we started ByteForge in 2024 in Kanpur because waiting for a builder community to appear around us felt dumber than trying to make one ourselves. at first, it was exactly what you would expect from students with more energy than infrastructure: a group of people, a few half-finished ideas, and the belief that if we kept putting builders in the same room, something real would eventually happen.
then Hack Club made us official. more importantly, they funded the hackathons and workshops. that changed the physics of the whole thing. we did not have to make every student pay before they had even discovered whether they liked building. we could focus on getting people through the door, putting tools in front of them, and giving them a reason to come back.
we started organising workshops almost every week. sometimes it was game development. sometimes soldering. sometimes hardware, PCB design, web design, or Minecraft mod development. then there were the sessions that began with one plan and ended somewhere completely different because one question sent the whole room down a rabbit hole.
the format was simple. first, we taught whatever we knew. then we ran a small competition around it. winners got prizes. everyone got food and merch. Hack Club covered the cost, which meant a student could show up without first having to justify the expense at home. they could make something, compete, eat, and leave with a stupidly satisfying sticker or t-shirt.
that was where ByteForge stopped feeling like a club name and started feeling like a real community. we watched people go from ‘i have no idea where to start’ to ‘wait, can i add this feature?’ in the same afternoon. that shift is addictive as hell. once you see someone realise they are allowed to build, you do not really want to go back to building only for yourself.
in 2025, we pushed the experiment much further and ran a four-day hacker house. four days is long enough for the polite introductions to disappear. people settle into the work, ideas get rebuilt, bugs become communal enemies, and the room starts developing its own language. it was not a workshop stretched across a weekend. it was a temporary home for people who wanted to make things.
an investor in Hashed Emergent put in ₹2 lakh. we gave out more than $75,000 in credits from OpenAI, Anthropic, Emergent, Lovable, and Supabase, plus $2,000 in cash and goodies from the same partners. written in one sentence, that sounds like sponsor math. inside the hacker house, it meant a builder could try the expensive version of an idea instead of killing it early because the API bill looked terrifying.
for a community that had started in Kanpur one year earlier, the whole thing felt slightly unreal. the credits, cash, and goodies were great, obviously. but the real flex was seeing serious people trust high school builders with resources and then watching those builders turn that trust into actual work.
so we started thinking bigger. a 24-hour hackathon. not for people who already had a polished 
github, a fancy laptop, and ten friends who knew how startups worked. for people in tier 2 cities who were curious, capable, and completely lost about where to begin. there are so many students with the interest but no starting point. no mentor. no event nearby. no one saying, ‘yes, you are allowed to try this.’ we wanted to make that first step less intimidating.
then came IIT Kanpur. we were outside the campus, roaming around and trying to figure out how to make this idea real, when we saw an IITian cycling inside. we stopped him and told him we wanted to organise a hackathon. very normal behaviour from us, obviously. he gave us the number of the vice president of Techkriti,
IIT Kanpur’s annual technical and literary festival. one random cycle ride became the first serious door that opened for Execron.
we contacted him, explained ByteForge, explained the kind of participants we wanted to reach, and explained why this hackathon needed to exist. and somehow, surprisingly, he took us seriously. we were allowed to organise our hackathon as Execron 1.0 through Techkriti. that moment was insane because the idea stopped being a poster in our heads and became a real event with rooms, bills, deadlines, permissions, and the terrifying possibility that actual people might show up.
we kept the ByteForge entry fee at just ₹499. if someone registered through the Techkriti portal, it was closer to ₹3,000. that difference mattered. the whole point was accessibility, not making the event look exclusive while quietly pricing out the exact students we wanted to help.
of course, the numbers immediately started trying to kill us. we had to pay for the hall, but we negotiated the price down. the original rate was around ₹50,000 per day, and we got it for ₹30,000 per day. thirty thousand still felt like a ridiculous amount when you are a bunch of young builders trying to make a first hackathon happen. every spreadsheet line looked like it was personally attacking us.
then fundraising began, and it was fucking difficult. Kanpur is not exactly a place where you can casually walk into ten companies and say, ‘hello, please fund our student hackathon.’ we had to explain the event again and again, prove that we were serious, and keep following up even when people stopped replying. we managed to get support from OpenAI, Lovable, and 
Google Developer Groups, but sponsorship credits and resources are not the same thing as having actual cash to pay the hall bill.
so we kept going. we raised funds from Hashed Emergent and local malls. we partnered with people for gifts, food, and support. we also reached out to Kanpur’s biggest amusement park and worked out support there. every contribution helped, but every contribution also came with another form, another call, another pitch, and another moment of wondering whether we had massively overestimated our ability to pull this off.
the team was the reason it did not collapse. we had the best co-founders, and then we built the rest of the team around the work. we started marketing in our school. we found a head of photography and videography, and their teams. we got a graphic designer who was also a special friend of mine, which made the work more fun and occasionally more chaotic. we had a finance head, plus strong people handling PR, outreach, and marketing.
none of those roles were decorative. photography had to document the event. design had to make the whole thing feel real before it existed. finance had to make sure we did not accidentally spend money we did not have. outreach had to convince students to trust an event organised by people they had never heard of. marketing had to make Execron visible. everyone was doing three jobs at once, because that is what happens when a team is small and the ambition is slightly unreasonable.
we also started calling computer science and AI professors from some of the strongest universities in Kanpur. we wanted the event to have real technical weight behind it, not just loud marketing and a nice poster. those conversations helped us think more seriously about mentors, judging, problem statements, and what students should actually take away from a 24-hour build.
we built Execron around a Minecraft theme. jerseys for the team. stickers and bags for everyone. a visual identity that made the whole thing feel like one world instead of a random collection of sponsor logos and stressed volunteers. it was not just branding. it gave people something to remember. you could walk into the venue and immediately understand that this was supposed to be fun, not another boring event where someone reads slides for six hours and calls it innovation.
and then the hackathon actually happened. this is the part where every terrifying spreadsheet, awkward sponsor call, late-night design edit, and stupid little logistics problem suddenly becomes worth it. people showed up. the teams built. the volunteers moved around trying to fix things before anyone noticed they were broken. the food arrived. the prizes went out. the Minecraft energy was everywhere. for our first hackathon, it was a great success, and i am still kind of shocked that we managed to make the whole machine run.
we also got passes for the DJ night, which meant the team finally got to stop acting like event staff and enjoy ourselves for a bit. we danced, laughed, ate, and had the kind of good time that only happens after you have been stressed together for way too long. everybody was exhausted, but in the best possible way.
not everyone was happy about it. some people from our school talked shit about the team and the hackathon. that hurt, obviously. it is one thing when a random person online says something. it is another thing when it comes from people who know you and have watched the whole thing happen. but the team stayed together. the leadership held. we kept showing up, kept solving the next problem, and refused to let gossip become the most important thing about what we had built.
that is probably the real ByteForge story. not just Hack Club making us official. not just a four-day hacker house, $75,000 in credits, or Execron 1.0. it is a few students in Kanpur deciding to create a starting point for other students, then refusing to disappear when the costs got scary, the logistics got messy, and people started talking shit from the sidelines.
we began by teaching people how to solder, make games, design PCBs, build websites, and mod Minecraft. then we gave them a competition, some food, some merch, and a reason to believe they belonged in the room. the hacker house and Execron were larger versions of the same idea: lower the barrier, make the first step obvious, and let young builders surprise themselves.
now, in 2026, we are making that support even more direct. ByteForge gives $50 to $200 to high schoolers who are building something cool. beside a $75,000 credit pool, that can look like a tiny number. to one student, it can be the parts, credits, hosting, or one last attempt that gets a project out of the drafts folder and into the real world.
i like that this is where ByteForge has ended up. not as a brand that only talks about empowering young builders, but as a community willing to put actual money behind them. the amount does not have to be life-changing. it just has to arrive at the moment when a young builder is deciding whether the idea is worth continuing.
ByteForge is still growing. as our own work became more demanding, we handed the full day-to-day responsibility to our president, Shresth Agarwal. that was not us disappearing. it was us trusting the team enough to let the community keep moving without pretending we could personally hold every thread forever.
we are now working full-time on 
Vivacity, carrying the same instinct into the next thing: make the door easier to find, help people get started, and keep going when the plan looks slightly insane. ByteForge taught us that a community does not begin when the logo is ready or the numbers look impressive. it begins when somebody shows up for a builder before the rest of the world has noticed them.
Execron 1.0 was our first big swing, and it was far from perfect. but it worked. people came, built, competed, learned, and had a genuinely good time. ByteForge started with workshops in Kanpur. now it backs high schoolers building their own weird, ambitious things. that is the part that makes me proud.