What came before.

I launched Menstiel as a Shopify store selling suit accessory sets. Indian weddings kept asking for custom ties and accessories for the groom’s and bride’s parties, so I added bulk custom orders of 20 to 60 sets each. Then came made-to-measure suits, which briefly became Mirza, until I closed the business before moving to New York in mid-2024.

I designed the products, managed vendors, ran operations, and led marketing online and at pop-ups in Westfield malls.

It started with FinTech Tips, a newsletter I launched in May 2016. Fintech was a flood of information across many verticals, and most sources covered the news but not how to actually apply it. FinTech Tips sourced the content, sorted it, and added that context. It grew past 200 subscribers, and it led directly to FinTech Scanner, which a group of us built in July as a month-long side project.

What it did: gathered fintech content from across the web, used machine learning to check that every source was legitimate, and organized it so people could learn a topic, follow the news, contact listed service providers and save favorites into collections. A trusted, one-stop place for fintech research, built for individuals, financial institutions, service providers, entrepreneurs and investors.

The team: six of us (three engineers, a designer, and two of us on business development and market research), with three advisors.

What we shipped: a landing page and clickable prototype at fintechscanner.com, with 38 sign-ups in the first two weeks. I interviewed 20+ potential users at fintech conferences and turned what I heard into the requirements for an MVP, with a roadmap from hand-collected data to a web crawler, a proper database and machine learning for source quality.

How it would make money: lead generation for listed providers, subscriptions, and white-label versions for banks, investment firms, consultancies and research teams.

My dad and I started a used car dealership together. I ran it on the side while going to community college and working a job, and it paid for my two years at the University of California, Davis.