"CTO and Co-Founder" on a student's profile invites scepticism, and it should. Here is what the title actually contained: a sequence of small, mostly unglamorous steps, each of which only made sense because of the one before. Students asking how to start a company should read the order, not the outcome.
Step zero: a failure
Living Space Automation, my first real project, failed hard. It taught me that building the thing is not the hard part; knowing what to build and for whom is. That lesson is the reason every later product started with a paying or committed user.
Step one: three students and clients
Saksham Gupta, Raman Shukla and I started shipping paid web products for clients while studying. Not a pitch deck — invoices. Five-plus paid products, roughly ₹1,00,000 in the first six months. Small numbers, real ones. That is what SCULT INDIA was before it had a name that meant anything.
Step two: the tool we needed ourselves
Client work produced chaos: leads, projects, deliverables, revenue in five places. So we built SCULT Studio, the CRM and operations platform the agency runs on. Building for ourselves taught the discipline that later went into client AI products — see building SCULT Studio.
Step three: a team
A 14-member cross-functional team, most of them students, which I led across engineering, architecture, UI/UX and delivery. Leading people older than your experience is where the title starts to mean something; the lessons are in leading a 14-member team while still a student.
Step four: the AI turn
Clients started asking for AI features, and the five production AI apps followed — RAG, fine-tuning, vision, document intelligence, speech. The CTO role became a GenAI engineering role with a team attached.
What the title does not mean
Funding, a large office, or certainty. It means responsibility for what ships and for the people shipping it, taken on while writing exams. Students who want it should start at step one, with a client, and let the title arrive when it is true.
— Pranjul Rathour, GenAI Engineer from Kanpur, India. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at any campus: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.