Almost two years back, in 2023, when I first entered college, I was motivated to build something of my own. To Become Something.
I wanted to be more than just another engineering student chasing a degree. Thanks to all those YouTube gurus and podcasters, I was flooded with the desire to become financially independent.
Since the main hostel got full in our first Semester, I along with around 250+ other fresher boys ended up staying in a PG which was kms away from our campus. That's where I started making friends with like-minded people.
I met Kavin, who was just getting into web development at the time, but full of energy and Curiosity that I liked very much and connected. Then somebody introduced me to Vagdev, who is now my good friend was very much into the startup world. He had already secured initial funding from AWS in 2023 for a startup he was (and still) building, called Walkins (which he plans to launch in early 2026) a modern social media platform focused on forming real connections and creating real-world hangout spaces. Hearing all this in my first week of college genuinely felt like a fairytale.
I also befriended two other guys, Ayan and Sooraj.
For us, living in that isolation away from the main hostel where all the fun club activities, eating delicious fast food, dating the opposite gender were happening, this would unexpectedly become our creative bubble.
Then one day, an idea landed — literally — on a flight.
In a flight, Vagdev met a wealthy man who managed golf courses and clubs. The man believed he had a multi-billion-dollar idea: an app that allowed golfers to log in, register, and book slots. He was excited and wanted someone to design its prototype, offering a big chunk of money for it.
That conversation lit the fire in us.
If someone like him was willing to pay so much for just a prototype, why couldn’t we build an agency and do this at scale?
So, we started a small design group. To make it sound professional and to add the vibes of Silicon Valley, we named it "Cupertino Focus".
The plan was simple: approach wealthy, middle-aged men with ambitious (and sometimes delusional) app ideas, build their UI/UX, create prototypes, and earn recurring income as students.
None of us actually knew how to develop an app, so our plan was simple: outsource development to Filipino freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr, give them 20–40% of the commission, and keep the rest.
But the UI/UX part was on us — we had to design real, functional apps on Figma, create workflows, and build something clients could take seriously. That was the real challenge.
Among us, three of us Ayan, Sooraj, and I were completely new to tech and startups. Kavin had some exposure to tech corporates through his family, and Vagdev. He was the one who pushed us to read, to think bigger, and to believe that we could build something.
We spent nights learning UX/UI, exploring workflow systems, none of us fully understood how agencies or startups worked, but we were curious enough to try.
We all brought separate copies of The Personal MBA. While I have read many books, this one was mind-bendingly a struggle to read with all those corporate and business jargons. I finished that 496 pages hell of a book within under 3 weeks. Of course, with a Headache.
Funnily we even started binge watching Silicon Valley Comedy Series, and even started calling each other names from the show's characters to each other.
To learn, we built multiple prototypes:
- I designed a app called Causeway which is a community–action app that lets you report local problems and volunteer to fix them, earning points and rewards for your contributions.
- Sooraj worked on a sports app
- Ayan and Vagdev explored a futuristic Neuralink-style phone interface
And most interestingly, we even designed a premium Uber-like app for Ultra rich clients like Film Stars, Social Media Influencers, Business Tycoons, heck even Politicians could book rides with trained security escorts. It was basically Uber with guns.
You'd book a cab ride and choose the type of security vehicle you wanted: bulletproof glass, reinforced doors, high-security locks and even the kind of security personnel accompanying you. It was a perfect solution for anybody who is well known and let's says gets stormed with thousands of their fans.
We based the app on actual security categories:
- X category
- Y / Y+ category
- Z / Z+ category
- (and at the very top) SPG-level protection, which is only for the Prime Minister
And of course, the pricing would scale accordingly.
Months later, we found out that a real US-based startup had built almost the exact same concept and had already raised millions for it.
Their app Protector was trending at #2 on the App Store.
They were even making headlines. My twitter feed was flooded with their story. Here's one of the Video from a news channel.
That moment hit us hard. We were just first-year students in a PG, imagining an idea that turned out to be globally viable. It wasn't just fantasy—we had been grinding on prototypes in Figma without even realizing we were sitting on a multi-million-dollar idea.
They even solved the challenge we were stuck on: where do you get security agents?
Their answer was brilliant—they hired retired army officers.
It was a punch and a gift.
A reminder that ideas don’t wait. Execution is everything. And intuition is sometimes smarter than experience.
Eventually exams came. Projects piled up. Life pulled us in other directions. Kavin drifted into freelance work. The rest of us kept tinkering until we couldn’t anymore. Cupertino Focus dissolved not because it was wrong, but because we weren’t ready yet.
And here’s the truth: Cupertino Focus wasn’t a failure. It was a rehearsal. A sketch. A first draft of the builders we were becoming.
We’ll pick it up again. Not now, not in the chaos of our early years but later, when we have the time, the clarity, and the mastery to do justice to “Cupertino.”
For now, it sits where all good origin stories sit — waiting. Waiting for the version of us who’s ready to build it properly. Because what started in that PG wasn’t an agency. It was a beginning. A first spark.
And beginnings
Real beginnings always come back.