3 Months In: An Honest Update on Building BrainSumo
Where We Actually Are Right Now
We could write a slicker post than this one. We're not going to. BrainSumo is early — 13 registered users, one live challenge on the platform, and a founder (me) doing outreach, product, and support all at once. If you're evaluating whether to post a challenge or sign up as a solver, you deserve the real picture, not a highlight reel.
Why We Built This
MindSumo — the platform millions of students used to solve real business challenges for prize money — shut down. It served the US market well for over a decade, but Indian solvers were mostly an afterthought: prizes came via slow, expensive international wires, and very few challenges were relevant to Indian companies or Indian problems.
BrainSumo exists to fix that specific gap: business challenges that make sense for Indian companies, with prize money that lands in an Indian bank account via UPI, without the currency-conversion tax.
What's Live Today
Right now there's one active challenge on the platform — a hardware/tech challenge about improving battery life for a portable cooler designed for tier-2 and tier-3 Indian households dealing with long power cuts. It's a real brief from a real company, with a real prize pool. We're not going to inflate that into "dozens of challenges" — there's one, and we'd rather you know that than assume otherwise.
We currently have 13 registered users on the platform — solvers and companies combined. That's a small number and we're not pretending it isn't. Every one of them is a real signup, not a purchased list or a bot.
What We're Doing About It
No ad budget. Zero. Growth right now is entirely: (1) direct outreach to Indian startups and SMEs who might have a problem worth crowdsourcing, and (2) writing honestly about what we're building, like this post. This week alone we reached out to a batch of Indian startups pitching challenge ideas specific to their business — some of those conversations may turn into live challenges, some won't, and we'll only claim the ones that actually go live.
We think this is the right way to build a marketplace that depends on trust on both sides — companies trusting that solvers are real and engaged, solvers trusting that prize money is real and will get paid. Fake traction now would just mean a harder conversation later.
What's Next
Our near-term goals are unglamorous and specific: get the first challenge through to completion with real winners paid out, get a handful more companies to post challenges, and keep growing the solver base one honest signup at a time. When we have a real completed challenge with a real winner, we'll publish that case study — problem, approach, outcome, prize paid — because that's the best proof of the model working, better than anything we could write today.
If you're a company sitting on a problem that could use fresh eyes, or a solver who wants to work on a real business brief for real money, the door's open. We're small, we're honest about it, and we're building in public from here.