Building Vexio: A Year in the Trenches

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It’s been nearly a year since I embarked on the chaotic, exhausting, yet exhilarating journey of building my first startup.

A lot has happened.

Vexio began as a solo effort—just me—driven by vision and determination. Over time, it grew into an intense collaboration with a small team of five. Today, we’re still lean but significantly tougher, sharper, and battle-hardened by reality.

The Name⌗

I named the startup “Vexio” because my ventures typically center around input-output (IO) systems. I wanted IO embedded in the name—something fluid and easy to use. Initially, I considered “Flexio,” but since it was unavailable, adding a “V” gave it a sharper edge. Five letters, easy to say, memorable. It just made sense.

What we ended up building, however, was not what I had first imagined.

The Vision⌗

Key Insight:

Commerce, fundamentally, is rooted in conversations. The research, bargaining, and understanding that happen before a purchase in in-person shopping can be replicated—and even enhanced—through AI-powered dialogue that is exponentially faster and more accessible.

In 2024, I internalized Kunal Shah’s Delta 4 theory: to matter, you must improve life so significantly that people can’t ignore the change. With ChatGPT reaching 500 million weekly active users by 2025, customer behavior has clearly shifted towards conversational interfaces.

The theory still holds, yet the terrain remains unforgiving.

Transformer models have reshaped computation. Machines have moved beyond organizing data to creating content, synthesizing context, crafting interfaces, and generating precise answers in milliseconds. They now mimic the nuanced human interactions of traditional commerce.

The Journey⌗

Transitions in startups are rarely linear. Startups never follow a straight path—they meander, carve through obstacles, flood, and then surge forward again.

We ran countless experiments:

• Product explorations
• Dead-end flows
• Half-built systems

We deliberately discarded some ideas, while others collapsed under their own weight. And yet, piece by piece, we kept chiseling.

The Reality⌗

We are building an agent layer that helps users buy without friction, without noise, and without dozens of open tabs. The image below shows how the product auto-finds the best options and helps users purchase them.

On paper, it sounds straightforward. In practice, it has been a blend of turbulence, chaos, and incremental breakthroughs. A single UI change sometimes took 20 iterations; a week’s work was scrapped because it wasn’t good enough. We missed targets some weeks and moved faster than I thought possible in others.

Silence bred doubt, yet moments of serendipity opened new avenues. Serendipity and grind worked hand in hand.

Building the Team⌗

The product’s complexity demanded exceptional talent. We hired backend and frontend engineers, plus design and UX interns throughout this journey. The right hires have transformed our product—together, we’ve designed over 500 web and mobile screens, mapped 30+ user flows, and architected 200+ robust APIs. The wrong fits cost us time and momentum.

One of our greatest challenges has been finding individuals who deeply understand both the technical complexity and the overarching vision. Some candidates looked perfect on paper but couldn’t execute. Others showed promise, then vanished mid-project. The hardest lesson: technical skills are teachable, but alignment with vision and work ethic cannot be taught. Those come from one’s upbringing and environment.

Massive Personal Learning⌗

Most people are shaped by childhood and environment. Credentials and institutions serve merely as badges—true expertise emerges from hands-on experiences in the trenches.

Micro-Viral Moments⌗

This year, two tweets unexpectedly gained traction and amplified our vision, validating our work in the broader tech community:

Nights & Weekends (Jun 23, 2024)
building @vexio_in at @_buildspace n&w s5 🚀 — 17.7K views

Kunal Shah Amplification (May 14, 2024)
Who’s building cool AI applications in India? — 555K impressions
Shreshth Arora’s response — 25K views

These moments brought visibility, encouragement, and a sense of momentum to our journey.

Against the Tide⌗

While most people chased stable jobs and steady paychecks, I chose to build something from scratch. I pitched Vexio to investors and heard “No” again and again. Each rejection stung, yet sharpened our resolve. Persistence became my most reliable tool.

Behind the scenes, the reality was messier than any polished pitch deck could convey:

• A codebase in constant need of surgery
• Product bugs on repeat
• Team churn—people joining, dropping off mid-build
• Hiring nightmares—finding the right people, losing the good ones, getting ghosted by the rest
• Burning the midnight oil to fix bugs and drafting docs at dawn

Every minor victory demanded sacrifices—sleep, health, and at times, sanity itself. All of it was bootstrapped and pushed forward by sheer will and caffeine. It wasn’t glamorous. It was chaotic. But it was authentically mine. And through that chaos, I held onto a dream: to build a company of substance and scale that rewrites how commerce works at the interface layer.

What kept me going was my parents’ unwavering support. When everyone around you says “No,” even one silent “Yes” can change everything.

The Challenge⌗

Time has been our fiercest adversary. I’ve spent days coding, nights writing docs, and weekends pitching. I’ve fixed server errors at 4 AM from mountain lodges and coffee shops in Bangalore. Sometimes I wondered why I was doing it. Yet, momentum itself became purpose.

The Present⌗

Today, Vexio is not just a product—it’s an engine. An engine grounded in the belief that commerce can be radically simpler and exponentially faster. An engine that knows AI is not a feature—it’s the new foundation of digital experience.

It’s uncertain if the world is ready or if we’ll succeed—but the only viable path is forward. So we build: one line of code, one pixel, one decision at a time.

May the web reward our perseverance.

Shreshth, 29 April 2025

You can find me on X or LinkedIn

P. S. The demo build is live at dev.vexio.in