How a Solo Developer in India Built a Project Management SaaS to $4K MRR
Shyamal Parikh skipped a master's abroad to code SmartTask alone, then grew it to 40,000+ active users and $300K in seed funding by pricing it like a daily cup of tea.
Founder · X
Part of Indian SaaS builders
Business snapshot
Monthly revenue
≈₹3.8 lakh/mo
$4,000/mo · reported Oct 2021
- Business model
- SaaS
- Started
- Feb 2017
- Team
- Solo founder + 8 staff
- Based in
- Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
- Monthly recurring revenue
- $4K MRR
- Seed funding
- $300K
- Active users
- 40,000+
- Customers via Google Ads
- 70%
- Team size
- 8 employees
Tools
- Microsoft Azure
- Stripe
- Gitbook
- SmartTask
- Angular
- C#
- Google Ads
- AppSumo
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified. ₹ amounts use the ECB reference rate rate of Oct 2026 (₹94.82/$).
Who built it, and what they built
Shyamal Parikh founded SmartTask, a project management tool built to help teams prioritize tasks, distribute work, and track sales through an integrated CRM. The product aims to make users 3x more productive.
The business operates from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, and reports $4K in monthly recurring revenue. In April of this year it raised $300K in seed funding.
Where the idea came from
Shyamal studied engineering at UVPCE in Gujarat, where a 2013 Robocon robotics contest win as lead programmer connected him with a mentor he later interned under for a year.
While preparing to apply for a master's in Embedded Systems abroad, he spent a gap year working in his father's business. Watching his father juggle separate tools for sales tracking, tasks, and service requests revealed how disorganized the workflow was.
He spent two to three months personally visiting hundreds of businesses and talking with owners in his target segments. Finding that most Indian businesses ran in a similarly unorganized way convinced him the idea had real demand.
How they built the first version
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