Building products and brands from zero, then proving it with the numbers.

I studied mechanical engineering at a college most recruiters have never heard of, and in my second year I took over as President of our SAE BAJA program: a 40-member team across 5 verticals, building an off-road vehicle from scratch and competing at 15+ competitions nationally, most of them against college teams with far bigger budgets than ours.

I couldn't out-spend them, so I went and found the money instead. I personally raised ₹5L from Eicher Motors, ANSYS, and MadeEasy by owning every sponsor account myself, and grew the program's budget from ₹10L to ₹15L by earning the Director's recognition across 6 colleges. We ranked 15th of 180 in the BAJA 2019 design round, top 8% nationally, against that David-and-Goliath budget gap.

It's a small story in the scope of a career, but it's the one that taught me the pattern I've repeated ever since: when the resources you need don't exist yet, you go build the case for them yourself.

After four years of building things with my own hands, TCS put me on the other side of scale entirely. I joined as a Product Owner on Walmart's inventory management platform, the system deciding pricing, inventory, and availability for every Walmart store in North America. A decision I made wasn't shipped to one race car anymore. It touched 4,700+ stores overnight.

I owned five critical product modules and coordinated a nine-person onshore-offshore team split across US and India time zones, leading 100+ scrum calls across 3 release cycles. I helped move a data migration to GCP BigQuery that cut processing latency by ~40% and projected infrastructure costs by ~22%, and I learned what it feels like to get a midnight escalation call because something I owned broke in production.

This is where the scrappy instinct from BAJA met real discipline: regression testing, variance thresholds, root-cause postmortems. I stopped just building and started learning to build things that don't fall over.

I left TCS for the opposite of an enterprise job: a founder's office at The Blended Co, an experiential gifting company betting on an AI-powered scent recommendation app. There was no roadmap, no engineering team to hand things off to, and no one to ask what "good" looked like. I was product, ops, and growth, some weeks all in the same afternoon.

I shipped the recommendation app across five sprints in two months to 20K+ customers, then spent the next couple of years finding out whether people actually wanted it: 30-plus prototype tests, SPSS segmentation to figure out who our best customers actually were, an automated KNIME workflow that lifted acquisition metrics ~17%. On the ops side I delivered 120+ luxury events end to end and ran 40+ pop-ups that drove ~22% weekly revenue uplift, managing 20+ vendors across 4 states along the way. When the CRM was still a WhatsApp thread, I built one instead.

Right around when I was interviewing for my MBA, I decided to stop advising other people's ventures from the sidelines and start one of my own. RUsticks is a premium dining-accessories brand built from a single insight: restaurants serving Asian cuisine in India were treating chopsticks as a disposable afterthought instead of a design opportunity.

I talked to 350+ potential customers before writing a business plan. I negotiated ₹120/pc B2B pricing against ₹30 in sourcing costs, closed six hospitality partners including Hilton and PF Chang's, and built a D2C funnel on Shopify on the side. It's now running at ₹12L ARR and a ~67% gross margin, alongside a full-time MBA, because I wanted to know if the instinct from BAJA and The Blended Co would hold up when the P&L was entirely mine to answer for.

Everything up to this point was instinct, most of it earned the hard way. At Masters' Union, I've spent the last year deliberately trading some of that instinct for frameworks: brand equity valuation, market sizing, equity research, ESG roadmapping, the kind of rigor that's hard to build on the job when you're also chasing sponsors or firefighting a CRM built from a WhatsApp thread.

The work below is grouped by the three lenses I kept coming back to: numbers-first strategy, product and growth thinking, and brand and consumer psychology.

Somewhere along the way, writing code became the same habit as raising sponsorship money for a race car: if something's missing, build it yourself instead of waiting. Between case studies and a venture, I've kept shipping full-stack products end to end: an AI shopping advisor that re-ranks Amazon listings by fit instead of keyword, a concept e-commerce storefront with real auth and checkout, an AI job-fit analyzer, and a behavioural-economics experiment, mostly using the same AI-assisted tools I'd recommend to any product team today.

It's not a resume line. It's the same habit from a college workshop, just running on a different toolchain now.