Tanya Mehra
Part 1: Swipe Left on Sanity
Mehul Mehta was the kind of man who walked into cafés with the confidence of a founder but paid for coffee with borrowed Paytm credit. On the second Tuesday of February, as the Koramangala sun turned everyone into sweating overachievers, Mehul stood outside BeanBag Labs, a co-working space that smelled like ambition and stale sandwiches. He adjusted his Zara-but-says-Gucci blazer, turned to his reflection in a glass door, and whispered, “Today, destiny gets an upgrade.”
Inside, Tara Jacob sat hunched over her laptop, surrounded by four open coffee cups and a fifth that was technically a plant. Her screen blinked red—an error in the code she’d stopped believing in three nights ago. She hadn’t slept. Not because she was working hard, but because she had run out of will to face anything resembling a bug report.
“Good morning, co-founder!” Mehul declared, dramatically throwing his arms wide like some caffeinated Moses parting a sea of broke engineers. Tara didn’t look up.
“Don’t call me that,” she muttered. “We don’t have a startup. We don’t have a product. We don’t even have a working Google Doc.”
“But we have vision,” Mehul grinned, unzipping his laptop bag that held only a Bluetooth speaker, three motivational books, and one perfectly ironed pitch deck.
Just then, Akash walked in, wearing a black kurta, mismatched Crocs, and an expression that suggested he was either deeply philosophical or badly hungover. “I dreamt of a goat whispering financial advice,” he said solemnly, dropping into a bean bag.
Tara looked at him. “Was the goat also your therapist?”
“No,” Akash said, “it was my inner child.”
Mehul clapped his hands. “Excellent. Everyone’s here. Time for our daily stand-up. Tara, how’s the FeelCast backend?”
Tara raised one middle finger.
“I assume that means it’s going great,” Mehul nodded. “Akash, how’s the blog for heartbreak survivors coming?”
“I wrote a poem about rejection using only semicolons,” Akash said. “It’s avant-garde.”
“Perfect,” Mehul said. “We’ll post it during peak engagement hours. Our brand voice is vulnerable yet unhinged.”
Tara sighed. “Can someone explain to me, again, what this startup is even about?”
Mehul stood tall. “FeelCast. The world’s first AI-powered emotional weather app. It predicts your next heartbreak based on your Instagram captions, Spotify playlists, and texting patterns. We tell you when your love life is about to crash—and give you time to install emotional airbags.”
“So,” Tara deadpanned, “a glorified horoscope for situationships?”
“Yes,” Mehul said proudly. “But techy. And sadder.”
Akash looked inspired. “What if we integrate with Uber and warn people not to go to their ex’s house?”
“That’s… actually decent,” Tara admitted.
“But how will it work?” she asked. “We don’t have any data. We don’t have machine learning. We don’t have anything but a fake landing page and Mehul’s overconfidence.”
“Correction,” Mehul said, pointing at his blazer. “We have brand presence.”
Suddenly, the door creaked open and in walked Chinnu Aunty—their landlady, accountant, and reluctant investor. She carried a steel dabba and a stare sharp enough to cut through code.
“Where is my update?” she barked. “And why did you tell the newspaper that I’m an angel investor?”
Mehul stood up, hands folded. “Aunty, you’re more than an angel. You’re a whole startup ecosystem.”
She narrowed her eyes. “And what is this FeelCash?”
“FeelCast, Aunty.”
“Feels like nonsense,” she grumbled, slamming the dabba on the table. “Eat first. Fail later.”
While the three dug into lemon rice and guilt, Mehul opened his laptop and clicked on the FeelCast homepage: a sleek black site with purple gradients, fake app screenshots, and a tagline that read, “Don’t just feel. Forecast.” Below it, a giant red button said: Try the beta now.
Of course, the button led nowhere. But Mehul had embedded a tracking link. Last night, 342 people had clicked it after he posted a fake testimonial from a fictional user named “@sadgirl1998” who claimed the app saved her from texting her ex at 2 a.m.
“We have traffic,” Mehul beamed.
Tara raised an eyebrow. “We don’t have a product.”
“But we have buzz.”
“And what happens when the buzz wants a demo?”
Mehul paused, then smiled the kind of smile only pathological optimists and con artists share. “We improvise.”
That afternoon, they received an email from a journalist at Startup Chai, an Instagram blog that covered early-stage nonsense with suspicious enthusiasm. The journalist, one Rhea Gulati, wanted to do a profile piece on “the heartbreak tech trio taking over Bangalore.”
“I don’t want to be in this circus,” Tara declared.
“But you are the circus,” Akash whispered.
Mehul clapped. “This is it! We fake the demo, use fake screenshots, tell a fake origin story, and maybe—just maybe—someone real gives us money.”
Tara looked at the ceiling. “I should’ve become a bartender in Goa.”
Akash closed his eyes. “We’re not a startup. We’re a breakup waiting to happen.”
The next day, Rhea walked in wearing oversized sunglasses, carried two phones, and smelled like content. “So,” she smiled, “how does FeelCast feel?”
Mehul launched into his pitch. Tara showed her terminal with random code scrolling (none of it real), while Akash served her ginger chai with a quote on the cup: Pain is temporary. Screenshots are forever.
After thirty minutes, Rhea was nodding and typing furiously. “This is gold,” she whispered. “You guys are like the Tinder of trauma.”
As she left, Mehul whispered, “We’re gonna be famous.”
Tara stared at the blinking cursor on her screen. “Or sued.”
That night, their story went viral.
“This Bangalore startup claims it can predict your next breakup.”
The post had 18,000 likes and counting.
Mehul danced on the beanbag. “We’re in the ecosystem now!”
Akash sat in the corner, petting a stray cat that had wandered in. “The goat was right.”
Tara muttered, “This startup is going to be the death of me.”
Somewhere in the shadows, Chinnu Aunty lit an incense stick and whispered to her gods, “Protect my deposit.”
Part 2: Pitch Please!
When you go viral for the wrong reasons, the universe offers you two options: panic, or monetize. Mehul chose the third—panic, then monetize. At precisely 9:07 AM the morning after their accidental media stardom, he burst into the BeanBag Labs common area wearing his “pitch mode” T-shirt, which had a lightbulb on it and the words “Innovation Starts With Insomnia.”
“We have inbound interest!” he yelled, holding up his phone like Moses revealing a stone tablet. “I repeat, inbound interest!”
Tara, already three coffees deep and debugging what she now suspected was ghost code, barely looked up. “Is it an investor or a bot?”
Mehul grinned. “Neither. It’s something even rarer—a man named Piyush from Sambar Capital who wants to hear our pitch. In person. Today. At 5 p.m.”
Akash blinked slowly, emerging from behind a stack of poetry books. “Sambar Capital? I once used their office Wi-Fi while pretending to be a startup mentor.”
“Same guy,” Mehul beamed. “Piyush Malhotra. Portfolio includes a tiffin delivery drone service, a kombucha-based currency startup, and a B2B platform that connects B2B platforms.”
“I don’t think that last one exists,” Tara muttered.
“It doesn’t,” Mehul said proudly. “But it raised three crores.”
Tara stared at him. “Mehul. We don’t have a working prototype.”
Mehul sat down, eyes wide with delusion. “We don’t need a product. We need a narrative. Investors invest in dreams. All we need is confidence, jargon, and at least one graph that looks exponential.”
Akash, still in last night’s kurta, leaned back. “We could add some Greek letters to our pitch. VC folks love anything with sigma in it.”
Tara rubbed her forehead. “So we’re just going to lie?”
“No!” Mehul said. “We’re going to manifest.”
By 11 a.m., the team gathered for an emergency pitch workshop titled ‘Pitch Please!’ led by Mehul, which mostly involved him pacing dramatically and using phrases like “consumer-facing empathy interface” and “machine-learned heartbreak mapping.”
He drew a triangle on the whiteboard.
“This,” he said, “is the FeelCast Love Loss Lifecycle.”
Tara squinted. “That’s just a triangle.”
“It’s data-shaped emotion,” Mehul replied. “Each point represents a stage: ‘Hope,’ ‘Ghosted,’ and ‘Closure as a Service.’”
Akash raised his hand. “Can we wear turtlenecks to the pitch? Like Steve Jobs, but emotionally unavailable.”
“No,” Tara said. “We need to look semi-professional, not like tech cult leaders.”
By noon, Chinnu Aunty barged in. “You three lied to that journalist,” she said, waving her phone. “This article says your app healed over 12,000 hearts. You can’t even fix the leaky faucet.”
Mehul clasped his hands. “Aunty, trust the vision. Also, do you have any of that rasam from yesterday?”
She rolled her eyes. “If this investor runs away, you’re paying next month’s rent in dishwashing.”
Tara sighed. “Honestly, not the worst offer I’ve heard today.”
By 3 p.m., the pitch deck was semi-ready. It had 19 slides, 3 of which were just different angles of Mehul holding a coffee mug and looking pensive. Tara added a diagram that looked techy but was actually a flowchart for ordering biryani. Akash contributed a slide titled “The Emotional Economy: An Existential Framework.” No one knew what it meant, but it had a lot of arrows.
By 4:30 p.m., nerves were high. Mehul paced like a TED Talk addict. Tara dry-swallowed a Parle-G. Akash did breathing exercises that involved chanting “VC is just ego with a cheque.”
At 4:59, Piyush Malhotra walked in—early 40s, sunglasses indoors, chewing paan masala with the calm of a man who once funded an app called Rent-a-Dog. He looked around at the crumbling beanbags and exposed wiring and said, “Nice… bootstrap vibes.”
Mehul sprang up. “Sir, welcome to the FeelCast revolution.”
Piyush nodded, chewing. “Show me what you got.”
Mehul launched into the pitch, clicking through slides with dramatic flair. “At FeelCast, we believe heartbreak is the final frontier of tech disruption. Our app uses machine learning to predict romantic collapse before it occurs. Think of us as emotional early warning systems.”
Piyush raised an eyebrow. “What data do you use?”
“We scrape public digital behavior—captions, emojis, Spotify playlists, rate of typing versus deleting, and text message sentiment patterns. Also, if someone changes their Netflix password, that’s a red flag.”
Tara nodded solemnly. “Our model currently has 74% accuracy for predicting breakups within a 10-day window.”
Akash added, “It’s higher for couples who post too much.”
Piyush chewed slowly. “Any users?”
“Over 40,000 people have interacted with our landing page,” Mehul said.
Tara whispered, “Interacted = clicked on a meme.”
Piyush leaned back. “What’s the monetization?”
Mehul lit up. “Freemium model. Basic heartbreak forecasts are free. Premium users get pre-breakup therapy prompts, curated sad playlists, and a feature called ‘Text Delay’—it pauses your drunk texts by 45 seconds to let your dignity catch up.”
There was silence.
Piyush nodded. “Interesting.”
“Also,” Mehul said desperately, “Chinnu Aunty believes in us.”
Piyush looked at her. “You the angel investor?”
Chinnu Aunty, who had been listening from the corner with a spoon in hand, stood tall. “I’m their only investor. In cash, food, and emotional damage.”
Piyush chuckled. “I like her.”
He stood up, adjusting his sunglasses. “Look. It’s nonsense. But it’s funny nonsense. People will download it just to laugh. That’s better than 90% of startups I meet.”
Mehul blinked. “So… you’re in?”
“No,” Piyush said. “But I want to see a prototype in two weeks. Make it barely work. Show me traction. I’ll think about it.”
And just like that, he was gone.
The three stood frozen. Tara was the first to speak. “He said yes to a maybe.”
Mehul screamed. “THIS IS A SOFT COMMITMENT!”
Akash smiled. “This startup might be fake, but this serotonin is real.”
Chinnu Aunty walked up to them and smacked the back of Mehul’s head. “Now make that app. Or I’m feeding you only upma.”
As the sun set over Bangalore, the trio sat silently in their beanbags, staring at the wall, wondering how to build an app in two weeks with no money, no plan, and no idea how to start.
But hey.
They had a triangle.
Part 3: Coffee, Code & Crashing Dreams
At 8:04 AM, Tara Jacob had a choice to make: wash her hair or finish the API. She chose neither. Instead, she stared blankly at the terminal window on her laptop, sipping burnt coffee that tasted like betrayal. Around her, BeanBag Labs buzzed with early-stage energy—freshly printed résumés, pitch decks with too many gradients, and one guy named Mohit loudly arguing with his own whiteboard.
Inside their corner cubicle—an area held together by willpower and three broken extension cords—Mehul was doing his daily warm-up ritual: five power poses, one deep breath, and seven self-affirmations that included the phrase “unicorn vibes.”
“I’ve cracked it!” he declared.
Tara didn’t even flinch. “Cracked what? The secret to your delusion?”
Mehul spun his laptop around. On the screen was a rough wireframe of the FeelCast app.
“This,” he said, “is our MVP. Minimum Viable Product. It does one thing: analyzes your recent texts and tells you if you’re about to be dumped.”
Tara squinted. “Mehul, this just shows a red heart with a sad face.”
“Exactly! Simple. Bold. Universal.”
Tara buried her head in her hands. “It’s a PNG file, Mehul. This isn’t a product—it’s clipart.”
Akash shuffled in, wrapped in a shawl like a retired philosopher, holding a half-eaten samosa and a spiral notebook with doodles of broken hearts and circuit diagrams. “I had a vision last night,” he said. “The app crashed in a dream and caused an emotional apocalypse. Just putting that out there.”
“We don’t have time for dreams,” Mehul snapped. “We have thirteen days to turn a meme into a machine.”
Tara sighed. “Do you even know how to build anything?”
“No,” Mehul replied proudly. “But I know how to Google.”
And so, Operation “Actually Make This Thing” began.
Tara took command of the backend, which meant long hours staring at Python scripts while internally screaming. Mehul was in charge of product design, which translated to “complaining about fonts.” Akash declared himself “Chief Vibe Curator” and started creating fake testimonials like ‘FeelCast saved me from texting my ex at 1:43 AM after three mojitos. – Shalini, 23’.
They tried to function like a real team. They held stand-up meetings (where nobody stood), used Trello (which Mehul renamed “Tragello”), and drank so much coffee that the vending machine began blinking in Morse code.
One evening, Chinnu Aunty walked in, eyebrows raised. “Why does your app now show random breakup quotes in Sanskrit?”
Mehul pointed at Akash. “Ask the philosopher.”
Akash smiled. “Breakups are timeless. So is Sanskrit.”
Tara threw a stress ball at his head.
By day six, the cracks began to show.
The app crashed every third use.
The sentiment analysis tagged “I miss you” as “positive” and “pending doom.”
The beta testers were mostly bots and one very enthusiastic dentist who thought FeelCast was a tooth pain tracking tool.
Mehul tried to motivate the team with Post-it notes that read “Pain is Temporary, Startups Are Forever” and “Elon Would Be Proud.” Tara threw most of them in the trash. Akash used one as a bookmark for a Paulo Coelho novel.
On day seven, disaster struck.
Mehul had scheduled a small demo party for five of their early “users” (mostly friends bribed with samosas). Right before the event, the entire app broke down—again.
Tara slammed her laptop shut. “I’m done. This codebase is cursed. I haven’t slept. My cat doesn’t recognize me anymore. And the last time I laughed was during the third espresso.”
Mehul, unshaken, whispered, “Maybe the app’s supposed to be broken. Because love is broken.”
Akash clapped slowly. “That’s deep.”
Tara glared at them both. “You two are idiots.”
But they had no time to fight. The demo guests were arriving.
Among them:
– Devika, Mehul’s on-again-off-again crush who believed all apps were listening to her thoughts.
– Ronnie, Tara’s college frenemy who now ran a “wellness NFT” platform.
– Rishi, Akash’s old roommate who once invested in cryptocurrency by accident.
– And Aunty Chinnu, who had baked a cake shaped like a broken heart.
The demo was a disaster.
The app froze on launch.
Devika asked if it could detect karmic betrayal.
Ronnie tried to pitch his NFTs during the Q&A.
And Rishi—after one too many free mojitos—yelled, “You people should start a breakup-themed karaoke bar instead!”
Chinnu Aunty tried to save the day by cutting the cake. The knife got stuck in the middle.
Silence.
Tara stood up. “You know what? Maybe this whole thing is a joke. But at least we tried. Unlike half the people in this room who are busy selling spirituality in JPEG format.”
Everyone blinked.
Mehul followed. “Yes. The app might be crap. The tech might be trash. But we made it together. With samosas. And sarcasm. And that’s… beautiful.”
Akash raised his samosa. “To beautiful nonsense!”
The guests actually clapped.
Tara looked shocked. “That… worked?”
Outside, the Bangalore rain started pouring. Inside, the team looked at one another, drenched in code, chaos, and community.
Mehul turned to Tara. “You still quitting?”
She smirked. “I don’t have the energy.”
They all sat back on the beanbags, staring at the buggy app on Mehul’s laptop screen.
It didn’t work.
But it existed.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
To be continued…
Part 4: Investor? I Hardly Know Her!
By Day Nine of the “two-week prototype challenge,” Team FeelCast had collectively forgotten what daylight felt like. The blinds stayed shut. Time was measured in crash logs and chai rounds. Tara had adopted a pattern of coding for eighteen hours straight, then muttering about existential despair while staring at a rotating loading symbol. Akash was convinced the app had developed emotions. And Mehul had developed a new habit of whispering startup quotes to the mirror like morning prayers.
But this particular morning was different. Because this morning, Mehul received a calendar invite from none other than Suhana Saxena, the junior associate from Sambar Capital. Subject line: Pre-Seed Chat: Let’s Talk LoveTech 💔✨
“She added sparkle and heartbreak emojis,” Mehul said, eyes glimmering like a child who’d just seen a unicorn in HSR Layout. “That’s good, right?”
“She probably thinks we’re a dating app,” Tara grunted, sipping cold coffee with the enthusiasm of a Victorian ghost.
“She probably thinks we’re a joke,” said Akash, who had decided to fast that day in protest of “capitalism’s emotional colonization.”
“You’ve never even read Marx,” Tara snapped.
“I’ve watched two YouTube videos about him,” Akash replied. “Same thing.”
Mehul ignored them both. He was too busy prepping. “This is not just a meeting. This is an opportunity. If Suhana likes our pitch, she could unlock Piyush Malhotra’s checkbook.”
“I think she’s here to make sure you’re not completely insane,” Tara said, opening her laptop to show him the current state of the app: glitchy, moody, and prone to sending users ominous breakup messages even when they were single.
One test user had received, “It’s not you. It’s your meme history.”
Another got, “Your Spotify sadness index is rising. Buy tissues.”
Akash defended it. “But those are beautiful. It’s poetry wrapped in tech.”
Mehul clapped. “We lean in. We sell it as the first emotionally sentient breakup assistant.”
Tara rolled her eyes. “You mean a judgmental ghost in an app?”
“Exactly!” Mehul said, unfazed. “We don’t code bugs. We code attitude.”
By 4:45 p.m., Mehul had changed into his startup pitch uniform: black turtleneck, blue jeans, and sneakers that cost more than their domain registration. He slicked his hair, sprayed perfume in the air and walked through it slowly, like a Bollywood villain preparing for a TEDx talk.
“You look like Steve Jobs if he sold tears instead of tech,” Akash commented.
“Perfect,” Mehul replied. “Tara, final app status?”
“Functioning-ish,” she said. “It’ll run for five minutes if you chant a prayer and don’t press anything weird.”
“That’s enough for a demo!” Mehul grinned.
At exactly 5:02, Suhana Saxena walked in. She was dressed in business casual, carried a reusable water bottle, and had the calm, calculating aura of someone who had once survived a pitch from a guy trying to gamify breathing.
“Hi, all,” she said with a pleasant smile. “I’ve heard… interesting things.”
“Welcome!” Mehul said, with a bow that felt like a scene from a musical. “You’re about to witness the future of emotional forecasting.”
Suhana sat, opened her laptop. “Just to be clear, this isn’t a formal pitch. Piyush asked me to take a deeper look. He said, and I quote, ‘They’re either brilliant or completely unhinged. Find out which.’”
“Fair,” Tara muttered.
“So,” Suhana continued, “Tell me: Why should anyone trust an app to predict their love life?”
Mehul smiled. “Because people already do. Just not consciously. They ask friends. They read astrology. They overanalyze texts. We offer data-driven clarity in a world full of emotional confusion.”
Akash added, “We’re basically modern love shamans. With analytics.”
Tara opened the app. “Here’s how it works. The user connects their messages, playlist, and social feed. The app scans for red flags—emotional drop patterns, sudden emoji shifts, playlist melancholy—and flags an alert if there’s a likely breakup ahead.”
Suhana nodded slowly. “And… that alert is this sad heart?”
“Yes,” Mehul said. “Version 1.0 is symbolic. Future versions will be more detailed. Customized feedback. Coping playlists. Digital therapist tie-ins. Maybe even real-time don’t-text-your-ex warnings.”
“Sounds very Black Mirror,” Suhana said, unimpressed. “How do you deal with false positives?”
“Heartbreak is often a false positive,” Akash offered, mysteriously.
Tara ignored him. “Right now, we’re refining the model. But early testers—despite the bugs—are engaged. Some even said the app made them think more about their patterns. And that’s the win. We’re not predicting love. We’re reflecting behavior.”
“And your market size?” Suhana asked, eyebrows raised.
Mehul was ready. “India has over 100 million smartphone users aged 18–35. Most of them have been heartbroken, are about to be, or are actively denying it. Our initial target is the Gen Z and millennial crowd using dating apps, therapy services, and Spotify.”
Suhana tapped her laptop. “Hmm. And what’s stopping someone from copying this?”
Mehul didn’t miss a beat. “They can copy the app. But not the tone. We’re snarky but sincere. We’re breakup advice with the vibe of a stand-up comic and the soul of a softboi.”
Akash nodded solemnly. “Sad but sexy.”
There was a pause.
Suhana smiled. “Okay. That was… weirdly convincing.”
Mehul exhaled. “So… do we get a cheque?”
“No,” Suhana said. “But I’ll give you something better.”
She leaned forward.
“Build this into a Chrome extension. Not just an app. Something that reads emotional signals across platforms, even emails. Lightweight. Viral potential. Come back in a month with traction, and I’ll push it forward.”
Mehul blinked. “You want cross-platform heartbreak surveillance?”
Suhana winked. “Call it ‘emotional hygiene.’ You’ve got something, guys. Just make it a little more… dangerous.”
She stood, slung her laptop bag on one shoulder. “Also, please don’t use sad Sanskrit quotes. They’re traumatizing.”
And with that, she left.
Mehul collapsed into a beanbag. “She didn’t say no.”
Tara whispered, “She didn’t say yes either.”
Akash stood up dramatically. “We are now building a Chrome extension. I don’t know what that means. But I am ready.”
From the kitchen, Chinnu Aunty shouted, “If you lot don’t start making money soon, I’m converting your office into a tiffin centre.”
Mehul smiled.
One heartbreak at a time, they were getting somewhere.
Part 5: Viral for All the Wrong Reasons
Three days after Suhana’s “emotional hygiene” challenge, FeelCast was no longer a joke. It had become a Chrome extension. A janky, over-engineered, questionably-ethical Chrome extension—but one that technically worked. When you opened Gmail or Instagram in your browser, a small icon appeared in the corner. Hovering over it displayed a line of text like:
“His reply time has increased by 37%. Danger, heartbreak approaching.”
“She posted a selfie with a vague caption. Prepare your tissues.”
“Stop checking his Insta at 2:00 a.m., Tanya. We see you.”
Users weren’t sure if it was satire or surveillance. But they loved it.
“This is terrifying,” one tweet read. “I installed it. I cried. I shared it with five friends. 10/10.”
And just like that, FeelCast went viral—for all the wrong reasons.
Mehul woke up at 7:11 a.m. to 74 unread emails, three missed calls from unknown numbers, and a WhatsApp message from his college crush that said, “You guys built this? Damn. That’s scary… and kinda hot?”
He burst out of his room like a man possessed. “TARA. WAKE UP. WE’RE A PHENOMENON!”
Tara was already awake, sitting with her laptop, eyes red and dry as burnt toast. “The extension’s been downloaded 11,000 times in 14 hours,” she said calmly. “And someone on Reddit is claiming we’ve created an AI breakup demon.”
Akash floated in with a towel on his head and a steel glass of green juice. “Guys. I’ve achieved inner peace. Also, Buzzfeed India just posted about us.”
He opened his phone and read aloud: “‘This Indian startup wants to predict your heartbreaks before they happen. Black Mirror meets Bollywood. We’re scared. We’re obsessed.’”
Mehul looked like he might ascend. “We’re trending!”
Tara wasn’t impressed. “With great virality comes great responsibility—and potentially great lawsuits.”
“Let them sue us after Series A,” Mehul said, already pulling out his blazer. “We need to prep for press. I’m talking interviews, influencer partnerships, maybe even a TEDx Talk titled ‘Predicting Pain with Pixels.’”
At that moment, the office printer exploded with papers. A user had somehow printed out every quote FeelCast had ever generated.
Tara picked one up. “‘Love is dead. Have a sandwich.’ You wrote this?”
Akash smiled. “I believe sandwiches are a valid coping strategy.”
They barely had time to breathe when Rhea Gulati—the same journalist from Startup Chai who had first written about them—showed up again, this time with a mic, a ring light, and a YouTube channel called “Founders & Fails.”
“Okay you heartbreak hipsters,” Rhea grinned. “You made it. You broke the internet. Now let’s see if you break yourselves.”
Mehul posed. “Bring it on.”
The interview was chaos.
Rhea: “So why heartbreak?”
Mehul: “Because we believe emotional turbulence is the next frontier of monetization.”
Tara: “We wanted to build something real. And unfortunately, pain is real.”
Akash: “Also, horoscopes are a scam. So we made a new one.”
Rhea blinked. “Okay. But is this ethical? You’re tracking people’s messages, captions, and social data.”
Tara clarified, “We never store data. It’s all processed client-side. We don’t keep anything.”
Mehul added, “We just help people see what they already know but are too deep in denial to accept.”
Akash whispered, “We are the mirror. You are the ghost.”
“No one write that down,” Tara muttered.
Despite the bizarre responses, the video blew up.
1.2 million views in 36 hours.
#FeelCastWarning started trending.
A parody account began posting fake forecasts like:
“Your love life has crashed. Would you like to send a feedback report?”
Soon, influencers started tagging FeelCast in stories.
One posted, “This app told me to stop stalking my ex. So I did. For 20 minutes. Then I reinstalled it. 5 stars.”
Another created a breakup playlist titled ‘FeelCast Approved’, featuring Adele, Arijit Singh, and three versions of “Somebody That I Used to Know.”
Mehul was living the dream.
He walked around BeanBag Labs like a man on a spiritual high, shaking hands with strangers, offering advice to other founders like “Embrace chaos. Product-market fit is just emotional timing.”
Tara, meanwhile, was trying to keep the servers alive. “We’re getting DDoS’d by sad teenagers. Our extension is being cloned. And someone offered me ₹10,000 to make it tell their ex they’re the problem.”
Akash was working on a new feature: ‘Closure Generator.’ The tool would auto-generate fake closure messages based on your chat history. Sample output:
“I loved you. But I love myself more. Goodbye, Rahul.”
“We were a glitch. A good one. But still a glitch.”
Tara wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. “We are monetizing heartbreak. Do you guys even realize that?”
Mehul looked up from his pitch deck. “Tara, capitalism doesn’t care about feelings. But we do. We just want to charge ₹99 a month for them.”
At 10 p.m., Chinnu Aunty stormed in with a coconut in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
“Why is your app being blamed for four breakups and one almost-marriage?! Look!”
She slapped the paper on the table. The headline read:
“FeelCast Fever: Helpful App or Relationship Terminator?”
“We are not responsible for your bad decisions,” Mehul said, sipping his fourth cup of masala chai.
Tara added, “We literally told them it was in beta.”
Akash just bowed his head. “Sometimes the truth must break you before it sets you free.”
“ENOUGH,” Aunty yelled. “Fix your app. Apologize to the newspaper. And don’t mention marriage until you can afford your own milk.”
But the storm wasn’t over yet.
Because the next morning, they received an email from a lawyer representing someone named Priyanka Solanki.
Subject line: “Notice of Emotional Damages Caused by Your App.”
Mehul’s jaw dropped. “We’re being sued for emotional accuracy?”
Tara smirked. “Well, we always said heartbreak has consequences.”
Mehul sat down, finally speechless.
Akash, sipping his green juice, whispered, “We are the ghost.”
Part 6: HR Manual for Three People and a Dog
After the legal notice, the mood inside Flat 4B/BeanBag Labs (they were now using both names interchangeably) dropped faster than a situationship after Valentine’s Day. Tara spent the morning drafting a strongly worded disclaimer. Mehul Googled “how to apologize without accepting liability.” And Akash was on the terrace, staring into the distance while feeding Marie biscuits to a stray dog he’d named Breakup Bhaskar.
“This app ruined my wedding plans!” Mehul read aloud from the email. “‘Your forecast told me she was about to ghost me. So I ghosted her first. I want a refund.’”
He turned to Tara. “We don’t even charge for the extension!”
Tara didn’t look up. “Then refund his dignity.”
Meanwhile, Breakup Bhaskar had been unofficially adopted. Akash claimed he was the team’s “Emotional Support Mammal.” Chinnu Aunty, after some negotiation, agreed to let the dog stay under three conditions:
- No barking during investor calls.
- No licking code cables.
- And he must never poop near her rose plants.
But Bhaskar, like everything else in their startup, refused to follow rules.
By afternoon, things got weirder. A social media manager from a popular corporate dating app emailed them with a subject line that said:
“Collab? Let’s Get Heartbroken Together 💔✨”
Mehul, high on caffeine and delusion, was ready to sell the entire company for a free Tinder Gold subscription. “We’ve entered Brandable Sadness territory,” he declared. “It’s time to scale.”
Tara raised a brow. “We can’t even scale Bhaskar’s food bowl. Also, we need an HR policy. Like, immediately.”
“Why?” Mehul blinked. “There’s only three of us.”
“Exactly,” Tara said. “Three people. No boundaries. No roles. No clue who’s in charge of Bhaskar’s vaccinations. We’re a workplace disaster waiting to happen.”
Akash nodded wisely. “Also, I demand flexible nap hours and zero eye contact before 11 a.m.”
That’s how it began: the most chaotic HR manual ever drafted.
They titled it:
“FeelCast Code of Conduct (and Other Suggestions for Not Screaming)”
Clause 1: Everyone gets chai breaks. No meetings during poop emergencies (including Bhaskar’s).
Clause 2: No gaslighting your teammates unless it’s part of user research.
Clause 3: Emotional breakdowns are allowed, but only one per founder per day.
Clause 4: If you cry into your laptop, clean it afterwards.
Tara added a “No Touching the Developer Without Consent” section after Mehul tried to high-five her mid-debug.
Akash contributed a “Spiritual Leave Policy,” which included one bonus day off during retrograde and one emergency half-day for existential panic.
“We’re basically a therapy startup run by people in desperate need of therapy,” Tara muttered.
By 5 p.m., Mehul was already prepping for his latest “vision meeting,” which mostly meant him drawing Venn diagrams with words like Feelings, Data, and Monetize Me, Baby in the center.
“You know what we need?” he said suddenly, eyes sparkling. “An office dog profile for Bhaskar. Let’s make him Head of Emotional Intelligence.”
“Perfect,” Tara said dryly. “That way, someone in this team will finally have some.”
They gave Bhaskar a tiny bandana and took photos of him next to a whiteboard. His bio on the website read:
Breakup Bhaskar – Chief Emotional Officer (CEO)
Special skills: Staring at the void, barking at your ex’s name, and being the only one who understands timelines.
Things were starting to look up again. The users were still downloading the extension. The hate comments had reduced to a manageable trickle. And Chinnu Aunty had even offered to make pav bhaji for everyone—provided they promised not to crash the app during dinner.
That night, the team sat under the string lights on the rooftop with paper plates and cold thumbs-up bottles.
“You know,” Tara said between bites, “this is still the dumbest thing I’ve ever built. But I’m also weirdly… proud?”
Akash nodded. “I thought we were making fun of heartbreak. But maybe we’re just helping people laugh through it.”
Mehul raised his plate. “To chaos. To Bhaskar. To building things that might crash but still matter.”
They clinked pav bhaji-stained plates in an oddly poetic toast.
But just as peace settled over Flat 4B, the office phone rang.
Mehul answered it.
“Yes? This is Mehul Mehta, Founder of—”
He paused.
Then his eyes widened.
He turned to the others and whispered, “Guys. That was Piyush. The Piyush. He saw our Buzzfeed video.”
“And?” Tara asked, tense.
“He’s coming tomorrow,” Mehul said, stunned. “With someone from Netflix.”
Silence.
Bhaskar sneezed.
Akash dropped his spoon.
Tara blinked twice.
Then she said what they were all thinking.
“We’re going to die.”
Part 7: Fake It Till You Break It
There are three types of founders in Bangalore: the ones who know what they’re doing, the ones who pretend they know what they’re doing, and the ones who invite Netflix over before deciding what it is they’re even doing. Mehul Mehta, naturally, belonged to category three.
“Netflix is coming here,” he whispered for the seventh time that morning, pacing between two beanbags like a caffeinated panther. “Netflix. Like… actual Netflix. Not someone’s cousin working on subtitles.”
Tara didn’t even look up. “Please stop saying Netflix. You’re making Bhaskar nervous.”
Bhaskar, wearing his ‘Chief Emotional Officer’ bandana, was hiding under the table after Mehul had tried to put sunglasses on him for the third time. “We need to look premium,” Mehul had said. “If Bhaskar’s in the pitch video, he needs to give Golden Retriever founder energy.”
Akash, meanwhile, was assembling a DIY ring light using a steel sieve and a tube light. “You think they’ll let us do a docuseries? Like ‘Love, Lies, and Startups’?”
Tara snorted. “More like ‘How I Accidentally Built a Chrome Extension That Ruined Five Relationships and a Kitchen Sink.’”
They had exactly 4 hours before the arrival of Piyush Malhotra and the mysterious ‘Netflix Development Exec’, whose name was allegedly Divya, and who, according to LinkedIn, had produced both an indie movie and a documentary on waste management. Mehul wasn’t sure what their angle was—romance tech? startup failures? Indian sadness?—but he was ready to sell them whatever story they wanted.
“I need a story arc,” Mehul muttered, sketching furiously on the whiteboard. “Every docuseries has one. We need a protagonist, a crisis, and a breakthrough.”
“We’re the protagonists,” Tara said dryly. “The crisis is this meeting. The breakthrough is… well, still buffering.”
“I think we need more plants,” Akash suggested. “People trust founders with plants.”
They went full chaos-mode. Tara cleaned up the codebase just enough to make the app run for 12 minutes without crashing. Akash rearranged the furniture for “maximum authenticity.” Mehul stuck motivational quotes on the walls like “Fail Forward” and “Data is the New Heartbreak.” Bhaskar got a bath he absolutely did not consent to.
At 3:59 PM, the bell rang.
Piyush entered first, still chewing paan masala like a venture capitalist who’d seen too much. Behind him was Divya—mid-30s, sharp blazer, sharper gaze, carrying a tablet and an aura of mild judgment.
“Nice vibe,” she said, looking around. “Very… honest.”
Tara opened her mouth to apologize for the exposed wiring, but Mehul cut in with, “Welcome to FeelCast Labs. Where heartbreak meets hardware.”
Divya smiled politely.
Piyush flopped onto the beanbag and said, “So? Let’s see your mess.”
They started the pitch.
Mehul did the talking.
Tara did the clicking.
Akash did the background sighing.
The Chrome extension ran on the screen. The fake forecasts popped up. The dashboard blinked with fabricated user data (carefully curated from the “Probably Real Enough” spreadsheet Mehul had made the night before).
“We’re not just predicting breakups,” Mehul declared. “We’re reflecting emotions. This is preventive heartbreak care.”
Divya raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling people they’re going to be dumped. Isn’t that kind of… dark?”
Tara replied calmly, “It’s data-driven empathy. If a user is spiraling, it’s better they know. Better they prepare.”
Akash added, “Also, if they’re spiraling, we recommend herbal tea.”
Piyush laughed. Divya didn’t.
“What about liability?” she asked. “You caused some breakups. That’s in the media.”
“Correction,” Mehul said. “We revealed the truth of breakups that were already underway. We’re like Google Maps for the emotional potholes.”
Tara muttered under her breath, “Except sometimes Google Maps sends you into a lake.”
Piyush was clearly enjoying himself. Divya? Hard to tell. She tapped her tablet. “Look. There’s something raw here. Something human. People are reacting, engaging. Even hate is traction. I could see this becoming a short-format docu-feature.”
Mehul almost levitated.
“A what?”
“A series. Ten-minute episodes. Streaming. Funny. Sad. Real,” Divya said. “A behind-the-scenes of a startup trying to build the weirdest app in India.”
Tara looked horrified. “You want to film us while we… crash emotionally and professionally?”
Divya smiled. “Yes. But tastefully.”
Mehul whispered, “Do we get hoodies with our names on them?”
Piyush stood up. “I like it. It’s doomed, it’s brilliant, it’s a mess. Exactly the kind of thing people binge between crime shows.”
Akash was already imagining episode titles:
Episode 1: CTRL+ALT+Heartbreak
Episode 2: Ghosted by My Own Code
Episode 3: Chai, Crying, and Chrome Extensions
“Give us a week to shoot a teaser,” Divya said. “If it clicks, we greenlight. But don’t fake it too much. The chaos is the charm.”
As they left, Mehul turned to his team, trembling slightly.
“We’re going to be on Netflix.”
Tara blinked. “You realize this is not a funding round. This is a content deal.”
Akash smiled. “Content is currency now.”
Bhaskar barked once and then threw up in a corner.
Mehul raised his arms. “Team! We have one week to become lovable idiots instead of just idiots. Let’s go full founder mode.”
Tara groaned. “We need therapy.”
Akash nodded. “And matching hoodies.”
And somewhere in the madness, with wet dog pawprints on their codebase and a streamer circling above them, Team FeelCast found something dangerously close to hope.
Part 8: The Great Breakup Hackathon
In the world of startups, there are only two types of weekends: the ones where you sleep in and pretend the world isn’t falling apart, and the ones where you host a Breakup Hackathon with barely functional software, too much caffeine, and a dog that keeps stealing sandwiches.
Naturally, Team FeelCast chose the second.
The moment Netflix showed mild interest, Mehul went into full PR-overdrive. “We need a content moment,” he declared, pacing with a whiteboard marker tucked behind one ear and his phone glued to the other. “Something viral, visual, and vaguely unhinged.”
Tara looked up from her laptop, already exhausted. “We’re barely surviving user bug reports. One girl’s app told her to dump her cat.”
“It was meant for her boyfriend!” Mehul defended. “It’s the autocorrect’s fault.”
Akash, seated cross-legged in the corner with Breakup Bhaskar asleep on his feet, calmly suggested, “Let’s crowdsource pain. Make it a festival of emotional implosions. Like a heartbreak Kumbh Mela.”
Tara blinked. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but… that might actually work.”
And thus, The Great Breakup Hackathon was born.
Venue: The BeanBag Labs rooftop.
Participants: 22 brave souls and one clueless influencer.
Rules:
- Build something heartbreak-related in 12 hours.
- Crying is allowed.
- Free samosas for anyone who admits they’ve stalked an ex this week.
The RSVP list was a wild mix—disillusioned developers, sad poets, meme-makers, and even a couple of corporate types on the brink of resignation and/or romantic collapse. Someone brought a sitar. Another guy brought his therapist. No one brought a stable Wi-Fi connection.
Mehul welcomed everyone with a booming speech: “Today, we don’t just code. We feel. Welcome to the saddest hackathon of your lives!”
A guy in a hoodie yelled, “I just got ghosted on the way here!”
Applause.
Meanwhile, Tara had set up “Emotion Stations” with themes like: Denial, Anger, Text Drafting But Not Sending, and Staring at Their Profile Picture Until You Hate Yourself. Each station had sticky notes, tissues, and calming lo-fi playlists.
Akash organized “The Wall of Regret,” where participants could write their worst texting mistakes. By noon, it had confessions like:
“I replied to his ‘k’ with a 47-line essay.”
“Told her ‘ily’ on a Google Meet. She thought I was joking.”
“Sent a voice note. Immediately wished for death.”
A small group called themselves Team Left on Read and started building a plugin that detects if your ex is secretly watching your Stories with a fake account. Another group attempted a “Pet Rebound Tracker”—an app that shows how long it takes for people to adopt a dog after a breakup.
The star participant, however, was an elderly man named Mr. Bhatia, who walked in wearing a Nehru jacket and declared, “My first heartbreak was in 1978. I’ve waited 45 years to build revenge.”
He created a tool that analyzed old love letters and scored them on a “delusion index.”
Tara was so impressed, she gave him Bhaskar’s cushion to sit on.
Throughout the event, the rooftop echoed with keyboard clacking, bad poetry recitations, and random outbursts of “I KNEW SHE WAS TEXTING SOMEONE ELSE!”
Netflix had sent a camera crew to “observe.” Divya, sipping cutting chai and half-horrified, half-entertained, muttered, “Is this real life or did I walk into an indie play?”
At 5:00 p.m., the power went out.
Everyone screamed.
Tara banged the inverter. Akash offered incense. Bhaskar barked at the fuse box.
Miraculously, it came back in five minutes. The crowd applauded as if it were a tech miracle. Mehul took credit.
At 8:00 p.m., it was time for final demos.
Team Left on Read presented “StorySnitch.” It didn’t work, but their presentation included a dance break to an Arijit Singh remix.
Mr. Bhatia’s “LoveLetterAI” scanned a 1981 note and said, “Confidence level: 12%. Emotional maturity: pending.”
A duo called “He Doesn’t Deserve You, Sis Inc.” unveiled a chatbot that simply repeated: “Block him. Block him again. Block his mom.”
Tara gave that one the Audience Choice Award.
Then came FeelCast’s own presentation.
Mehul stepped forward dramatically. “Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone ghosted in-between, we present our latest feature: Closure Generator 2.0.”
He clicked.
The screen displayed: “I’m sorry I made you a playlist instead of a plan. Goodbye.”
A quiet “ooof” went through the crowd.
Another one:
“You left, but your Netflix password stayed. Thanks. But also, bye.”
Applause. Some even clutched their hearts.
Divya from Netflix turned to her cameraperson and whispered, “Okay… I think we’ve got a teaser.”
The night ended with everyone sitting on the rooftop, surrounded by fairy lights, Bhaskar snoring gently, and samosas being passed around like sacred offerings.
Tara sat beside Akash, both too tired to move.
“That was…” she started.
“Insane?” he offered.
“Effective,” she said, smiling. “I think we accidentally built a community.”
Mehul joined them, looking smug. “And that is what investors call ‘user stickiness.’”
A paper lantern floated into the night sky.
The rooftop was full of strangers who’d found something they didn’t know they were looking for.
Sadness. Humor. Connection. A weird little app with glitchy buttons and too much soul.
But most of all—each other.
Part 9: Rain, Rum, and Rooftop Revelations
In Bangalore, the monsoon doesn’t knock. It just shows up unannounced like your ex at an open mic night—dramatic, inconvenient, and oddly well-timed. So naturally, it started raining the very next day after the Breakup Hackathon, just as Team FeelCast sat on the rooftop, half hungover from adrenaline, fried snacks, and too many feelings.
Tara was wrapped in a blanket, Bhaskar on her lap, both watching droplets race each other down the skylight. Akash was attempting to boil chai in a pan that had last seen a coding tutorial. And Mehul stood dangerously close to the edge of the terrace, holding a mug and staring into the wet horizon like he was expecting a Forbes cover to appear in the clouds.
“You know what’s weird?” he said, voice unusually soft. “I don’t even care if we get funding anymore. That rooftop full of weirdos yesterday? That was real. We did something. We built a… I dunno. A space.”
Tara sipped the chai Akash handed her and winced. “You put jeera in this?”
“It’s Ayurvedic,” he replied. “Balances the startup toxins.”
“Then I need a double dose,” she muttered.
The three of them sat under the makeshift tarp they’d tied using startup T-shirts and bhindi clips. Rain fell in sheets, soaking the city and muffling all outside noise. For the first time in weeks, it was quiet.
“I used to think I’d build something revolutionary,” Tara said suddenly. “Something that changes the world, gets written about in Wired or Fast Company. But this? This dumb, buggy app that predicts heartbreak? Somehow, it means more than anything else I’ve coded.”
Akash nodded. “It’s because heartbreak is the only thing that feels the same at 19 and 39. Rich or broke. Whether you’re a philosopher or a sales intern.”
Mehul looked at them both. “I started this as a joke. Honestly. I thought we’d build something quirky, pitch it, exit, maybe get a podcast invite. But now…”
He paused.
Tara raised an eyebrow. “Now what?”
“Now I care,” he said, shocked. “Like actually care. We’ve built a product that makes people feel seen. And not in a creepy-data-collection way, but in a ‘I thought I was the only one’ way.”
Akash clapped once. “Growth arc unlocked.”
Bhaskar sneezed and rolled over.
Just then, Tara’s phone buzzed.
She picked it up, read the screen, and slowly sat up straighter. “Uhh… we’ve got a message. From Suhana. The Sambar Capital associate.”
Mehul grabbed the phone, read aloud:
“Hey! Saw the hackathon reel. Divya sent us the Netflix teaser. Team looks weird but authentic. Piyush wants to meet again. Possible funding. Let’s talk.”
Dead silence.
The only sound was the rain hitting the tin roof.
Then Mehul screamed, “WE ARE GETTING A SECOND MEETING!”
Akash nearly dropped the Ayurvedic chai. “They want to invest? Are we… investable?”
Tara looked down at Bhaskar, then at her half-functional laptop, then at her co-founders—the chaos brigade.
“We’re not ready,” she said.
Mehul looked confused. “Wait, what?”
“We’re not,” she said again, calmly. “The codebase is a mess. The product is inconsistent. We still don’t have a proper privacy policy. If they invest now, it’ll all be lipstick on a glitch.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then Akash nodded. “She’s right. We need to fix what’s inside before we sell what’s outside.”
Mehul sat back, quiet for once. The rain softened, as if listening.
Tara continued, “Let’s build a clean version. One that doesn’t just predict heartbreak but helps people heal. Journaling features. Therapist tie-ins. Maybe community forums. Something real.”
“Less judgmental ghost,” Akash added. “More gentle ghost with cookies.”
Mehul exhaled. “So… we’re not pitching for money yet?”
“We’re pitching for meaning,” Tara replied.
Mehul smiled. “Okay. But let’s still make hoodies.”
That night, they ordered pav bhaji from the roadside stall down the lane. Sat on the rooftop again, this time with fairy lights tangled in extension cords, and rewrote their roadmap. Not for investors. Not for clout.
For them.
FeelCast 2.0 would be real.
Rain poured around them. Bhaskar barked at a pigeon. Tara made a Kanban board with actual Post-its. Akash created a meditation corner with a beanbag and a playlist called “Exhale Your Ex.” Mehul wrote the tagline for their new landing page:
“FeelCast. Not just heartbreak predictions. Heartspace healing.”
They looked at each other and laughed.
They were still broke. Still buggy.
But for the first time—they weren’t faking it.
They were becoming it.
Part 10: Eviction, Eclairs, and Everything in Between
On the morning of Day Forty-Three of FeelCast, Bhaskar threw up on the pitch deck.
Literally.
Mehul stared at the laminated slide that said “Heartspace Healing for Gen Z: Our Vision for Emotional UX” now soaked in a mixture of last night’s puri bhaji and despair. “That was laminated,” he whispered, heartbroken. “We had bullet points and gradients.”
Bhaskar wagged his tail and trotted away to chew a Post-it note that read “Series A Manifesto.”
From the kitchen came a shriek. Tara burst out, flour on her face, holding a tray of broken éclairs. “The oven short-circuited mid-bake. I was going to bring these to the user feedback circle!”
Akash appeared behind her, holding a burning toaster. “Also, breakfast is on fire.”
Mehul blinked. “Guys. We’re cursed.”
“No,” Tara said, wiping her hands on the last clean startup T-shirt. “We’re just underfunded, underslept, and overinvested in a dog who thinks HDMI cables are chew toys.”
At that very moment, as if summoned by the gods of timing and irony, the front door rattled.
Chinnu Aunty stood there with a letter in hand.
Her expression was the emotional midpoint between pity and homicide.
“I asked for rent,” she said calmly. “What I got was fame, a dog that eats my basil plant, and a power bill higher than Shahrukh Khan’s vanity van.”
“We were going to pay you in equity,” Mehul began.
She raised one hand. He fell silent.
“You have seven days,” she said. “Find funding. Or find another rooftop.”
She dropped the eviction notice like a mic and walked away.
Bhaskar peed on it.
For the next ten minutes, no one spoke.
Then Mehul stood up.
“We are not dying in Act Three,” he said firmly. “This is our montage moment. We clean up. We fix bugs. We deploy updates. We earn the right to be dysfunctional in a fancier office.”
Tara looked at him. “You’re quoting a Netflix protagonist again, aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” he whispered.
The final week of survival began.
Akash set up an emergency marketing campaign—“Feel Better, Not Bitter” ads popped up across Instagram with Bhaskar wearing sunglasses and a T-shirt that read “Still Single, Still Loading.” They got 3000 new users in 24 hours.
Tara rewrote the backend from scratch, pausing only to eat Maggi and argue with YouTube tutorials. At one point, she fell asleep mid-compilation and Bhaskar rested his head on her foot like a fuzzy debugger.
Mehul went full founder-mode—pitching at co-working spaces, doing podcast interviews with titles like “The App That Dumped You Before They Could” and even convincing a vegan cafe to host a FeelCast pop-up.
Everything was falling apart.
And yet somehow—also falling together.
On Day Seven, the final day, they presented FeelCast 2.0 to a live group of early users on their rooftop.
The app now featured:
- Forecast Mode: Soft alerts with GIFs and playlist links.
- Closure Generator Pro: Auto-crafted messages with mood sliders.
- Heartmap: A visual graph of emotional trends.
- Ghost Mode: A feature that locks the phone when you try to text your ex past 11 p.m.
Tara gave the demo.
Akash ran the music.
Mehul stood off to the side, watching the reactions.
People laughed. Some teared up. One girl said, “This is like having a therapist and a sarcastic best friend in your phone.”
Mehul whispered to Tara, “That’s the tagline.”
Right after the event, just as they were packing up the folding chairs and half-eaten éclairs, Piyush Malhotra called.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You made a mess. Then made meaning. That’s the whole startup journey. We’re in. Small cheque. Big potential.”
Mehul collapsed onto a beanbag. “We… did it?”
“Yes,” Piyush said. “But don’t spend it all on dog treats.”
Two hours later, Chinnu Aunty rescinded the eviction notice in exchange for lifetime access to Bhaskar’s own FeelCast account, which now included personalized horoscopes and biscuit delivery reminders.
Tara passed out with her laptop still open.
Akash poured chai into mismatched mugs.
Mehul stood on the rooftop, breathing in the post-rain air.
No one had become rich.
No one had become famous.
But they’d built something weird and beautiful.
From memes.
From mistakes.
From the oddly universal ache of being human.
As the sky turned pink and the fairy lights blinked on one last time, Bhaskar jumped into Mehul’s lap, curled up, and finally stopped chewing things.
The startup hadn’t just predicted heartbreak.
It had healed something, too.
Them.
THE END
