next morning, we posted it. By evening, it had crossed 12K views, 1.4K+ interactions and around 16 hours of watch time. For a completely new startup account, that was fucking crazy. We also posted a reel on my personal account about being 16, ending up at HiveSchool and building a startup with two people I'd met that week. Between the two, we got around 12 to 14K views and roughly 1.5K interactions.
The numbers were cool, but what mattered more was that we'd actually figured out a distribution channel and executed on it while everyone else was still mainly building. You can build almost anything now. Getting people to give a shit is the hard part.
The other thing we did differently was the pitch deck. We didn't want some standard startup deck full of corporate bullshit. We wanted it to feel like us. Minimal, raw and honest. And yeah, we used words like TF, shit and the occasional fuck. Because that's literally how we talk.
the pitch
Day four was the open roast pitching session with Aman. Every team had to pitch before the final day so he could tear it apart and give us feedback. The funny part was that we hadn't even properly made our pitch deck yet. While Vanee and Shaunak were working on it, I was doing something else.
Getting customers.
I leveraged previous Building Anyways clients, cold called businesses and started pitching Invodex. Around 60% of the calls I made turned into confirmed customers, and we got four businesses willing to pay and use the product. Four real customers. That was my priority.
We eventually pitched the first version of the deck to Aman that afternoon. It went pretty badly because we weren't prepared enough. Aman gave us feedback and talked about his own early pitch decks and fundraising journey. That night, I decided to rebuild our deck. I wanted something minimal, classic and straightforward. No unnecessary bullshit. Vanee kept updating it the next day, and we were still changing slides on the day of the final pitch.
Then, around 1 PM, I called one of our customers again. He's a gold shop owner, and he told me he'd lost track of 60 grams of gold in a single month because his finances were spread across paper, Excel and spreadsheets. It took him almost a week to figure out where it had gone. 60 grams of gold is roughly ₹9 to ₹10 lakh. He was genuinely panicking and wanted to use our product. So I recorded that call and we put it into the pitch deck.
That was the pitch we wanted to make. No fake numbers or exaggerated claims. Just the actual problem, the actual product, actual customers and actual conversations.
1st page of the deck
the final pitch
The final pitch was at 2:45 PM. At 2:30, we were still updating the deck. Classic.
Compared to the roast pitch with Aman, the final pitch went really well. We were confident, the product worked, we had customers, we'd started distribution and the pitch actually felt like something we believed in.
After everyone finished pitching, we had the closing session with Aman and Hans Dewan. I joined while another team was almost done with their pitch, and I heard the judge mention our team and Invodex while talking to them. He was pointing out some of the things we'd done well and parts of our product they could learn from. I was on Cloud 9. Not because we'd won anything. Just because someone whose opinion actually mattered had noticed what we'd built.
Then came the results. We genuinely thought we'd won. Aman said the first and second teams were separated by a very close margin, so we already knew it was either us or the other team. And then he announced it: we got second by one fucking point.
For a few minutes, we were frustrated and irritated. Obviously, losing first place by one point hurts. But after that passed, I started thinking about everything we'd done in those five days. We had met each other for the first time, spent nights on Discord, researched ideas, built a product, got four paying customers, started distribution and made a pitch deck that actually sounded like us.
Our team and product kept getting mentioned by the mentors and judges throughout the camp. And honestly, that made me happier than I expected. Winning first place would've told us that we'd won a competition. Having people repeatedly notice the product, the pitch and the way we'd built it told us something more valuable: maybe we were actually onto something. (Check out the LinkedIn post recap ↗).
what next?
The Build Camp is over, but Invodex isn't. We have the MVP, customers waiting, distribution started, and now we're figuring out what happens when the camp ends and nobody is forcing us to build anymore.
No Discord call at 9 PM, no pitch tomorrow, no judge waiting, no deadline. Just us. Three people who met a few days ago, trying to turn something we built in five chaotic days into an actual company.
The camp gave us 120 hours to figure shit out. Now we have a lot more time. Let's see what we do with it.
All thoughts, views and opinions expressed herein belong exclusively to the author.