Nudge
Founder & engineerA small tool that teaches you any product by actually using it. Guided runs, not docs. Live, in active use, and still being shaped.
Next · TS · GenAI
I’m Kartik. CS undergrad in Bengaluru. Day job is Finrep, mostly frontend, plus a bit of backend, devops, and whatever else the startup needs that day. Nights and weekends I’m shipping things of my own, because I genuinely can’t sit still.
A letter
Hello, and thanks for the minute. Here’s the short version: I love solving real problems, properly. The kind where someone is actually stuck, you build the fix, and you can see the joy on their face when it works. That’s the reason I picked CS in the first place, and the reason I keep building.
Most of what’s below started the same way. The video team I was on was burning an hour per clip on research; what I built for them does it in fifteen minutes. I was paying ₹130 a month for cloud storage I barely opened; what I built for me costs ₹25 with twice the space. NearHands was the same instinct, scaled up: home services that book like a Rapido instead of a phone call to your uncle’s friend. Someone is annoyed by something they do every week, a weekend or three goes by, the annoyance stops. That’s the whole job.
The other thing I care about is how it gets built. I’d rather spend an extra day on tests than ship something that falls over the second a real number of users show up. At Finrep that ends up looking like a bit of everything: frontend most days, backend when something needs writing, devops and automation when something keeps breaking. Startup math, basically. You don’t stick to one job.
Two things from outside the day-to-day, since you’re still here. I won a national 24-hour hackathon on Stellar with a product-authenticator for medicine supply chains (scan the QR, trace the whole journey from manufacturer to your hand). And I was tech lead for Ambition, a 700-person hackathon with 150+ repos and roughly twice the sponsor coordination a 24-hour event has any business with. Both the kind of thing you sign up for exactly once, and somehow remember every detail of.
A small selection of work sits below. The full version is one email away.
A small tool that teaches you any product by actually using it. Guided runs, not docs. Live, in active use, and still being shaped.
Next · TS · GenAI
A personal knowledge base for everything I save: text, video, articles, photos. Search runs locally on transformers, so I can ask “where is the sunset” and the right images surface.
Next · Local AI
Upload a script, get back which asset to drop where on the timeline and for how long. Took video-research time on the team from an hour down to fifteen minutes.
Next · Tooling
Book home services like cleaning, repairs, the small chores, the same way you book a Rapido. Worker comes to you, in minutes, not days. The backend story is on Medium in three parts.
Node · Postgres · React
A REST API with structured, detailed information on every ISRO mission and launch vehicle. Open-sourced so the space community can keep adding to it.
Node · Open data
Replaced a ₹130/mo cloud storage bill with a personal vault on AWS. 100GB at ₹25/mo, expandable. Built while learning AWS the deep way.
AWS · S3 · Node
Freelance work, hackathons and the rest sit on GitHub; the longer story is in the résumé.
If anything here lined up with what you’re building, whether it’s a role, a freelance contract, or just a conversation, email’s the fastest path. Freelance usually goes like this: you tell me the problem on a call, and if it’s something I can do well, you’ll have a proposal back in 24–48 hours. If I can’t do it well, I’ll say so. Happens rarely, but it happens.
With care,
Kartik Shukla
engineer · builder · perpetual student