Anand's Blog

2026-10-25 407 words 3 mins

What I Learned Visiting Salt Pans in Vedaranyam

I am only handling the business and entrepreneurial side of this venture. I am not the one engineering or manufacturing the rover, so the technical details in this post describe the product plan, not something I built myself. We went to Vedaranyam because reading reports and watching videos was not

2026-10-25 396 words 3 mins

TAM, SAM and SOM for a Niche Product: A Worked Example

When a product serves a narrow market, the usual textbook definitions of TAM, SAM and SOM can feel abstract. The exercise below shows how the three layers look for a salt‑handling rover aimed at Indian salt‑pan owners. Total Addressable Market (TAM) – Every salt‑producing operation in India where sa

2026-10-25 414 words 3 mins

Turning a Pitch Deck into One Short Speech per Judging Criterion

I am only handling the business and entrepreneurial side of this venture. I am not the one engineering or manufacturing the rover, so any mention of the rover in this post describes the product plan, not something I built myself. For the evaluation rounds I prepared three spoken answers, each roughl

2026-10-25 460 words 3 mins

The Product Plan for a 100 kg Salt‑Transport Rover

I am only handling the business and entrepreneurial side of this venture. I am not the one engineering or manufacturing the rover, so the technical details in this post describe the product plan, not something I built myself. The problem is simple: workers on small salt pans move harvested salt by h

2026-10-25 394 words 3 mins

Naming a Startup and Setting Up the Basics as a Student

I read a handful of naming guides — the Stripe guide on choosing a company name and a long Reddit thread where founders shared what worked and what they regretted. The common advice was to keep it short, easy to spell, and not already taken on the major platforms. I listed a few candidates, checked

2026-10-15 633 words 4 mins

Four Days, One Prototype, and a Pitch to IIT Madras Jurors

Four days. One prototype. A panel of jurors from one of the country’s best engineering schools. Here is what actually happened. On 12 October I got an email from EDII-TN. Our venture had been shortlisted under the Innovation Voucher Programme, and we were invited to pitch live to a panel of jurors f

2026-10-13 848 words 6 mins

How I Put Together My Startup's Pitch Pack as a Student Founder

On 13 October I wrote our Business Model Canvas, worked out TAM, SAM and SOM, and wrote our UVP, USP and problem statement for the IVP pitch. Writing these forced me to answer questions I had only half-answered. Here is what each one is, and how I approached it as a first-time founder who had never

2026-10-13 515 words 4 mins

Getting a Prototype Ready for a Live Demo in Three Days

Three days. A live prototype demo in front of a jury. Here is how I got the thing working. Why a Demo FailsA live demo fails for two reasons. The first is that the product does not do what you say it does. The second is that the product does what you say it does, but nobody watching can follow what

2026-10-09 80 words 1 min

What I Learned at the Aerospace and Defence Hackathon

An aerospace and defence startup hackathon. Senior jurors. A track I had not picked before. Here is what actually happened. On 8 October I prepared for the aerospace and defence startup hackathon at the StartupTN office. I looked through the sector problem statements and weighed which domains to com

2026-10-07 700 words 5 mins

What I'm Learning About Agentic Workflows in Security

Notes from someone who has been spending time with multi-agent systems in security contexts. No results, no architecture, no claims. Just the problems that keep showing up and the way a student can start a research paper in this space. Coordinating Agents Across Security TasksSecurity work does not