My Bootstrapped Startup: A 10k Gamble and a 10x Exit

They say your first year of college is for finding your footing. Mine was for dealing with a tragedy that would define the next two years of my life and set me on an unexpected path from a grieving friend to a bootstrapped founder.

This isn't a glamorous story about venture capital, billion-dollar valuations, or a clean exit to a tech giant.

This is a story about a 10,000 INR gamble, a 2-year struggle, and an unconventional 1 Lakh INR exit that proved a vital point: solving a problem you genuinely care about is the only thing that gets you through the fire.

It all started with a phone call.

Chapter 1: The Why That Breaks You

I was in high school when I fell in love. Like most teenage romances, it ended. I faced a breakup, but I moved on. I had exams to worry about.

My friend was not so lucky.

He was in my school, the best singer in any of our branches. He also faced a breakup, just two weeks before our exams. He couldn't move on. His results were poor. His music career was destroyed.

And then, he committed suicide.

I was shattered. But in my grief, I was also angry. I looked around and saw no one, no company, no venture, working on this at the ground level. We have apps for everything—food, taxis, casual dating—but what about the devastating fallout when a relationship ends? What about the crippling depression? What about the people who want a healthy relationship but have no idea how to build one?

Love is one of the most enhancing parts of life, but its outcome can be negative. You can get married, or you can get divorced and fall into depression. I decided, right then, that I would work on this problem.

That's when Lovedit was born.

Chapter 2: The Problem & The Begging Phase

As a first-year college student, I had no money, no connections, and no experience. All I had was an obsession with a problem I saw everywhere.

I started by defining it, just as I would later learn to do as a Product Manager.

1. Problem 1: Young people are often unable to even enter a relationship. When they do, they struggle to sustain it.
2. Problem 2: The fallout is real and devastating. People face breakups, divorce, and crippling depression. They also face intimacy issues they're too afraid to talk about.
3. Problem 3: Even if a couple is successful, they hit a tangible wall: they aren't able to arrange the finances for their marriage.

My idea was to build a social and mental Healthcare app for couples. A single, trusted place to solve every relationship problem, whether it was mental, physical, or financial. We would give users a path from the dating stage to the marriage stage.

With this idea, I went out to beg for funding.

I pitched to anyone who would listen. I told my friend's story. I showed them my research. The rejections were fast and brutal.

"You're a student. What do you know about depression?"
"Is this a dating app? A therapy app? A loan app? It's too confusing."
"The market's too saturated."
"This is too niche. People don't pay for this."

They didn't see the 1.5 billion youth facing these problems. They didn't see the $7.55 billion market size I was pointing at.

I realized they wouldn't fund an idea, especially from a grieving kid. I needed to build it. I needed to prove it.

I stopped asking for handouts and decided to do it myself. I would be Bootstrapped.

Chapter 3: The 10,000 INR MVP

I scraped together 10,000 INR. That was the budget. It wasn't enough for a coffee machine in a real startup, but it was all I had for the MVP.

I found my team. I couldn't pay salaries, so I sold them on the mission.

1. Utkarsh (Me): Founder. I handled marketing, content planning, and product management (though I didn't call it that at the time).
2. Raj Tommer: (Freelancer). He was the one who could turn my 10k and my vision into an actual app.
3. Aryan Yadav: Our COO and Content Developer, with a background in psychology. He brought the expertise and credibility we desperately needed.

We also had a fantastic mentor, Rishav Agarwal, the founder of Picxele.

While the 10k built the app, I put in my entire life savings—2 lakh INR—to keep us alive. This was for servers, content, and our first marketing pushes.

In six months, we built and listed the app on the Play Store.

Our solution was a direct answer to the problems:

1. For Getting & Sustaining Relationships: We provided high-quality content, workshops, and guides on dating and relationships. This included everything from 20,000+ pickup lines (in Hindi and English) to quizzes, games, and advice.
2. For Breakups & Depression: We provided counseling services for depression, breakups, and divorce. This was the mental healthcare part of the mission.
3. For Financial Stress: This was our Unique Value Proposition. We were one of the only relationship apps that also provided Marriage Loans by connecting our users to banks.

Lovedit was live. We were The Only App That Helps You To Get Into a Healthy Relationship. And we had just 1.5 years of operations to prove it.

Chapter 4: The 1,000 User Grind

Launching an app is easy. Getting your first download is hard. Getting your first 1,000 is a war.

We had no money for big ad campaigns. Our marketing had to be scrappy and smart. We tried everything:

1. SEO & Content Marketing: We wrote thousands of articles. "How to fix a broken relationship," "love quotes," "couple games." We became a resource.
2. Offline Marketing: We put up posters on college campuses.
3. Digital Marketing: We ran micro campaigns on Meta and Google and used campus ambassadors.

The content strategy worked. Organically, we started getting traction.

1. We hit 200,000 impressions on Google.
2. Those impressions turned into 4,000 clicks.
3. And those clicks, along with our other efforts, led to 1,000 downloads.

A thousand users may seem small. To us, it was everything. It was 1,000 people who had the same problems we did. The validation started pouring in. We got emails and Play Store reviews thanking us.

We also started getting recognition. We were incubated by IIM Lucknow and named a Top 25 Startup by Delhi University. We had done it. We built something from nothing.

Chapter 5: The 10X Exit

About 12 months after our scrappy 10,000 INR MVP build, something unexpected happened. We got a call from a private, incubated company.

They weren't interested in acquiring the app. They didn't want our code or our team.

They wanted our data.

Think about it. We had 1,000+ users who were explicitly telling us their deepest relationship problems.

1. What articles did they read most?
2. What intimacy advice were they searching for?
3. What were the most popular pickup lines?
4. What quizzes were they taking?
5. Most importantly: How many people actually clicked the Apply for Marriage Loan button?

For a larger company in the relationship tech space, this anonymized data was a goldmine. It was a perfect, focused snapshot of our target market.

They made an offer. We made a deal.

We sold a one-time, anonymized data report of our user behavior for 1 lakh INR ($1,200).

My initial build cost was 10,000 INR. This was a 10X return on that cost. It was the first time an external party put a real cash value on what we had built.

I call it an exit because it was a liquidity event, a validation of our asset. And the best part? We didn't sell the company. We didn't sell the app. We sold a product—a data report.

We kept our app, we kept our users, and we now had 1 Lakh INR in the bank to keep fighting.

Chapter 6: The Second Act & The Product Manager

That 1 Lakh was rocket fuel. It proved our model and funded our second act.

Today, Lovedit is still live and still running. We didn't become a unicorn, but we became a sustainable, bootstrapped business. As I'd planned, we make money through ads, affiliate links, and sponsorships—the 100k data sale was just the beginning.

But the 2-year journey from my friend's death to that data sale changed me.

I realized that what I loved wasn't just being a founder. It was the process.

1. Empathy: Feeling my friend's pain and translating it into a Problem Statement.
2. Prioritization: Taking the 100 features I wanted and narrowing them down to the 3-4 features I could afford with 10k.
3. Execution: Working with a developer (Raj) and a subject matter expert (Aryan) to build and ship an MVP.
4. Iteration: Using user feedback (emails, reviews) and data (our 200k impressions) to decide what to build next.
5. Value Extraction: Realizing our data was an asset and packaging it for a sale.

I hadn't just built a startup. I had given myself the most intense, hands-on education in Product Management imaginable.

This journey led me directly to my current role as an Associate Product Manager (APM). I'm no longer the stressed-out founder begging for funding. I'm a product builder, using the same skills I learned in the trenches to build products at a larger scale.

The Lovedit journey taught me that I'm not just someone who reads about product management; I'm someone who had to live it to survive.

I am now looking for my next great opportunity, my next good problem. I want to take this raw, real-world experience and apply it to a new, ambitious challenge.

If you're building something that matters, I'd love to talk.