u/Pritam_Chakroborty

I'm a software engineer, and I help my sister run her home bakery — accounting, strategy, the operational stuff. Watching her business up close showed me exactly what the problem is: almost every home baker we know runs on Instagram DMs, WhatsApp chats, and a notebook, guessing at what they actually made on each order instead of knowing.

So I built Kamai: order tracking, expense tracking, a menu builder, and real margin calculation for home bakers. The kind of tool that turns "I think this month was decent" into "I know exactly what I made, and on what."

It's live and working. Two bakers are using it daily, with zero rupees spent on marketing so far.

Here's exactly what ₹30,000 goes to:

• ₹4,000 — Play Store listing, app signing, release setup
• ₹15,000 — Pilot collaborations with 2 baking teachers who have real reach with working bakers (small fee + bonus only for bakers who actually sign up and use it — not a blind ad spend)
• ₹6,000 — Infra buffer as usage grows past free tiers (OTP credits, hosting overage)
• ₹5,000 — Contingency for anything unplanned

I'm not asking for a handout — I'm asking for early backers who want a working product to reach the people it's actually built for. If that's you: [UPI ID / link / DM me] — I'll share real numbers with anyone who backs this, including whether the teacher collabs actually convert.

Happy to answer anything about the product in the comments.

Hey everyone!

Me and another person are planning to split a Claude subscription, and we’re looking for one more person to join us so we can split the bill 3 ways.

If you’re interested in joining, drop me a DM. We can discuss the plan, cost, and payment details there.

Only 1 spot available. 🙂

A couple weeks ago I posted about Kamai — bakery software for home bakers and wholesalers, live, solo-built, zero real users. Asked where I was going wrong. Got 29 comments, way more honest than I expected. Closing the loop on what actually changed.

Three things landed hardest:

"You're splitting an already-hard problem in half." I was chasing first users for the baker app and the wholesaler app at the same time, with zero bandwidth to spare. Someone pointed out I was just making a hard problem harder. So I parked wholesaler outreach entirely — not killed, just paused until the baker side has real traction.

"You have a case study sitting right next to you and you're not using it." My sister's been using the baker app for months. I told her story as the origin of Kamai but never once counted her as a user — because she's my sister, not a "real" data point, apparently, in my own head. Someone called that out flatly: real orders, real advance payments, real margins, sitting in her account this whole time, and I'd been treating it like a nice anecdote instead of the proof it actually is. Pulling the real numbers together now.

"Ask her what her bottleneck actually is." This one stung. I built off watching her struggle, not off actually sitting down and asking her directly. Fixing that now, months late.

Also got an idea I hadn't considered at all — voice input for bakers mid-order, hands covered in flour, instead of making them type into an app. Might actually build it.

Still haven't cracked user acquisition, to be clear. Still close to zero. But I'm doing the version of this you all actually told me to do, not the version I was doing before.

It's live on Product Hunt today, if you're curious what came out of round one.

Genuine question for anyone who's been here: how long did it take you to stop treating your own family/friends using your product as "not real users"? Feels like a weirdly specific blind spot but I have a hunch I'm not the only one.

My sister runs a home bakery. Real orders, real repeat customers — all of it managed through Instagram DMs, WhatsApp chats, and a notebook that's basically held together with tape at this point.

A few months back I started looking into it properly, and realised the wholesalers who supply people like her — flour, boxes, packaging — are in the same boat. Most have zero presence online. No catalogue, just phone calls and a notebook of their own.

So I built two things:

- A business app for home bakers — orders, customer history, calendar, UPI AutoPay payments, WhatsApp receipts instead of screenshots

- A separate app for wholesalers to put their catalogue online and actually take orders properly

Both are live. Both are solo-built, bootstrapped, no funding. And right now — zero real users on either side. Turns out building the thing was the easy part; getting non-technical, WhatsApp-native small business owners to actually adopt a new tool is the actual problem.

Genuinely asking, not fishing for compliments: if you were trying to get the first 50 home bakers or the first 10 wholesalers onto something like this in India, where would you actually start? Baker communities, Instagram outreach, WhatsApp groups, something I haven't thought of?

Happy to answer questions or go into more detail in the comments.

My sister runs a home bakery. Real orders, real repeat customers — all of it managed through Instagram DMs, WhatsApp chats, and a notebook that's basically held together with tape at this point.

A few months back I started looking into it properly, and realised the wholesalers who supply people like her — flour, boxes, packaging — are in the same boat. Most have zero presence online. No catalogue, just phone calls and a notebook of their own.

So I built two things:

- A business app for home bakers — orders, customer history, calendar, UPI AutoPay payments, WhatsApp receipts instead of screenshots

- A separate app for wholesalers to put their catalogue online and actually take orders properly

Both are live. Both are solo-built, bootstrapped, no funding. And right now — zero real users on either side. Turns out building the thing was the easy part; getting non-technical, WhatsApp-native small business owners to actually adopt a new tool is the actual problem.

Genuinely asking, not fishing for compliments: if you were trying to get the first 50 home bakers or the first 10 wholesalers onto something like this in India, where would you actually start? Baker communities, Instagram outreach, WhatsApp groups, something I haven't thought of?

Happy to answer questions or go into more detail in the comments.