Shyjal Raazi

Building & bootstrapping software products working remotely

Thoughts & Tools

Projects

Micro.company

A company solving niche market problems, run by a small team with minimal resources, narrow focus and no outside funding.

2021

Launching / Marketing various products according to the target market.

Free and Subscription plans

https://micro.company
Instagram filters

Created a few funny Instagram filters during Covid-19 lockdown. Got more than 10M impressions in first week.

2020

Spark AR, Reactive JS

Influencers and celebrities tried out the filter.

Non profit

Guess Mallu Movie Don't Blink Challenge
Collect.chat

Collect.chat lets you create highly engaging chatbots for your websites. Used by over 10k websites all over the world.

2017

React, NodeJS, MongoDB

Initial customers came from ProductHunt and then took off using the poweredby link on their websites.

Freemium Subscription plan

https://collect.chat
Makeachali messenger chatbot

Malayalam movie screenshot (plain meme) search on Facebook messenger.

2017

Graph API, Algolia, NodeJS

Promoted chatbot using makeachali.com which already got a strong userbase.

Non profit

https://m.me/makeachali
Converter chatbot

A chatbot that takes in a file or a website and converts it into various formats. Grab articles from a website and get them in audio or pdf format. Convert docs and images to pdfs, csvs to excels, videos to gifs.

2017

Graph API, Heroku, NodeJS

The project was part of Facebook messenger challenge and hence featured in few online media.

Non profit

https://m.me/converterbot
Fitbet

An April fool prank product which faked as an app that gives back the money you paid first only if you work out daily.

2017

React.js

Launched on ProductHunt on April 1st and got attention as a prank product.

Non profit

ProductHunt post https://www.takefitbet.com
Makeachali.com

Make a chali is a simple yet powerful online Malayalam meme editor.

2016

Javascript, HTML5 Canvas, Algolia

Facebook meme community members started talking about it in their groups.

Non profit

https://www.makeachali.com
Paylet

A simple secure payment solution. A hackathon project which won the first position in UAE's largest Fintech hackathon.

2016

IOS, Android

Expected to launch in partnership with the bank that conducted the hackathon.

Commissions from merchants accepting payments

https://www.paylet.co
Shopup

Local deals and offer discovery app for UAE.

2015 - 2017

IOS, Android, Angular.js

Collaboration with top supermarkets in UAE and word of mouth publicity.

Subscription from merchants who list their products

https://www.shopup.io
Gamification in E-learning

A hackathon project that won the first position. The project was to gamify India's enterprise e-learning software - Simplilearn

2015

Angular.js, NodeJS

Never launched

N/A
Splicer

A sociamedia interest based movie recommendation platform for indian movies.

2013

Javascript, HTML5

Never launched

N/A

https://www.splicer.in
Crushbites

A Facebook application that pranks friends by collecting their crush names. Got 300K users within 3 months and was shut down by Facebook due to policy issues.

2011

PHP, MySQL, Facebook API

Shared it among friends in college, and then it went viral because of the inbuilt sharing feature.

Display ads inside the web app

https://apps.facebook.com/crushbites