Back to one.
Fifteen years ago, I started with a simple principle: agency. It's why I named the studio Ajency.in. I began as a solo product consultant, moved to Goa, worked closely with founders I believed in, and built a studio around that idea.
The studio: a Goa-based software development and UI/UX design company, founded in 2012. We did product engineering, interface design, and web & ecommerce work — mostly for startups, including teams backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global, and Google Capital.
As the team grew to 50, some of that agency got lost. We always joked we were “buzzword compliant.” Funnily enough, agency itself has now become a buzzword — thanks to AI agents.
The acquisition
After the 2022 acquisition, I spent three years at Turtlemint, a fintech that recently IPO'd. Turtlemint is primarily an insurance distribution business; I was product lead for new verticals — mutual funds and lending — and, horizontally, product lead for data, automation, and AI across the company. Then I stepped out of full-time work entirely.
Turtlemint had been a client since 2021. After a couple of years working together, they offered to acquire the studio — an acqui-hire, for the team and the talent. They made sure I had no good reason to say no. :)
What I didn't expect was how much that step would give back. Two decades of payroll, deadlines, and stakeholder management had quietly drained something I only later had a name for: cognitive space. Once it returned, I started following curiosity again — going deep on things that interested me, dropping the ones that didn't, without needing every interest to justify itself.
Now
One of those itches was building things again.
I got AI-pilled, spent weeks inside Claude Code, and took an automation project from discovery to delivery for an automobile dealer. Solo. Turns out I love working solo — building, not managing and delegating like the last 20 years.
So Ajency.in 2.0 isn't a comeback. It's what the space made room for. More of the same, and yet very different. Slower. Calmer. Curiosity-led — I take on work I genuinely want to think about. More time building, less time managing.
a·jen·cy | ˈeɪdʒənsi | noun
The capacity to act independently, and to make one’s own choices.
in every sense —
Origin a misspelling, kept on purpose — fifteen years and counting.
I've done this before — for early-stage startups, a publicly listed enterprise, and most stages in between. If it overlaps with what you're working through, I'm glad to share what I learned.
I take these calls because I genuinely enjoy them — comparing notes with founders is how I keep learning, and the best conversations usually drift into motorcycles or cocktails anyway.