From Baleswar to Bengaluru: building NIGOC from a tier-3 town.

I moved to Bengaluru in 2016 because that's what you did, if you wanted to work on software in India. I spent six years there. I learned ML systems, I shipped production code at three companies, and I sat through enough founder-circle conversations to know what a "good" Indian startup pitch is supposed to sound like.

In April 2024 I moved back to Baleswar, the small town in coastal Odisha where I grew up. Five months later, I incorporated NIGOC.

The first question I get asked is some variant of: why didn't you stay in Bengaluru? The second question is: does it work? Both are reasonable questions; both deserve honest answers.

Why I left Bengaluru

I want to push back gently on the framing of the first question. Indian software founders default-incorporate in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, or Hyderabad because that is where the lawyers, accountants, recruiters and investors are. That is real. But it is not a law of physics.

What pushed me out was three observations:

One. The product I wanted to build was for students like the ones I grew up with — first-generation learners in tier-3 districts, parents who never went to college, family income in the bottom 40 percentile, primary language not English. I was looking at this user three feet away from me when I sat with my cousin during her JEE counseling. I was not looking at her when I lived in Bengaluru.

Two. The compute economics of LLM inference mean that I do not need to be near my customers' physical environment to serve them. AWS ap-south-1 is in Mumbai. The Anthropic Claude API doesn't care which Indian district I'm running my development laptop from. The infrastructure is location-agnostic; the problem isn't.

Three. The cost of starting a company is much lower in Baleswar. My office rent is ₹6,500 a month. My personal living costs are a fraction of what they were in Bengaluru. I am personally bootstrapping NIGOC without having taken external capital, and a low-cost base is the difference between making it to product validation and not.

What's hard about it

It is not all upside. Two things are genuinely harder.

Finding co-founders. Gautam is from Bhubaneswar, two hours from Baleswar — that's still rare for an Indian tech company. The pool of senior engineering and product talent who will sit in Baleswar is small. We have had to think differently about remote-first contracting and about hiring people who themselves want to leave the metros.

Banking and regulatory infrastructure. The bank manager at my Bandhan Bank branch in Baleswar had not before encountered a private limited tech company opening an account; it took weeks to set up correctly. The ROC Cuttack regional office is competent but slow. Getting GST registered involved more in-person visits than would be standard in Bengaluru.

These are friction costs. They are not blockers. We worked through them and now we have all the registrations a real company needs.

What's surprisingly good

The advantages have surprised me.

I sit in the same district where our users live. When we run pilots with the three Bhadrak schools, I can drive there in 90 minutes and sit in on a counseling session. That has shaped the product more than any user interview I did in Bengaluru.

The government registrations that are actually useful — MSME Udyam, DPIIT Startup India recognition, the local Industries Department's grant pipeline — are easier to access from a tier-3 base. The local bureaucracy is more responsive when a company is locally incorporated. We have been able to use this access in ways NIGOC would not have benefited from in Bengaluru.

And — this matters more than I expected — I am building the company my younger self would have wanted to exist. The first counseling session NIGOC ever ran was with a girl from the next village whose family I have known for fifteen years. That kind of accountability is hard to replicate from a co-working space.

To other founders

If you are an Indian software founder thinking about basing somewhere other than a metro: it is a reasonable choice for the right product. The infrastructure exists. The cost advantage is real. The proximity-to-user advantage, for products that serve non-metro India, is enormous.

The downside is loneliness — fewer founder peers, fewer happenstance conversations that move you forward. We mitigate that by being deliberate about how we travel. I'm in Bengaluru roughly one week a quarter to see customers and peer founders. The rest of the year is Baleswar.

The math has worked so far. We'll see how it scales.