Building Studique

Before Studique, there were a lot of bad names.

One thing I never expected to spend so much time on was naming the product.

And honestly... that's how the name happened. Sometimes there isn't a deep branding story.

Looking for inspiration.

Before designing anything, I spent weeks researching student platforms.

One platform that stood out was Studocu. Not because I wanted to copy it. I simply wanted to understand why students kept using it.

Then I came back to the original question.

What would something like this look like if it was built specifically for SRM students?

The first version never really happened.

At that time, I only knew design. Development wasn't something I could do.

So I reached out to three friends and we started working together. The designs came together quickly. We discussed features. Planned releases. Made prototypes. We were excited.

But after a few months, progress almost stopped. Everyone had different priorities. Assignments. Labs. Internships. College.

In almost four months, we had only managed to build a small part of what we had planned. Eventually I stepped away from the project.

Looking back, the idea wasn't the problem. We just weren't ready to execute it.

Learning somewhere else.

A few weeks later, I joined another student platform called Campus Orbit as a product designer.

That experience taught me something I had completely ignored before. Building products isn't just about designing them.

Around the same time, AI coding tools became incredibly good. I started learning frontend development. Instead of stopping in Figma, I started building my own designs.

Every screen became an opportunity to learn something new. By the time Campus Orbit had grown to a few thousand users, I felt much more confident.

Not just as a designer. But as someone who could actually build products.

Without realizing it, I was preparing myself to build Studique again.

Starting over.

By April 2025, I couldn't stop thinking about the original idea.

This time I didn't spend weeks designing. I opened VS Code instead.

Over one weekend, I built most of the frontend. One of my previous teammates helped with the backend. Three days later...

Studique was live.

It wasn't perfect. Far from it. But people could finally use it.

The first users.

The first people to use Studique weren't strangers. They were my roommates. My friends. People living on the same floor.

They found bugs. Suggested improvements. Complained when something didn't work.

And then they started sharing it with their own friends. Those friends shared it with their classmates. Those classmates shared it with their juniors.

Looking back, Studique never really had a marketing strategy. It grew because students kept recommending it to other students.

The real work started after launch.

Launching the website was probably the easiest part. Maintaining it was much harder. Every single day there was something to do.

A broken feature. A new resource request. A bug. A suggestion. A small improvement.

Some evenings we built new features. Other evenings we spent hours fixing problems that only affected a handful of students. That became our routine.

Building during exam season.

One thing I never expected was the sense of responsibility.

Sometimes I had an exam the next morning. The students using Studique also had an exam the next morning. At the same time, messages would start coming in.

When hundreds of students depend on something you've built, it's difficult to ignore those messages.

Balancing academics, internships and maintaining the platform wasn't always easy. There were days when I questioned whether I should study or fix a bug first.

But strangely, I never disliked that responsibility. If students trusted us enough to ask for help before an exam, I felt we were doing something meaningful.

The feature I always believed in.

When we started building Studique, almost everyone assumed attendance and marks would become the biggest features. And they did. But I never thought those features would define the platform.

At the end of the day, we were simply making SRM's existing portal easier to access.

The feature I always believed in was UnitWise.

Unlike attendance or marks, nothing about UnitWise existed before. Every resource had to be found. Verified. Organized. Categorized.

Sometimes we searched for hours. Sometimes faculty members helped. Sometimes seniors shared their collections. Sometimes content creators allowed us to include their material.

It took time. A lot of time.

But UnitWise kept growing.

Today, it has more than 1,200 resources, covering the things students actually look for before an exam - PPTs, PYQs, syllabus, notes, important topics and learning playlists.

Students don't just open it. They stay. They read. They prepare.

And seeing that happen has been incredibly satisfying.

Not every bug was actually our bug.

One funny thing about building a platform that depends on another platform... sometimes the problem isn't yours.

Many of our attendance and marks features relied on the SRM Academia portal. Whenever Academia went down, our wrapper naturally stopped working too.

Students would message us saying, "Studique isn't working."

Technically... they weren't wrong. But neither were we.

For a long time, this was simply part of building Studique.

Until it wasn't.

Then Academia changed.

In 2026, SRM changed what was available through Academia.

Attendance and marks were no longer accessible to us in the way they had been before.

At around the same time, other platforms started taking a different approach. They began asking students for their student portal credentials so they could access information directly.

We understood why.

Students wanted their information organized. They wanted something simpler than the existing systems.

But we also had a problem with it.

Giving a third-party platform your student portal credentials means giving that platform access to much more than it actually needs.

And that wasn't something we were comfortable asking our community to do.

So we didn't.

Even though we knew that decision would cost us users.

And it did.

But some decisions aren't about numbers.

From the beginning, we had tried to build Studique around transparency and community trust. If protecting that trust meant losing some users, that was a trade-off we were willing to accept.

We'd rather have fewer students who trust us than more students who have to wonder what we're doing with their credentials.

We had to ask a bigger question.

For almost a year, Studique had been built around SRM's systems.

It worked.

But it also meant that part of Studique would always depend on something we didn't control.

Academia's changes made that impossible to ignore.

We could keep trying to build another wrapper.

Or we could finally build the platform we had originally imagined.

The second option felt more difficult.

It also felt more right.

So in September 2026, we started the biggest change Studique has gone through so far.

Starting the revamp.

The new Studique isn't an Academia wrapper.

It's an independent platform.

We have our own authentication. Our own systems. Our own infrastructure. Our own product direction.

Instead of depending on another platform to give us student data, we're building things that we can actually own and improve ourselves.

The focus has shifted too.

We're building around the things students actually need rather than trying to recreate another system.

That difference might not sound huge.

But for us, it changes everything.

We also changed the team.

The old Studique started with a few friends trying to make an idea work.

The new Studique needed something different.

So we rebuilt the team too.

Today, I'm the Product Lead.

And around us, we now have a team of 15+ people working across development, HR and operations, academic resources and outreach, UI/UX and visuals, AI/ML and other parts of the product.

It's no longer just a few people building something between classes.

People now own different parts of the product.

Building something that belongs to students.

The reason we started Studique hasn't changed.

Students still have the same problems.

What has changed is how we're approaching those problems.

We're not trying to build another version of the college portal.

We're trying to build something that students can actually depend on.

We still don't want to charge students for the basics.

Very early on, we decided something.

We weren't going to charge students for essential features.

That decision hasn't changed.

We've watched other platforms move towards charging students for basic access to things they need every semester.

We understand why platforms do it. Hosting isn't free. Servers aren't free. Development isn't free.

But we also don't want Studique to become a platform where students have to pay for every small convenience.

And we don't want to fill the experience with advertisements just to make the numbers work.

Students already have enough things competing for their attention.

We'd rather build something useful first.

Figure out sustainability without compromising the experience.

And keep the things students genuinely need accessible.

Maybe that takes longer.

That's okay.

It slowly became a community.

Studique started with a small founding team.

It didn't stay that way.

Over time, students started contributing resources, reporting bugs, suggesting features, testing releases and helping us understand what actually mattered.

Today, more than 30,000 students have used Studique.

We've crossed 3 million interactions.

Our WhatsApp community has grown to more than 2,500 students.

And there are now 15+ people working on the platform.

The numbers are very different from where we started.

But the way Studique grows hasn't really changed.

More than just a website.

For the first year, Studique was primarily a web platform.

That worked.

But we always knew it couldn't stay that way forever.

The new version is being built across web, Android and iOS.

The idea is simple.

Students shouldn't have to care which platform they're using.

They should just be able to open Studique and find what they need.

We're still early in that process.

But for the first time, we're building all of it around our own platform.

Learning to rebuild.

The strange thing about building products is that success doesn't always make things easier.

Sometimes it makes them harder.

When Studique had a few hundred users, changing something was simple.

When thousands of students depend on it, every decision has consequences.

When a feature becomes popular, removing it feels wrong.

When something you've built for months no longer makes sense, starting over feels even worse.

But we've learned that keeping something just because it already exists isn't always the right decision.

Sometimes you have to remove things.

Sometimes you have to rebuild.

Sometimes you have to accept that the version you worked so hard on isn't the version that should exist next.

The September revamp is exactly that.

We're not trying to preserve the old Studique.

We're trying to build the next one.

Looking back.

When I started this project, I thought I was building a website. I wasn't.

I was learning how products are actually built. How to work with people. How to prioritize. How to listen. How to balance design with engineering. How to ship even when everything isn't perfect.

And now I'm learning something else.

How to rebuild something that already works.

Studique has gone from an idea in a faculty meeting to a platform used by more than 30,000 students.

From a few friends working on sketches to a team of 15+ people.

From a small collection of resources to more than 1,200 resources.

From a website to something we're now building across web, Android and iOS.

And most importantly, from a platform that depended on someone else's system to an independent platform with its own direction.

Those numbers make me happy. But they're not what I'll remember most.

I'll remember the late-night bug fixes. The exam week messages. The first resource upload. The excitement of watching someone I didn't know recommend Studique to another student.

I'll remember losing users because we refused to ask for credentials we didn't think we needed.

I'll remember the conversations about whether we should keep building around Academia or start again.

I'll remember the people who joined the team because they believed the idea was worth working on.

And I'll remember September 2026.

The month we stopped thinking about how to make Studique work around another system.

And started thinking about what Studique could become on its own.

Those moments never appear on Google Analytics. But they're the reason this project means so much to me.

What comes next.

I don't think Studique is finished.

Honestly, I don't think it ever will be.

There are still a lot of things we want to build.

The new team has its own ideas too.

Some of them will probably be things I never thought of.

Some things I thought were important will probably disappear.

And honestly, I hope they do.

Because that means Studique is no longer just my idea.

It's becoming something much bigger than that.

Thank you.

Studique has never been a one-person project. It wouldn't exist without the people who believed in it.

Thank you to our faculty mentor, Dr. H. Karthikeyan, for guiding us and helping us navigate permissions and university processes.

Thank you to my founding teammates - Utkarsh Jaiswal, Utakarsh Jain, Manya Sewkani, and Chirag Khairnar - for taking a chance on an idea that existed only as sketches and conversations.

And thank you to every contributor who uploaded a resource, reported a bug, suggested a feature, tested a release, or simply shared Studique with a friend.

You helped build something that became much bigger than any one of us.

Now we're building it again.

This time, independently.

And I think that's just the beginning. Jai Mata Di.