Building Studique

Before Studique, there were a lot of bad names.

One thing I never expected to spend so much time on was naming the product.

And honestly... that's how the name happened. Sometimes there isn't a deep branding story.

Looking for inspiration.

Before designing anything, I spent weeks researching student platforms.

One platform that stood out was Studocu. Not because I wanted to copy it. I simply wanted to understand why students kept using it.

Then I came back to the original question.

What would something like this look like if it was built specifically for SRM students?

The first version never really happened.

At that time, I only knew design. Development wasn't something I could do.

So I reached out to three friends and we started working together. The designs came together quickly. We discussed features. Planned releases. Made prototypes. We were excited.

But after a few months, progress almost stopped. Everyone had different priorities. Assignments. Labs. Internships. College.

In almost four months, we had only managed to build a small part of what we had planned. Eventually I stepped away from the project.

Looking back, the idea wasn't the problem. We just weren't ready to execute it.

Learning somewhere else.

A few weeks later, I joined another student platform called Campus Orbit as a product designer.

That experience taught me something I had completely ignored before. Building products isn't just about designing them.

Around the same time, AI coding tools became incredibly good. I started learning frontend development. Instead of stopping in Figma, I started building my own designs.

Every screen became an opportunity to learn something new. By the time Campus Orbit had grown to a few thousand users, I felt much more confident.

Not just as a designer. But as someone who could actually build products.

Without realizing it, I was preparing myself to build Studique again.

Starting over.

By April 2025, I couldn't stop thinking about the original idea.

This time I didn't spend weeks designing. I opened VS Code instead.

Over one weekend, I built most of the frontend. One of my previous teammates helped with the backend. Three days later...

Studique was live.

It wasn't perfect. Far from it. But people could finally use it.

The first users.

The first people to use Studique weren't strangers. They were my roommates. My friends. People living on the same floor.

They found bugs. Suggested improvements. Complained when something didn't work.

And then they started sharing it with their own friends. Those friends shared it with their classmates. Those classmates shared it with their juniors.

Looking back, Studique never really had a marketing strategy. It grew because students kept recommending it to other students.

The real work started after launch.

Launching the website was probably the easiest part. Maintaining it was much harder. Every single day there was something to do.

A broken feature. A new resource request. A bug. A suggestion. A small improvement.

Some evenings we built new features. Other evenings we spent hours fixing problems that only affected a handful of students. That became our routine.

Building during exam season.

One thing I never expected was the sense of responsibility.

Sometimes I had an exam the next morning. The students using Studique also had an exam the next morning. At the same time, messages would start coming in.

When hundreds of students depend on something you've built, it's difficult to ignore those messages.

Balancing academics, internships and maintaining the platform wasn't always easy. There were days when I questioned whether I should study or fix a bug first.

But strangely, I never disliked that responsibility. If students trusted us enough to ask for help before an exam, I felt we were doing something meaningful.

The feature I always believed in.

When we started building Studique, almost everyone assumed attendance and marks would become the biggest features. And they did. But I never thought those features would define the platform.

At the end of the day, we were simply making SRM's existing portal easier to access.

The feature I always believed in was UnitWise.

Unlike attendance or marks, nothing about UnitWise existed before. Every resource had to be found. Verified. Organized. Categorized.

Sometimes we searched for hours. Sometimes faculty members helped. Sometimes seniors shared their collections. Sometimes content creators allowed us to include their material.

It took time. A lot of time. But today, UnitWise has become one of the most visited and most engaging parts of Studique.

Students don't just open it. They stay. They read. They prepare. And seeing that happen has been incredibly satisfying.

Not every bug was actually our bug.

One funny thing about building a platform that depends on another platform... sometimes the problem isn't yours.

Many of our attendance and marks features rely on the SRM Academia portal. Whenever Academia went down, our wrapper naturally stopped working too.

Students would message us saying, "Studique isn't working."

Technically... they weren't wrong. But neither were we. Those moments were always slightly awkward.

One decision we never changed.

Very early on, we decided something.

We weren't going to charge students for essential features.

Attendance. Grades. Resources. Faculty information. These are things students already have access to. We simply wanted to make them easier to find.

Hosting isn't free. Servers aren't free. Domains aren't free. Everything has been funded by the team.

Maybe someday Studique will become financially sustainable. But putting basic student resources behind a paywall never felt right. And it still doesn't.

It slowly became a community.

Studique started with a small founding team. It didn't stay that way.

Over time, more than 100 students contributed to the platform.

Every contribution mattered. The platform became much bigger than the people who originally started it.

Passing it on.

One thing we always wanted was for Studique to continue after we graduated.

A student platform shouldn't disappear every four years. Over the last few months, we've started handing everything over to juniors.

The codebase. The documentation. The designs. The infrastructure. Most importantly, the responsibility.

The next batch will build their own version of Studique. They'll improve things. Change things. Probably remove features I thought were important.

And honestly, I hope they do. Because that means the platform is growing. Not standing still.

Looking back.

When I started this project, I thought I was building a website. I wasn't.

I was learning how products are actually built. How to work with people. How to prioritize. How to listen. How to balance design with engineering. How to ship even when everything isn't perfect.

Today, Studique serves more than 26,000 students, has crossed 2.3 million page views, includes resources across 250+ subjects, has a community of 2,500+ students, and has been shaped by 100+ contributors.

Those numbers make me happy. But they're not what I'll remember most.

I'll remember the late-night bug fixes. The exam week messages. The first resource upload. The excitement of watching someone I didn't know recommend Studique to another student.

Those moments never appear on Google Analytics. But they're the reason this project means so much to me.

Thank you.

Studique has never been a one-person project. It wouldn't exist without the people who believed in it.

Thank you to our faculty mentor, Dr. H. Karthikeyan, for guiding us and helping us navigate permissions and university processes.

And thank you to every contributor who uploaded a resource, reported a bug, suggested a feature, tested a release, or simply shared Studique with a friend.

You helped build something that became much bigger than any one of us.

I hope the next batch takes it even further.