NextCo

As Startup Relations & Partnerships Head at E-Cell IIT Bombay, I spent a year around founders and kept hearing the same problem: finding a compatible co-founder was almost entirely luck-based, relying on cold LinkedIn outreach, WhatsApp groups, and chance introductions.

No existing product treated co-founder matching as a data problem. Matching was social and unstructured, with no systematic way to evaluate compatibility on the things that predict whether a co-founder relationship works.

I built NextCo alongside a full course load and while running E-Cell’s Startup Relations vertical. SINE IIT Bombay provided infrastructure and mentor access rather than a dedicated engineering team.

I ran 30+ interviews with founders to understand what made co-founder matches succeed or fail, then built NextCo 0→1 in partnership with SINE IIT Bombay under Project Titanium. I executed GTM across 30+ incubators and the broader startup ecosystem to drive early adoption.

I built the matching algorithm’s compatibility criteria directly from patterns in the founder interviews: what predicted whether a pairing worked, rather than surface-level filters such as industry or founding stage.

I ran GTM through 30+ incubator and startup-ecosystem partnerships instead of relying on paid acquisition because the target users were already concentrated in those communities.

NextCo acquired 4,500+ early users at launch, grew its user base 3×, and reached a 40% pilot match success rate. I later handed the product over to SINE IIT Bombay to run going forward.

Handing NextCo over to SINE after building it 0→1 taught me the difference between building something that works and building something that can be run by someone else. Clean documentation and a real handoff plan mattered almost as much as the product decisions.