Hey, I'm Manas.
I take rough ideas and turn them into products people pay for. Solo builder of the Live Selling vertical at Apptile — $300K+ ARR in 4 months. Founder of Portwol and VSign. Seven years on the web and still counting.
— that's me, mid-idea.
Some receipts.
Let's talk about me.
I'm a full-stack engineer who thinks like a product person and ships like a founder. Started building for the web at 17, freelanced through college, taught myself the parts nobody teaches you, and landed at Apptile in 2022. Been here since, growing from tiles & themes to owning a revenue-generating vertical solo.
I like the parts of software where product, engineering and design collide — real-time systems, live commerce, dev tooling, playful UI. I'm most useful when a team needs one person to own a slice end-to-end and get it live, then hand it off polished. I've done this at freelance scale (20+ client sites in one year), startup scale (Sneakomatic, Crime Check, Ungaveedu), and platform scale (Apptile).
Outside of Apptile I've founded Portwol, grew VSign from a research-lab intern project into a public platform, and shipped a bunch of side experiments I keep going back to. I take pride in shipping fast without shipping ugly.
Things you can hire me for.
Not a spec sheet — a menu of shapes I've done well and will happily do again.
Zero → One product builds
You have an idea and a small budget. I do the whole thing — spec, design, build, ship, iterate. Comfortable being the only engineer for the first 6–9 months.
Platform + tooling
Retool dashboards, internal admin panels, workflow automation, cron jobs, migration scripts. The unglamorous stuff that makes a team 3× faster.
Live commerce & real-time apps
WebRTC, real-time carts, host tooling, viewer experiences. I built this vertical at Apptile — happy to build one for you too.
Data pipelines & scraping
Scraping at scale, OCR, headless browser orchestration, automated deploys. If you need to move 18M records a month, I have receipts.
Full-stack web apps
Node + React + a database of your choice, deployed on Vercel / AWS / wherever. The bread and butter, done well.
Fixing what "almost works"
Inherited a codebase that's scary? I like those. Instrumentation, tests, refactor in place, ship a stable version, migrate incrementally.
Things I've actually built.
A rotating cast of side quests, main quests, and one or two dragons.
A brand-new revenue vertical for Apptile — real-time video shopping for D2C brands. I designed and shipped the whole thing: broadcaster app, viewer experience, real-time cart & checkout, moderation, host tooling, and analytics. Onboarded the first cohort of merchants, then handed off to a team.
- $300K+ ARR within the first 4 months
- First revenue-bearing feature of its kind at Apptile
- Now a small team owns it — I still do customer calls
Built the analytics layer that shows merchants how their mobile app is really performing. Instrumented every live tile with first-party events, designed the ingestion pipeline, wired the dashboards, and shipped the merchant-facing UI. Now the default way our customers understand their apps.
- Live on every tile in every customer app
- Replaced ad-hoc reporting with a durable pipeline
- Feeds our internal churn + retention dashboards
Wanted anyone — designer, developer, freelancer — to stand up a great-looking portfolio without touching code. Built the editor, the template system, the auth, the export pipeline, and the marketing site. Free forever tier. Now serves creators worldwide.
- 400+ curated templates across roles & niches
- Zero-code publishing pipeline
- A design-forward brand — my sandbox for playful UI
Started at the CURIN Speech Lab as a research intern; grew it into a web platform for authoring Hamnosys code that drives ML-generated 3D character sign animations. Was internal-only; now open to everyone.
- Went from a locked-down internal tool to a public platform
- Used by researchers and educators working on Deaf accessibility
- Powers the Child Ensign learning experience (SIH 2019 finalist)
Rewrote the data-extraction stack: server deployment fully automated, scraping and OCR pipelines built for volume. Grew processing capacity ~900× while cutting per-record cost. SEO-optimized surface layer to match.
- Throughput: 20K → 18M records
- Automated server provisioning; no more manual deploys
- SEO overhaul lifted organic reach
Built the data-scraping engine and a Discord bot that alerted resellers on drops, restocks, and price moves. High-throughput, low-latency, hard-to-detect. My crash course in adversarial engineering.
- Real-time drop alerts across major sneaker sites
- Learned everything about bot detection & evasion — the ethical parts
A first-year college side project. Parses basic C via regex and animates what each line does — useful for students staring at a for-loop for the first time. Chaotic. Still fond of it.
- Used by juniors at my college for a couple of semesters
- Reminder that "quick and dirty" can still be useful
Shipped the entire product for an early-stage startup — customer-facing app, admin console, everything in between. The platform ran for years; relaunched by another company in 2024 on top of the foundation.
- End-to-end product delivered under freelance timelines
- Solid enough to serve as the base for a 2024 relaunch
A closer look at what I do day-to-day.
Highlights of the last three years — organised by kind, not chronology.
Revenue
- Built Live Selling vertical solo — $300K+ ARR in 4 months, and growing
- Shipped Apptile Analytics — first-party event pipeline across every live tile
- Auto-Fill for Apps — reduced onboarding churn measurably
Platform
- Owned the tile workflow end-to-end — created the tools designers use to ship tiles
- Built the tile variants feature on personal time, enabling rapid theme development
- Led migration of 80 apps to a new editor (with Ankit) — no customer-visible downtime
- Preprocessor style checker + pre-save app config — fewer crashes, cleaner configs
- Automated E2E platform tests running against prod every 2 hours
Tooling
- Retool dashboards + Super Actions for internal ops
- Integration self-serve — exporter + dashboard for integration pages/tiles
- Tile Studio: advanced property selection + theme switching
- Revamped events editor, page breadcrumbs, control data validation
Growth & Design partnership
- Themes & Tiles launch — shipped a fresh library of themes and tiles alongside design
- Control standardisation across the platform — one consistent language
- Constant bug hunt — spotted and fixed dozens of platform issues before customers noticed
The zig-zag so far.
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2018
Started with research
Joined the CURIN Speech Lab at Chitkara as a research intern. Worked on Child Ensign — an online learning platform for Deaf children — and built the first version of VSIGN, a web tool for creating and teaching signs.
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2019
Full-stack + stage fright, both conquered
Went deep on full-stack. Took Child Ensign to Smart India Hackathon 2019 and made finalist — which meant pitching on stage (terrifying, recommend it). Started freelancing on the side, built a chat-based CRM for Eracost that lifted their conversion rates.
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2020
Shipping season — 20+ sites, 1–2 per week
Went hard on freelance. Delivered 20+ websites for small businesses at 1–2 per week. Built the full platform for Ungaveedu — admin console, user dashboard, the works. That platform ran for four years and was relaunched by another company on top of it in 2024.
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2021
Scale, scraping, and a Discord bot
At Sneakomatic: scraping algorithms and a Discord bot for sneaker resellers — real-time drops, high throughput. At Crime Check: rewrote the data pipeline and scaled processing from 20K to 18M records, automated server deployment, and did an SEO overhaul that lifted organic reach.
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2022
Joined Apptile
Joined Apptile as a full-stack engineer. Started on tiles + themes, grew into owning the tile workflow end-to-end. Built the tools for the design team, then the variants feature on the side.
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2023
Went wide — platform + tooling
Migrated 80 customer apps to a new editor with Ankit, no downtime. Built the automated end-to-end test suite that runs against prod every 2 hours. Shipped auto-fill (reduced onboarding churn), the preprocessor style-checker (fewer crashes), and Retool + Super Actions for the internal team.
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2024 → today
Owned Live Selling from zero
Single-handedly built the Live Selling vertical — real-time video commerce for merchants. $300K+ ARR in 4 months, still growing. Now working with peer engineers to harden it, running customer calls to shape the roadmap, mentoring junior devs on the codebase, and continuing to ship platform features on the side.
A few principles.
Not rules. Just what I've learned actually works, said out loud.
Ship the smallest thing that works.
The first version is a strong opinion, weakly held. I'd rather ship in a week and iterate than perfect for a quarter.
Own the whole slice.
Backend, frontend, ops, docs — I move fastest when nothing is thrown over a wall.
Instrument early.
You can't fix what you can't see. Metrics, logs, error tracking on day one — even for the prototype.
Talk to users often.
I run customer calls for the products I build. The roadmap belongs to whoever hears the pain first.
Automate the boring parts.
If I did it three times, it becomes a script. If the team did it, it becomes a dashboard.
Design matters.
Playful, thoughtful UI is not decoration — it is trust. I care about the pixels.
Tools in the backpack.
Things I reach for reflexively, grouped so you can find yours.
A wall of small wins
- 1st — Huawei All-India National ICT Competition Delhi · 2019
- 1st — Coffee & Code Hackathon 2020
- 1st — Fetch.AI Open-Source Hackathon 2021
- 2nd — Web-O-Mania 2020
- Finalist — Smart India Hackathon 2019 Chandigarh · 2019
- Huawei Certified ICT Associate 2019 → 2021
The questions people ask.
Are you looking for work?
Happy at Apptile, but always open to interesting conversations — advisory, freelance nights & weekends, or the very right full-time role.
What kind of work energises you?
Zero-to-one product builds, real-time systems, live commerce, internal tooling that makes teams faster, and anything with a tight feedback loop with real users.
Can you lead?
Yes — I currently mentor peer engineers on Live Selling, coordinate customer calls, and set the roadmap for the vertical. I also work well as a strong IC.
What is your favourite stack?
Node.js + TypeScript on the backend, React (or React Native) on the frontend, MongoDB or Postgres depending on the shape of the data. Vercel for anything static-ish.
Are you open to remote?
Based in Bengaluru, comfortable async, flexible on hours. Have done fully-distributed teams and hybrid.
Got an idea worth chasing?
I'm always down to talk about product, live commerce, weird side-projects, or hiring me for something interesting.