I'm 18. BTech CS student in India.
Everyone around me is grinding Leetcode, preparing for placement season, optimizing for offer letters.
I made a different choice.
I spent the last 4 months building XEdge — an AI tool discovery platform — completely solo, zero budget, while attending college.
Here's what that choice produced:
500+ users from 0
160+ curated AI tools
15 business execution playbooks
2,420 LinkedIn impressions on a single post
A Gumroad store ready to make first revenue
A pitch deck submitted to a VC fund
A skill set no placement interview ever tested
I'm not saying placement is wrong.
I'm saying it's not the only path and for a lot of people it's not even the best one.
The skills I learned building XEdge:
— How to validate an idea before building
— How to acquire users with zero budget
— How to price and sell digital products
— How to write content that reaches thousands
— How to build in public and turn struggle into marketing
None of that was on my syllabus.
If you're a CS student reading this — you don't have to choose between placement and building. But if you're only doing one of them, make sure it's the one that still matters in 5 years.
xedge.tech — built by a student, for builders.
Top comments (10)
As someone who spends more time building than collecting certificates, I completely agree with this.
A real product forces you to learn architecture, marketing, customer psychology, pricing, support, sales and execution at the same time. Those lessons are difficult to learn in a classroom or from coding challenges alone.
Leetcode may get you hired. Building teaches you how to create opportunities for yourself and others.
This is exactly it "Building teaches you how to create opportunities for yourself and others." That line hits different .The classroom teaches you to solve defined problems. Building forces you to find the problems worth solving first. That's a completely different and honestly more valuable skill.
What are you currently building? Always curious what people in this community are working on.
At the moment I’m building several products in parallel, but the two largest are a payroll & workforce management SaaS (HRMarge) and an e-Ledger audit platform for accountants and auditors.What building these products taught me is that software development is often the easiest part. Understanding regulations, business processes, edge cases, user behavior, scalability, security, auditability, and operational realities usually takes far more effort than writing code.That’s one reason I agree with your post. Building a real product exposes you to problems that coding exercises rarely touch: customer validation, pricing, support, compliance, performance bottlenecks, and long-term maintainability.A product doesn’t ask whether your algorithm passes a test case. It asks whether a real customer would pay for it and still be happy six months later.
HRMarge and an e-Ledger audit platform that's a serious combination. Payroll and compliance are two of the most underserved spaces for genuinely good software.
Your point about software being the easy part is something I wish more CS students understood before they spend 2 years optimizing for interviews. The hard parts regulations, edge cases, user behavior, long-term maintainability none of that shows up in a Leetcode problem.
"A product doesn't ask whether your algorithm passes a test case. It asks whether a real customer would pay for it and still be happy six months later."
Enjoyed the conversation on that post. Building XEdge , AI tool discovery platform for founders. Would love to stay connected as you build HRMarge.
Likewise, I enjoyed the conversation.
What I find interesting is that we’re building in very different domains, but facing many of the same challenges: understanding users, validating assumptions, finding distribution channels, and turning a product into something people actually want to use. XEdge is a great example of identifying a growing market early and executing consistently. I’ll definitely be following your progress. Looking forward to seeing where XEdge goes over the next year, and I’d be happy to stay connected and exchange ideas along the way.
Exactly the domain changes but the hard problems stay the same. Distribution, validation, getting people to actually want it. That's the universal founder experience regardless of what you're building.
Really appreciate that. I'll be following HRMarge and the audit platform too — curious to see how you navigate the compliance complexity at scale.
Let's stay connected. Would be great to exchange notes as we both build the kind of honest founder conversation that's hard to find elsewhere.
This is really inspire me. btw, As someone who is still learning to build and launch products, I’m curious how you first introduced XEdge to the public and convinced people to try it, especially with zero budget.
Honestly, I sometimes feel afraid to talk about my own project because I worry people might judge it, criticize it, or notice that it still has bugs and rough parts. How did you overcome that fear and start building in public with confidence?
Would love to learn from your experience.
Honestly the fear never fully goes away. I still feel it every time I post real numbers publicly.
What helped me was reframing it bugs and rough edges aren't embarrassing when you're building in public. They're proof you're actually building something real instead of just talking about it.
The first time I shared Xedge it had broken links and half-empty pages. Nobody cared about the bugs. They cared that someone my age was actually shipping something.
Start smaller than you think. Share one thing you built today not the whole product. Just one feature, one decision, one learning. That's how building in public starts.
What are you currently working on? Would love to see it.
❤️