Headline

Founder, Aratavan | Building Sella: a marketing head for small online stores, on WhatsApp | Founder, FresherNation | 20 Yrs Engineering Leadership | Building in Public

About

I build software that does a job people can actually feel. Right now, that job is marketing for small online stores. -------- SELLA ----------- Most small store owners run their own ads. Not because they want to, but because an agency costs ₹25,000-30,000 a month before a rupee of ad spend, and a freelancer hands over tactics, not a plan. So the owner guesses. Every week. Forever. Sella closes that gap. Every week it studies what a store's competitors are advertising, looks at what worked for that store last week, and sends the owner exactly what to run next — who to target, what to say, ad copy written to fit each platform, and a ready-to-post image pack. It arrives on WhatsApp. Read it in five minutes, tap approve, run it. No dashboard to learn. No forms to fill in. No retainer. ₹2,999 a month. Every brief is scored against a quality bar before it reaches the merchant. If it isn't good enough to run without editing, it gets rewritten — not delivered. I built it end to end, on my own: the intelligence that reads public ad archives, the writing, the quality checks, billing, compliance across four markets, and the operator tooling behind it. It runs today. I'm opening the first pilots now. ---------- TWENTY YEARS BEFORE THIS ------------ I started with core system software at Nokia, then spent fifteen years in engineering leadership. In numbers: • Scaled engineering organisations to 45+ people, attrition under 8% • Built SaaS platforms adopted by 25+ enterprise clients, driving $3M+ ARR • Cut AWS/GCP infrastructure cost 25-35% while holding 99.95% uptime • Moved release cycles from weeks to daily deployments • Shipped MVPs in under six months, consistently — an AI shopping-agent MVP to six pilot clients in five months; a healthcare MVP that validated a new business line I'm most useful where product thinking meets hands-on engineering. I still write the code. ---- ALSO BUILDING ----- FresherNation:helping fresh engineers go from confused to confident in their first job. Less scalable, more personal, and closer to why I started doing this at all. ---- GET IN TOUCH ----- If you run an online store and want to see what Sella would tell you to do this week, message me. The first brief is free. saran.83@gmail.com

Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

AI stack

anthropic apis

claude code

claude

cursor

github copilot

openai

Work experience

Director at Aratavan Private Limited, Sep 2017 - Present · 9 yrs, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Aratavan is where I build my own products. SELLA — an AI marketing brain for small online stores (2025-present) Every week Sella studies a store's competitors, reviews what worked for that store last week, and sends the owner exactly what to run next — audience, message, ad copy, and a ready-to-post image pack — on WhatsApp. Agencies start at ₹25,000 a month. Sella is ₹2,999. Built solo, end to end: • Competitor intelligence from public ad archives, web search and store data • Weekly brief generation behind a versioned quality gate — anything below the bar is rewritten, never delivered as-is • Ready-to-run ad copy enforced to each platform's character limits, plus generated image kits • WhatsApp, email and SMS delivery with one-tap approval • Billing across four markets (Stripe and Razorpay); GDPR, CCPA and CAN-SPAM compliance driven by configuration, not code • An operator dashboard for approvals, leads and funnel numbers • Node.js and Python services, Claude models, ~80% test coverage, CI-enforced engineering guardrails VIDEO INFRASTRUCTURE — FFmpeg transcoding, HLS/DASH adaptive streaming, resumable uploads and queue-based processing on Cloudflare R2 and Railway. Also evaluated and deployed local model inference for cost-controlled and privacy-sensitive workloads.

Vice President of Engineering at Katalyse AI, Nov 2024 - Dec 2025 · 1 yr 2 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Head Of Development and Support at foreva, Apr 2020 - Oct 2024 · 4 yrs 7 mos, Directed global engineering, product development, and customer success engineering for SaaS-based community management platforms. Scaled engineering team from 1 → 15 distributed engineers, embedding Agile/Scrum, with attrition kept below 8%. Launched Virtual Community Management SaaS platform, adopted by 25 enterprise clients and driving $3M ARR. Implemented CI/CD automation, enabling daily deployments instead of biweekly releases. Strengthened customer engineering, improving client retention by 20% and reducing incident response times by 60%.

Co-Founder at Nowa Labs, Oct 2017 - Mar 2020 · 2 yrs 6 mos, Bangalore, Directed technology strategy, product architecture, and global stakeholder management for healthcare and enterprise SaaS platforms. Built healthcare MVP from scratch, achieving product-market validation with 5 hospital clients. Bridged technical execution with business priorities, ensuring predictable releases and stakeholder alignment.

Director at Saaragh Technologies, Nov 2016 - Oct 2017 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Managed $1M annual revenue portfolio while leading a 25-member engineering team, improving delivery by 30%. Partnered with global stakeholders to align engineering execution with business strategy. Improved delivery timelines by 30% through process optimization and engineering best practices.

Education

B.E., Computer Science and Engineering, Visvesvaraya Technological University

MESKK

Public links

github: https://github.com/saranp