IITianVibes started because two of my co-founders failed a course.
It's true. In the summer of 2023, Arpit and Anurag — both at IIT Jodhpur — flunked a subject and got stuck on campus for the summer semester to clear it. No internship, no going home, just a long, empty Jodhpur summer. And when you're bored on an IIT campus with nothing to do, you start noticing the things that are quietly broken.
The problem we couldn't unsee
The one that stuck out: getting any decent merch was painful. If your branch or club wanted hoodies or tees, you filled out a Google Form, someone collected everyone's money, and a local vendor printed it. Then you waited. And waited — a month, sometimes a month and a half. When the order finally showed up, half of it might have defects, custom names came back misspelled, and there was no one to actually complain to. The quality was rough, the process was opaque, and the only people it really worked for were the middlemen pocketing the margin.
Arpit and Anurag figured the fix was obvious: build a proper website to compete with those Google Forms. Order online, customize and verify your design before it's printed, track it properly, and actually get it in about a week instead of forty days — at quality that didn't feel like a compromise, for a price students could afford. High quality, affordable, no nonsense. That was the whole motto, and it still is.
Then placements happened
They started building. And then the thing we now write entire blog posts about happened to them: third-year internship season hit. Suddenly it was all CVs, coding rounds and placement prep, and a side project didn't stand a chance. The idea got shelved. Very classic IIT.
Where I came in
I'm Arun — the third of us. I found out about the half-built thing the next year, around the start of our fourth year, and I couldn't let it go. There was already a base system sitting there, so we picked it back up: Anurag and I on the build, Arpit on design, and me also handling marketing and the money side.
I won't pretend it was smooth. We knew how to make websites — but putting one in front of real people paying real money is a completely different game. Production broke in ways our localhost never did: bugs, edge cases, "why is this happening for only this one user" at 2am. Honestly, it was some of the most fun I've had. It was the first time something we built was being used by people who weren't us.
We launched, and people actually showed up
We went live around November 2024, just for IIT Jodhpur at first. And it worked — people ordered, people liked it, and the idea held up outside our own heads. That traction was the green light to expand to other IITs, which is where we are now. Plenty of IITians know IITianVibes; plenty still don't, and getting our gear to every IIT is the part we're still chipping away at.
Why we're not chasing the money
Here's the honest part most founder stories skip. All three of us are placed — we have day jobs. We know the IIT-merch market is capped; there's a ceiling to how big this gets without turning it into something it was never meant to be. We thought about expanding to every college in the country, then realised we just… didn't want to run that business. IITianVibes was our first real product — the first thing we shipped that strangers actually used — and we'd rather keep it alive and good than squeeze it for every rupee.
We're not really in this for the profit anymore. We run IITianVibes for the vibes. That's the honest answer.
How a few lazy engineers run a brand
Let me let you in on the real reason a lot of our stuff exists: we're lazy. Not bad-lazy — engineer-lazy. None of us wanted to post on Instagram every day, reply to the same DMs, or sit and crank out new designs by hand. So instead of doing the boring work, we automated it. We built an Instagram agent — from scratch, because we actually know AI — that chats with people and lets them place orders right inside their DMs. We wired up content-publishing automation so posts go out on their own, and design pipelines where AI researches and generates artwork that we just review and approve. The models got good enough that we genuinely don't need a full-time designer anymore; we point them at good ideas and curate the output. It's funny to admit, but a lot of what makes IITianVibes run is three engineers avoiding the work they found annoying.
What we're actually building
Today it's Anurag and me keeping IITianVibes running and pushing it forward. The bigger idea we keep coming back to is this: there's no real home for IITians on the internet. People buy our gear, we talk to them every day — and yet there's no proper, trustworthy IIT community or information hub anywhere. That's what we want IITianVibes to grow into. The blog you're reading is the start of it: genuinely researched, no-fluff content on everything IIT — placements, fests, rankings, hostel life, the lot. The merch funds the mission; the mission is to be the place for all things IIT.
On the side, the two of us are also building crayonz.ai — a tool where anyone can design their own t-shirt from scratch, not just pick from a catalogue. It's launching soon. Same instinct as everything else we make: take something that should be easy and actually make it easy.
That's the whole story. A failed course, a broken Google Form, a few engineers who'd rather automate than hustle, and a product we keep alive because we love it. If you're an IITian, grab something from the collection — and stick around for the blog. We're just getting started.