NettWorkk started as a side project with my brother — a community-driven marketing company we were trying to build. We never quite found the spark. The bottlenecks were real. We didn't take off.

But one thing kept going: a small IPL predictor league we ran for friends and a small community.

Last year I ran it on Excel and Google Forms. Every match, I'd download form responses, copy-paste them into a sheet, recalculate the leaderboard by hand, post it back. Hours of work. Errors I had to chase.

This year I refused to do that again. Not because I was a builder — because I was tired of being the manual labour my own project required.

The build

I'd never written production code. I started anyway.

Two weeks, mostly nights. A Cloudflare Worker in JavaScript. A D1 database for users and matches. Apps Script triggers on the Google Form so that when someone submits a prediction, the data flows to the Worker, which updates the live odds and leaderboard.

I worked with Claude as my pair programmer. Hit usage limits. Waited hours. Used other AI models in the gaps. Burned weekends on bugs that turned out to be one-character typos.

I'll be straight: I don't write code in the way an engineer does. I have ideas, I direct AI tools, I integrate, I debug, I ship. The distinction matters and I won't blur it.

What I learned

Building is mostly waiting and not giving up. The romantic version where you sit down and code for six hours and ship — that's not how it works for me, and I suspect not for most people. The unromantic version is two weeks of small, frustrating, eventually-working steps.

That's enough for me. I'd do it again.

The problem

When I joined the engagement, the work paper for borrowings and debt securities — the second-largest line on an NBFC's balance sheet — was a mess. Unstructured client data on one side, manual re-keying on the other, fourteen days to audit it, and most of those days went to copy-paste. The numbers were right. The process was wasteful.

The fix

I rebuilt the work paper from the ground up. Standardised input formats, formula-linked tabs, named ranges, dynamic reconciliations across statements of accounts from multiple lenders, automated EIR and amortisation calculations as per Ind AS. No macros, no VBA wizardry — just disciplined Excel applied with intent.

The result: 70-80% less manual work. Days back for actual analysis. A template that became how the team handled the area afterwards.

While I was at it, I taught myself DataSnipper — a verification tool the firm had introduced that nobody on my team had explored. Within weeks I was training the rest of the team. We cut document verification time roughly in half.

The other stuff

There was more. In year one, I picked up an entire engagement that had been abandoned by someone two levels senior to me, and got recognised for it. I worked on a ₹300 Cr public NCD issue. SOX audit for a global financial services firm. The usual statutory work across asset management, capital markets, AIFs.

I was a team player. I had good bonds with everyone. I was good at audit because I was attentive, because I built tools that made my work better, and because I noticed when the existing system wasn't serving us.

Those instincts didn't come from audit. Audit just happened to be where I sharpened them.

The honest part

I didn't love it. I'll say that here because pretending otherwise is exhausting and you'd see through it.

What I loved was the part where I made the work better. That part I'd do anywhere.

Clienter.AI — Blog Writer

Six months writing for an AI accounting startup. Authored long-form posts on AI trends, automation in accounting, and user education for a non-technical audience. Read the work →

Mangrol Multimedia — Translation

Four years of freelance Gujarati-to-English translation work. A UPSC exam guide book. Two autobiographies — one I led, one I assisted on. Form digitisation projects for an MNC bank (35+ forms converted into editable PDFs).

Translation taught me what writing is when meaning matters and the wrong word costs something real.

This site

The words on these pages — most of them — are mine. That counts as a portfolio entry too.