CampusCritique

Students choosing one of India’s new-age tech colleges get marketing from the college and rumours from YouTube. CampusCritique puts verified student reviews, structured college data, side-by-side compare and a community in one place, and Connect lets a prospective student book a paid one-to-one video call with a verified senior. Three of us co-founded it in April 2026; I am “Founder C” in the team’s docs, which meant payments, notifications, admissions automation and the initial UI.

A booking holds a slot, creates a gateway order, and confirms only when the webhook arrives. Webhooks arrive twice, out of order, and sometimes for refunds rather than payments, so the route verifies the signature, derives an idempotency key from the gateway’s event id (falling back to a hash of the body), and guards refund updates with an already-processed check. Reschedules are a one-time, one-hour-rule flow with their own table. Reminders fire once, two hours before, after the 24-hour and 10-minute variants proved noisy. All of it emits events to Notify rather than sending anything itself.

Thirteen verified mentors, 43 sessions created, 15 paid and all 15 completed, two reschedules handled, zero refunds needed. 1.1K users and 18K events since the June launch, with organic search now the largest channel at 53% of sessions. Small, real, and every paid session completed. Gross merchandise value is tiny at test-phase pricing and is not a number worth headlining.

Admission-date automation and alerts, compare data and college alerts, the initial UI and first pages, the migration of every runtime image to Supabase Storage, and the Connect end-to-end audit and release QA checklists.