Our story

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.

We started the company with ₹8,000. It was internship money. We have never taken outside money since. Everything CodeNicely has, it earned.

The years, in order

2015

VegKnock. Co-founder and CTO — the first time either of us built something real for someone else.

2016

The CodeNicely club, at Kota. Before the company, there was a club. We just wanted people to build with.

May 2017

Our first eight interns. Eight people said yes to something that wasn't a company yet.

June 2017

GimBooks calls — our first real client. Nine years on, they've been through Y Combinator, and we still work together.

31 Aug 2017

CodeNicely is formed. The official birthday. We celebrate it every August.

Sept 2017

Our first full-time teammate — the first person who chose this as a career, not an experiment.

2018

Incubated at 36Inc. Chhattisgarh's incubation programme took a bet on us.

2019

CodeNicely, Inc. — two years old, and registered in the United States. HealthPotli signs; we take equity in GimBooks.

2020

Vahak raises VC money. GimBooks gets into Y Combinator. The products we built started winning on their own.

2021

We became a national name. Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata — all coming to Raipur.

2024

200+ inbound leads. Zero marketing spend. Every single one came by word of mouth.

2025 —

Global, and AI-first. The US, Dubai, Singapore, Europe. And our own products: RecruitNicely, PerformNicely, OutPilot.

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.

We underestimate ourselves. Most of the time. Fix that, and there is no limit to what we can do.

Built entirely on word of mouth

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.