• One — Who we are
• 1This is not a constitution5
• 2How we started7
• 3Why Raipur12
• 4Why we exist14
• 5What we're aiming at16
• 6Built entirely on word of mouth17
• Two — What we believe
• 7The six21
• 8Own the outcome22
• 9CodeNicely26
• 10Be open30
• 11Be kind — and fun to be with34
• 12Their business is our business38
• 13Stay curious42
• 14Where these came from46
• Three — How we work
• 15The rhythm49
• 16We run on our own software50
• 17The people who hire us51
• 18The craft — our engineering standard54
• Four — What we expect
• 19The red lines61
• 20What belongs to the client63
• 21What we say no to64
• Five — Growing here
• 22Who we hire67
• 23How you grow68
• 24Your first week69
• 25How we celebrate71
• 26A letter to you73

This is not a constitution.

It's a book about how we like to work — written down, so nobody has to guess.

We wrote the first version of this in 2021. One line in it still holds up better than anything we have written since.

That line is on the next page. It is still the deal.

There is less friction, and more good work, when everyone already knows roughly what everyone else would do.

That is the entire purpose of this book.

How we started.

We never planned to start a company. We just wanted to learn.

Two friends from college. No business plan. No intention of building one. We only wanted to know more — so we started making apps, and picking things up as we went.

The apps got noticed. Then the phone rang. Someone wanted to pay us to build something.

That is the whole origin story. We got good at the work, and the work found us.

The first years.

• 2015VegKnockCo-founder and CTO. The first time either of us built something real for someone else.
• 2016The CodeNicely club, at KotaBefore the company, there was a club. We just wanted people to build with.
• May 2017Our first eight internsEight people said yes to something that wasn't a company yet.
• June 2017GimBooks callsOur first real client. Nine years on, they've been through Y Combinator — and we still work together.
• 31 Aug 2017CodeNicely is formedThe official birthday. We celebrate it every August.
• Sept 2017Our first full-time teammateThe first person who chose this as a career, not an experiment.
• 2018Incubated at 36IncChhattisgarh's incubation programme took a bet on us.

And then it
got serious.

• 2019CodeNicely, Inc.Two years old, and registered in the United States.
• 2019HealthPotli signs. We take equity in GimBooks.We started betting on our clients, not just billing them.
• 2020Vahak raises VC money. GimBooks gets into Y Combinator.The products we built started winning on their own.
• 2021We became a national nameDelhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata — all coming to Raipur.
• 2024200+ leads. Zero marketing.Every single one of them came by word of mouth.
• 2025 —Global, and AI-firstThe US, Dubai, Singapore, Europe. And our own products.

Why Raipur.

Because we chose it. Not because we were stuck with it.

We could have moved. Everybody said we should. The money is in Bangalore. The clients are in Delhi. Every year somebody asks when we're relocating.

We stayed.

We stayed because you can build a company of real, global quality from here — and we'd rather prove that than argue about it. We stayed because people here shouldn't have to leave home to have a serious career. And because good work speaks for itself, whatever the pin code.

That is not a limitation we overcame. It is the point.

Why we exist.

In most fields — technology included — the West leads. They own the products. They set the direction. India, with all its talent, is still seen as the place that provides the service. Not the place that creates the thing.

Think about who wrote the rules of the internet. Who built the operating systems. Who invented email. Who built the models everyone is now building on.

They wrote the playbook. We got very good at following it.

We don't want to stay that way.

CodeNicely exists to change that story — to show that world-class products can be imagined, built and scaled from right here.

Every line of code we write is a small argument for that idea.

What we're aiming at.

These are not two different missions. The businesses we modernise today are the companies that get big tomorrow.

We are not waiting for the 1,000. We are working on them, one at a time, right now.

Built entirely on word of mouth.

If you remember one thing from this book, make it this one.

In 2024 we got more than 200 leads. We spent nothing on marketing. We have never run an ad. We have never made a cold call. Nobody here is knocking on doors.

Every client we have came to us because somebody told them about us.

Think about what that means. The work is the marketing. The boring Tuesday where you fixed something properly instead of patching it — that is what pays the salaries here.

It works the other way too. One badly handled project. One broken promise. One client left in the dark. And the machine that feeds this company stops turning.

The six.

"I did my part" is the one thing we never want to hear. Your part is not the point. The thing working is the point.

If you notice something broken, it is now yours. Not because anyone assigned it to you — because you saw it first.

And if you say you'll do it, do it. If it's going to be late, say so before it's late.

• You find a bug in someone else's code. You fix it, or you make sure the right person knows. You don't walk past it.
• On Tuesday you realise Friday is at risk. You say so on Tuesday.
• The client asks something that isn't strictly yours. You find them the answer instead of forwarding the email.
• Something you shipped breaks. You're the first one looking at it, not the last.
• You give the estimate you actually believe — not the one that will make people happy.

We care how a thing is built, not just that it works. Anyone can make something run. We want to make things a stranger could pick up in a year and understand.

Build it fast — slow costs our clients money. But fast has never meant sloppy here. Not once.

The trick is not to cut corners. The trick is to know the good path.

• You name the variable properly, even though nobody will ever check.
• You write the API doc as you go — not three weeks later, when you've forgotten.
• You refuse to merge something you know is fragile, even under pressure.
• You leave the file a little better than you found it.
• You don't ship at 6:50pm on Friday just to say you shipped.

Simply. If someone can't understand you, that's your failure, not theirs. Nobody is impressed by jargon.

Early. Bad news travels fast here, and nobody is punished for carrying it.

Openly. No secret projects. No hidden agendas. You can ask why a decision was made, and you'll get a real answer.

And when we decide something, the best idea wins. Not the loudest one, and not the most senior one.

“I'm behind.”
“I broke it.”
“I don't understand.”
“I don't think this will work.”

Say any of these and you will be helped. Say none of them, and a small problem quietly becomes a big one.

No shouting. No humiliation. No politics. Being talented has never been an excuse for being unpleasant, and it never will be.

We get far more done when nobody is counting who gets the credit.

If someone makes a mistake, we don't make them feel small about it. We use it to make the person better, and the process better.

• Someone's stuck. You give them twenty minutes, even though you're busy. Especially then.
• You never criticise a teammate in public. Praise in public. Correct in private.
• The intern's question gets the same respect as the lead's.
• When something goes well, you say who did it.
• You go to the celebration. It matters more than you think.

Behind every project is a person who has staked something real. Their savings. Their reputation. Sometimes their family's future.

They are not a ticket queue. They are a founder — and the whole thing rests on them.

So we think like owners of their company, not suppliers to it. And we spend their money the way we spend our own. Carefully.

• You tell the client the feature they asked for isn't worth building — and you say what is.
• You pick the boring, cheap infrastructure over the exciting, expensive one.
• You learn enough about their industry to have an opinion about it.
• You care whether the thing you shipped actually got used.
• You treat the company's money — tools, licences, servers — like it came out of your own pocket.

What you know today has a shelf life. What you can teach yourself does not.

We have always hired for that — and we have always grown people up, rather than waiting for them to arrive finished.

The part people forget: teach the next person. You should leave CodeNicely more capable than you arrived. So should everyone around you.

• You try the new tool before you have an opinion about it.
• You read the code you're about to change, instead of guessing.
• When you learn something useful, you tell somebody. Ideally everybody.
• You sit with a junior for half an hour instead of just fixing it for them.
• You can explain why the AI's suggestion was right — not just that it compiled.

Where these
came from.

From 2021 onward, every deck we made carried the same five words. Every one of them survives in the six.

The rhythm.

We run on our own software.

We used to run this company on tools other people built. Now we run it on PerformNicely, which we built. We hire through RecruitNicely, which we also built.

This is not a marketing decision. It's a discipline.

When you use your own product every day, you can't lie to yourself about it. Every rough edge is an edge you feel. Every slow screen is a screen you wait for.

The people who hire us.

Everyone in this industry talks about the user's experience. We think somebody else deserves the same care: the founder. The person who started it. Who carries the whole thing. Who usually has nobody to tell when they're frightened.

We call it Fx — Founder Experience. Four habits.

No surprises.

The rule underneath all of it. It does not bend.

A client can forgive a delay. A bug. A wrong estimate. Even a bad week. What they cannot forgive — and should not — is finding out late.

• The moment you know, they know. Not after three days of quietly trying to fix it.
• Never let a demo be the first time they hear about a problem.
• Never promise a date you don't believe. An honest "three weeks" beats a hopeful "one week" every time.
• Never go quiet. To a founder, silence sounds exactly like something going wrong.

The craft.

Our engineering standard. Not a style guide — a shared idea of what "good" means here.

Done is not "it works on my machine." Done is not "I pushed it." It's done when all six of these are true:

• It does what was actually asked for — and you checked, rather than assumed.
• Someone else has read the code and approved it.
• You tested it. On purpose. Including the ugly cases.
• It's documented.
• It's deployed where the people who need it can see it.
• You'd be comfortable if a stranger read this code with your name on it.

Code review.

Nothing reaches a client's system without a second pair of eyes. Not because we don't trust you — but because nobody catches their own blind spots.

• Review the code, not the person. "This breaks when the list is empty" — not "you always forget this."
• Small changes, reviewed fast. A review sitting for two days is a review blocking a person.
• If you don't understand it, that's a finding. Code only its author can read is a liability, however clever.
• Approving means you'll stand behind it. A rubber stamp is worse than no review.

The four documents
we owe every project.

Write them as you build. Never at the end — by then you've forgotten why.

Testing, and
handover.

Test the thing you built before you say it's finished. Then test the case you're hoping nobody tries. The empty list. The enormous file. The double-click. The network dropping halfway.

The real test of our craft isn't whether we can build it. It's whether someone else can pick it up.

Building with AI.

Four rules. Not complicated. Not negotiable.

The red lines.

Mistakes are forgivable here. Almost all of them. These are the ones that aren't.

And these
are absolute.

What belongs to the client.

People trust us with the inside of their business. Their numbers. Their strategy. Their half-finished ideas. Their worries. That trust is the reason we have work at all.

What we say no to.

We are selective, and we have turned down real money. This is what we turn it down for.

• Work we don't believe in. If we honestly think a build will fail or waste someone's money, we say so. If they want it anyway, we walk.
• Work that's ethically wrong. Anything that misleads or harms the people who end up using it.
• Clients who mistreat our team. Rude, abusive, demeaning to our people — the money is never worth it.
• Work we're not the right team for. Sometimes the honest answer is "we're not the best people for this" — and then we point them to someone who is.

Any one of us can raise any of these. If a project feels wrong to you, say so. You will not be told to be commercial about it.

And when we get
it wrong, we pay
for it.

We have gone well over on a project before. Weeks over. The estimate was ours to get right, and we got it wrong.

We did not send that bill to the client.

We absorbed it. We finished the work. We learned to scope better. That decision cost real money — money that would have paid salaries.

Who we hire.

This is the bar you were held to. It's now the bar you hold others to.

How you grow.

No secret. No politics. Four things earn you more responsibility, more trust, and more money.

• You deliver what you committed. Consistently. On time. At quality. Reliability compounds faster than brilliance.
• You make other people better. Mentoring juniors. Unblocking teammates. This is what turns a good engineer into a lead.
• You earn client trust. The client asks for you by name. There is no stronger signal in this company — and no faking it.
• You take on more before anyone gives it to you. Nobody is handed leadership here. You grow into it by behaving like a leader while you're still not one.

Your first week.

How we celebrate.

We celebrate festivals as a team, to celebrate difference. These are the days we actually keep.

None of that was a strategy. It was the only way we knew: do the work properly, tell the truth, and be someone people want to work with again.

That is still the entire plan.

We are grateful for it, and we don't take it lightly. Our job is to make sure you leave here worth far more than when you walked in.

Our ambition isn't modest. We think world-class products can be built from Raipur — and we mean to prove it by shipping things too good to dismiss.

We'll get there the way we got here. By owning the outcome. By coding nicely. By saying the true thing early. By being decent to each other.

Tell us where we're wrong. We mean that. And thank you for making CodeNicely what it is.