A one-person software company. I trade Indian equities, and when the
tools I needed didn't exist or cost more than they were worth, I built them. Five products
in production, all of them mine to ship and keep running.
I'm Shikhar. I live in Delhi, I trade Indian equities, and I run
Mudgal Labs, a one-person software company. The trading came first — November 2022,
full time since September 2024 — and everything I've built since came out of needing
something nobody was selling me at a price that made sense.
Before that I spent four years shipping inside other
people's companies, twice as the first engineer on the ground. That record is in the log below.
I keep most of it in public — the products, the
trading record, the drawdowns included. All I can do is try.
Delhi, India. Building and trading from here the whole time.
Trading since November 2022, full time since September 2024.
Mudgal Labs since March 2025. Five products, one operator.
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The work
Selected · N01 – N05
ceoshikharFig. 01 · dependency graph
Five products, but they're not five startups.
Arthveda is the product. Everything underneath it started as something I needed
to keep Arthveda running, and turned out to be worth building properly. That's the whole shape
of the thing: one product, and the infrastructure I had to build to operate it.
Find setups with the screener, track them in watchlists, read the market monitor,
journal the trades, and build a public record of your process rather than your P&L.
TradeZella was the journal everyone recommended. $30 to $50 a month was
steep in rupees, and it had no Indian broker support, so paying for it wouldn't have made it
work with Zerodha anyway. That gap is the whole product.
Direct and broadcast notifications at scale, respecting each user's preferences,
with the SDK treated as the product rather than the console.
I wanted the Resend of notifications: send one from code in a line. Novu
could do it, but it's built for non-technical marketing sends and carries all the machinery
that implies.
Customer conversations that happen inside your product, themed to match it, with
no vendor badge in the corner.
Every commercial widget wanted my users to create an account somewhere else,
which just replaces one scattered channel with another. Grahak uses a one-time signed handshake,
so the host app vouches for its own users and they never sign up for anything.
One-time JWT handshakeZero end-user signupRuns on Bodhveda
India's trader sentiment board. Vote bullish or bearish on tomorrow, then find
out who called it right.
The only thing here that doesn't solve a problem. It's just fun, and the
historical votes turned out more interesting than I expected.
Weekend project
Next.jsSQLite
/ 03
Ask about me
Hand-written / offline
Every answer here is one I wrote myself. It runs
entirely in your browser, nothing you type leaves your machine, and it can't invent something I
didn't say — there's no model, just my answers and a search over them.
AssistantAsk me about the products, the trading, or Shikhar himself. I only answer from what he's written down.
Offline · answers on-device · no data leaves your browser
/ 04
Experience
Log / 2020 – 2024
Before the studio I spent four years shipping
inside other people's companies, twice as the first engineer on the ground. Working solo now
is a choice, not the only thing I know how to do.
Select an entry to expand
Software Engineer· Cetec ERPDec 2021 – Aug 2024
First member of the India team, helping move a live ERP SaaS off Perl and onto React
and Go. I built the frontend foundation the product still runs on, then led the team that
built on top of it.
Cut a core report from 40s to under 1s by replacing sequential, nested Perl queries (an N+1) with joins and subqueries in Go.
Built the architecture behind 200+ reports and 50+ dashboard widgets: API contracts, filter persistence, bookmarking, pagination, and the drag-and-drop dashboard core.
Wrote the UI component library solo for its first month, then grew it as the team scaled.
Led a frontend team of 6 to 8, setting the bar for design, readability and performance.
Designed and shipped Custom Forms, letting customers build their own forms across inspection and feedback workflows.
Founding Engineer· IndyWiseAug 2020 – Feb 2021
First engineering hire. Took the product from an empty repo to a working MVP, and
owned it end to end: architecture, build, deploy and everything that broke afterwards.
Concept to MVP in under six months: auth, user and mentor profiles, 1:1 session booking and an admin dashboard.
Designed the API and data architecture, and ran operations on a serverless AWS stack (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3).
The job I learned to ship in, and the one that sent me looking for problems of my own to solve.
/ 05
Trading
Record / Nov 2022 – now
I trade the thing I build for.
Everything Arthveda knows about what traders
actually need, it learned from me needing it. Full-time since September 2024.
Fig. 02 · Equity curveNov 2022 → now
1,180Trades on record
29.3%Win rate
2.96:1Avg win / loss
~50%Oct 23 → Oct 24
First trade.
First real edge, trading crypto futures on Smart Money Concept.
Blew up an account in rage by abandoning my own system. Still the most expensive lesson I've paid for.
Found Kristjan Kullamägi and started trading his momentum-breakout setup.
Consistent profitability on Indian equities. The account grew about 50%.
India's bull market ended, and the setup stopped working with it.
Six months hunting a new edge with short-term trading and writing options. Nothing stuck.
Stopped looking for an edge in the market and built one instead. Arthveda starts.
I've been in drawdown since late 2024, and that's on the record too. A 29% win rate only
works because the winners are roughly three times the losers, which means the whole thing rests on
risk management rather than on being right. Publishing only the good year would make the number
meaningless. See the full record on Arthveda ↗
/ 06
How I build
Method / leverage
People ask how one person keeps five products
running. It comes down to three things, and none of them are working harder.
mudgal labsone box · no managed services
/ 01
Own the whole stack
One Hetzner box runs all of it — every product's API, the workers and crons behind them,
Postgres, Redis, object storage, Caddy on the edge, Grafana and Loki watching the lot. Every
service in Docker, no managed anything. It's why five products cost close to nothing to
keep alive, and why nothing breaks that I can't fix myself.
I ship with AI every day, and that's most of how the maths works. Inside the products there's
exactly one AI feature so far: an MCP server for Arthveda, so you can query your own
journal from an AI client. Bringing that into the app is next.
MCP · AI-assisted development
/ 03
Make the tools reusable
Every piece of infrastructure I needed twice became a product. Bodhveda, Grahak and Resurface
all started as internal plumbing for Arthveda. Building them properly cost more up front and
has paid for itself every time since.
Go · TypeScript · Postgres
/ 07
What people say
Discord · Reddit · Email
The first person who ever paid me for software.
Reddit DM
"Hey, I have used your platform, loved it, and I am ready to support your endeavor by subscribing it monthly."
Me
"Oh my god! Really? If you subscribe, you will officially be the first person to help me make my first rupee from software!"
2h later
"Great. And seeing your dedication in this project, I have subscribed it yearly."
"
I will definitely check it. Again, the app did help me realise the flaws, now I want to bring out the strength. Thanks once again, Shikhar.
EkhiveerDiscord
"
I had about 12,000 screenshots which are now gone with a Google Photos account. The issue is you can't link one move to another. You've solved that issue.
RustyCoder99Reddit
"
I found some things that might help me out, like days when I am profitable, and hour of the day. Very good information.
nocturnal_shitReddit
"
Love how you've built a clean, focused tool for Indian traders with open-source transparency.
Ranjeet KumarLinkedIn
"
Many journalling platforms already exist, but your pricing is discounted compared to others I've seen. So great work there.
IndependenceBroad456Reddit
"
Just set up the entire app. Must say it's very good and new-user friendly.
ProbsGalaxyReddit
/ 08
Contact
Channel / open
Building something?Let's talk about it.
Three reasons people usually get in touch.
Contract, consulting or part-time work alongside the products, which I take on a small amount
of. Partnering on one of the products, if you think you can take it somewhere I can't on my
own. Or just to say hi, which is a perfectly good reason on its own. Fifteen minutes is usually
enough to work out which one it is.
