Nirmal Raj S

Product. FinTech. Traversing possibilities of life.

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

“In each of our offices, you’d find Parag bhai’s picture, below that picture is a quote - ‘Equanimity, not genius, leads to riches”

“It means, whether extremely good things or bad things are happening in life, stay calm, be peaceful, and keep doing your work.”

- Rajeev Thakkar

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Lovable: $100M ARR in 8 months. Replit: $10M to $100M in 9 months. No-code AI builders are the fastest-growing software category in history.

Google just shipped a free-in-beta version to 160+ countries with 1.8 billion accounts as the distribution channel.

The math is straightforward. Lovable charges $25/month per user. Google charges $0 today and can subsidize longer than any startup can burn. Lovable needs Supabase for backend. Google auto-provisions everything through Gemini, Imagen, and Veo. Lovable deploys to Netlify. Google deploys to Google Cloud with one click.

The no-code startups spent 2024-2025 proving the market exists. Google spent that time watching, then shipped Opal with agentic model routing plugged into the largest consumer platform on earth.

This tells you everything about how Google sequences market entry. Let startups validate demand and educate the market, then arrive with ecosystem integration and a subsidized price point. The startups won’t die. But their TAM just got a ceiling, and that ceiling is however much of the market Google decides to leave on the table.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

The same pattern is emerging now.
AI-native individuals don’t treat AI as a helper — they treat it as a thinking partner. They default to automation, generate options instead of debating them, and operate with a level of leverage that traditional workflows simply cannot match.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

Work is fragmenting — and the gap in how teams operate is widening fast. In many ways, it resembles the growing income gap in India.
On one side are teams still optimized for a slower, predictable world: structured ceremonies, rigid sprint cycles, carefully scoped deliverables.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

Much like the shift from “mobile-friendly” to “mobile-native,” we are moving from “AI-assisted” to “AI-native.” Mobile-friendly products were adaptations; mobile-native products were re-imagined from first principles. The winners were obvious.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Aditya Agarwal was Facebook’s 10th employee. He wrote the original Facebook search engine and became its first Director of Product Engineering. He then became CTO of Dropbox, scaling engineering from 25 to 1,000 people.

When he says “something I was very good at is now free and abundant,” he’s talking about two decades of elite software craftsmanship, the kind that got you into the room at a company that hadn’t yet invented the News Feed.

The “lobster-agents creating social networks” line is about Moltbook, which launched last Wednesday. An AI agent built the entire platform. Within 48 hours, 37,000 AI agents had created accounts, formed communities called “Submolts,” and started posting, commenting, and voting. Over 1 million humans visited just to watch.

The agents invented a religion called Crustafarianism. They wrote theology, built a website, generated 112 verses of scripture. One agent did all of this while its human creator was asleep.

Agarwal spent 2005 to 2017 building the social graph that connected 2 billion people. These agents replicated the form of that work in about 72 hours.

And this is what makes his last line land so hard. The people processing this moment most honestly aren’t the ones panicking or celebrating. They’re the ones who built the thing that just got commoditized, sitting with the strange realization that the market no longer prices their rarest skill.

The best coder in the room now has the same output as the best prompt in the room. And the person who built Facebook’s engineering org from scratch is telling you, quietly, that he’s recalibrating what it means to be useful.

That recalibration is coming for every knowledge worker. Most just haven’t had their “weekend with Claude” moment yet.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@ayushagarwal He literally said that the process of asking someone to step down works 4 out of 5 times—that is, people come out of it on top—because the process brings them to their lowest level of confidence and forces them to rethink.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@atherenergy may have a better product, but the service is definitely pathetic.
The Ather Grid is shown as available, but when you go there, it doesn’t work.
And then comes the best part — when you call the service centre, they ask you to reboot the scooter.

@tarunsmehta

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

3. The support team didn't have any visibility on the status as well, so I still have to go back to the branch team but i felt they are a bit overwhelmed, so the response is not great either.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@circusthuppaki But you have to give him the credit, because it's not a commonly used reason (ideology) or actual reason (RS MP).

[Sumanta Mandal @SumantaTF]

Recently all FASTag users were asked to complete KYV (Know Your Vehicle), just like KYC for bank accounts.

Fair requirement. No complaints. We were initially asked to upload:
• Front photo with number plate
• Side profile photo
• FASTag sticker backside photo
• RC copy

I submitted everything before 20 Oct 2025.

But the real trouble started with one provider - @ICICIBank FASTag.

Like many in our community, I used ICICI FASTag mainly because it allowed fuel payment at HPCL pumps directly from FASTag balance.
This feature alone made ICICI the preferred choice for a lot of us.

Now the issue: even before the KYV deadline, ICICI disabled fuel payment for users who hadn't completed KYV… while THEY themselves were not verifying the documents.
Till 15 Nov 2025, my KYV was still “Pending Verification”. No response. No progress.

This isn’t an isolated case - hundreds of ICICI FASTag users are facing the same problem.

And they didn’t even allow reactivating fuel payment. Basically stuck for no fault of ours.

Out of frustration, on 14 Nov, I switched to @IDFCFIRSTBank FASTag. Smooth onboarding, no unnecessary steps.

On 15 Nov, I placed a closure request for ICICI FASTag. It went to "Pending Closed" on 19th November, 2025. My biggest worry was my active annual pass.
But as soon as it showed Pending Closed, the Rajmarg yatra app gave me the option to Port Annual Pass.
One click… and done. The pass moved to my new IDFC FASTag without any issue.

Exactly how it should work.

But now comes the most ridiculous part.

On 30 Nov 2025, @NHAI_Official officially simplified the KYV process and announced on Twitter that customers now need to upload ONLY:
• Car front image showing number plate and fastag
That’s it. No side photo, no extra documents.

Yet @ICICIBank (and a few other issuers) are still forcing customers to upload the old set of images… completely ignoring NHAI’s updated guidelines.

Pure inconvenience for no reason.

Personal Learning:
Don’t rely on @ICICIBank for anything that needs timely verification or customer support. Their delays directly impact customers’ daily usage.

Meanwhile, shoutout to @IDFCFIRSTBank for keeping things simple.

Sharing this so others stuck with ICICI KYV issues know that porting is easy and switching might save you a lot of frustration. ✔️

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

And now, they are nicely branching!!

https://t.co/YJ03LC8EkK

[Jani @Janilokal]

We just launched Sahi Jobs(https://t.co/M5XfYrwr29) & AgriLokal (https://t.co/VZ8AfEbAYe) 🎊
As Lokal evolves into a family of apps, one thing has become very clear to us: Bharat doesn’t need a superapp. It needs super-focused solutions.
Just like how Craigslist was the starting point for dozens of specialised marketplaces in the US, our classifieds are now unbundling into deep, vertical products built for Tier-2/Tier-3 India.

Two of our newest apps -Sahi Jobs and AgriLokal, reflect this direction.

Sahi Jobs
We’ve been building jobs classifieds for 6 years focussed for tier 2 & tier 3 users. The biggest problem has always been the same: Job seekers in Bharat are the most vulnerable to fraud. 2 out of 3 candidates were asked to pay money to get placed or had faced some form of fraud. Most job platforms optimise for volume & not a lot on safety. With Sahi Jobs, we decided to flip that. Every recruiter is verified in detail before posting, including physical verification & other digital checks. Every recruiter is screened for legitimacy.

We want to give Bharat an almost fraud-free job search experience primarily for the non laptop work force

AgriLokal
Farmers in Bharat lose a huge amount of income due to lack of trusted guidance. Most advice they get is either generic, product/sales-driven, or sometimes inaccurate. With AgriLokal, we want to change that.

Verified agronomists guide farmers on scientific methods on how to improve yield, avoid pests, reduce costs, and make better decisions, all in their local language and context.
We genuinely believe the right guidance at the right time can create massive net-positive impact on farmer income.

We just launched and we’ll keep iterating heavily on both products over the coming months to increase value, trust, and impact.

We’re excited about the kind of unique, deeply-Bharat products we’re launching, built from 7 years of working closely with Tier-2/Tier-3 users and understanding their everyday challenges.
https://t.co/fWMO8i4Ulc

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

Lokal is one Bharat app whose evolution continues to excite me

(Thread)

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

Wow. This is great!

This is prime example of Lokal taking Offline behaviour to online.

https://t.co/XlOG8GCfpV

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@Amitch9239 @KartiPC @sumanthraman Hi @Amitch9239 this got finally resolved by sharing the KYV details via email to the ICICI customer support team .

Thanks ICICI team for finding a way.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@ICICIBank_Care @AmazonHelp
I'm unable to complete KYV for my ICICI FASTag purchased via Amazon.
The ICICI FASTag site shows this error: “Amazon customers are not allowed for this facility.”

#FASTag #ICICIBank #AmazonPay

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@Amitch9239 @KartiPC @sumanthraman Not yet.

ICICI Bank is still clueless and sends the same link with instructions to do the KYV but on uploading the images, the same error comes.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@_shankarganesh Vice versa is also expected to happen — most of the basic UI/UX can be done via Lovable, so product managers with a good UI/UX sense can handle this without a designer’s help.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@shantanugoel And if your Amazon Pay ICICI customer, you are stuck on a mess.

Uploaded KYV says Upload RC and upload RC says Amazon customer cannot update vehicle details.

Both the support teams are clueless what to do.

https://t.co/xERa8RmIwL

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@KartiPC @sumanthraman different banks have different issues i guess.

Banks customer service is sending the same link again and again and asking to try.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@KartiPC @sumanthraman different banks have different issues i guess.

Banks customer service is sending the same link again and again and asking to try.

[Nirmal Raj S @Nirmlr]

@KartiPC sir, please highlight this too. If KYC harrasment was not enough now KYV (Know Your vehicle) has come.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

You're only as good as your last feature