200 logos, 50 websites, and a product used by 700 million people

people usually ask how i ended up doing brand, ui, and hardware at the same time, as if there was a plan. there wasn't. there was a lot of free time in college and a habit of taking on work i didn't quite know how to do yet.

here is the actual route.

a degree in electronics, and a lot of spare hours

i did my BE in electronics and communication in surat. good course. the thing nobody tells you is how much unstructured time an engineering degree leaves you with if you want it.

i filled mine with design and startup hackathons. we made the finals in a few of them, which mattered less for the result than for what it taught me: that you can go from a blank page to a demo in a weekend if you stop waiting for permission.

projugaadu, the first attempt

somewhere in there a friend and i built projugaadu.

the idea was simple. college students make genuinely interesting projects and then those projects die in a folder. so we built a place to publish them, students uploading their own work under their own name. a blogging platform for one niche: student projects.

it didn't take off the way we wanted. that's the honest version. the audience was real but the pull wasn't, and we didn't crack distribution.

i don't count it as wasted. it was the first time i owned something end to end, and the name stuck around long enough to become something else later.

learning the trade on upwork and fiverr

still in college, i started freelancing. upwork, fiverr, whatever platform would let me bid.

the early work was not glamorous. logos. banners. video editing. app promo videos. small jobs at small prices for clients who had never met me and had no reason to trust me yet.

what that period actually gives you, and i don't think it's replaceable, is volume. you're not doing one logo carefully over three weeks. you're doing a lot of them, for people with real opinions, on deadlines, and you find out fast which of your instincts survive contact with someone else's business.

after college i went full time on it for the better part of a year and crossed three thousand dollars across those platforms. not a fortune. but it was proof the thing worked: strangers, on the internet, paying for the work.

the job that came through the platform

then a client turned into an employer.

a company called fando hired me as a visual and web designer. it was platform work at first: social media posts, web design, video editing. i made over fifteen hundred social posts for them and built their website.

partway through, the company renamed itself the binary holdings.

and then the work changed shape. i moved from graphics into ui, and started designing the product itself. the binary holdings' main product reaches a scale i had never touched before: around 700 million users.

that number does something to how you design. at that size you stop having opinions about what looks nice. a control that is slightly confusing is not a small problem, it's a support load in dozens of languages. an extra tap is not a minor cost, it's millions of extra taps. you get conservative in the good way.

alongside it: more websites, the landing page ui for the company's ai companion product, and banner work that shipped through telcos.

the freelancing never stopped

here's the part people find strange. all through that, the freelance work kept running.

the totals to date, roughly:

• 200+ logos designed
• 50+ websites built
• 3,000+ social media posts and graphics
• a pile of product label and packaging work

i'm not listing that to sound busy. i'm listing it because it explains something about how i work. when you've done two hundred logos, you have seen most of the ways a mark fails: the one that dies at favicon size, the one that only works on white, the one the client loves and their customers can't read. you stop guessing. you're not being clever, you're recognising.

what i'm building now

two things of my own.

dotly is a habit tracking app, live on the play store. it's the same subject as the book i wrote, rewired habits, which is about breaking automatic patterns and building an identity that holds. writing about habits for a year and then building a tool for them was not a plan either, but it's a good pairing: the book argues the theory, the app has to survive daily use by people who don't care about the theory.

and an nfc app, in progress.

projugaadu also came back, pointed somewhere else. the student publishing idea didn't work, so it's now the hardware and software prototyping side of what i do: esp32, ble, sensors, 3d design, prd through to a working prototype. the electronics degree finally earning its keep, about a decade after i started it.

what this adds up to

i freelance. brand identity, ui, websites, and hardware prototypes, taken end to end by one person.

the reason that's not a red flag is the route above. it isn't a generalist who learned a bit of everything from tutorials. it's a designer who did two hundred logos before anyone was watching, then designed at 700 million user scale, then went back to the electronics he trained in. the range is the product of doing the work, in that order.

what it means practically: there is no handoff. the person who designs your brand is the same one who builds the site and, if it needs one, the board. every translation between people is somewhere a product loses its intent. i've removed those steps by being all of them.

bring an idea, leave with a product.