We started cohort26 to build the payroll layer for Indian SMBs. This is a raw account of everything we shipped in the first two weeks — the commits, the breaks, the wrong bets, and what we actually learned.
No polish. No post-hoc narrative. Just what happened.
April 12 — Day 1: Get something live
The first commit was just removing build files so Vercel could serve raw HTML. No React, no bundler, no nothing. The reasoning was simple: we needed something live that we could show people in conversations. The faster we could get to a URL, the faster we'd get real feedback.
vercel.json with cleanUrls: true so URLs work without .html. Removed the "Worked Example" payslip section and a compliance table that was cluttering the hero. Removed the booking CTA from the demo thank-you state.By April 15 we had a real site — not just a placeholder. It ranked for long-tail payroll terms almost immediately. The competitor comparison pages started picking up clicks within 48 hours.
April 26 — The week everything changed
We went quiet for a week because we were doing customer discovery. We had a hypothesis: CAs (Chartered Accountants) were the right wedge. They handle SMB finances, so if we could get CAs to adopt our tool, they'd bring 10-30 clients each.
We called CAs through our personal network. Our dads made calls. We asked everyone we knew.
"I do GST and ITR. For payroll, the client handles it internally or has a separate accountant."
Nobody was interested. Not because the product was bad — but because CAs don't do payroll. We'd built a strategy around a customer who didn't exist. We wrote about this in detail here.
Then we figured out who actually does payroll in Indian SMBs: the HR executive, the in-house accountant, or the founder themselves. And we looked at Kredily's CA page and realized CAs are a distribution channel, not a user. You get CAs to share the tool with clients. You don't sell the tool to CAs.
So we rebuilt the entire narrative in one day.
/for-cas with a "give your clients a free tool, you review the numbers" angle. Added a WhatsApp share button — the ask is "share this with your SMB clients," not "use this yourself." 4-step flow: CA shares → client uploads → AI calculates → CA reviews. No data stored, fully browser-side, DPDP-safe./payroll-agent. Upload an Excel/CSV of employees, get back a full payroll run: gross, PF, ESI, PT, TDS, net. Generates ECR and EPS files for PF filing. Covers all 28 Indian states for Professional Tax. Zero server-side code — everything runs in the browser.Upload your employee list. Get PF, ESI, PT, TDS, net pay — all calculated instantly in your browser. No login. No data stored. Works for all 28 Indian states.
Try it free →What we learned
Ship fast, fix in public. We had two production bugs on launch day. We fixed them within hours. Nobody remembered the bugs — they remembered the tool worked.
Wrong hypothesis ≠ wasted time. The CA outreach took a week and found nothing. But it told us exactly who our customer isn't. That's worth a week.
Free tools earn trust that landing pages don't. Sending someone a URL that calculates their actual payroll in 30 seconds converts better than any "book a demo" CTA. We're using the tool itself as a top-of-funnel.
Distribution is a product decision. We didn't build a CA tool. We built something that CAs can share with clients. That's a completely different product decision — and it changes the interface, the data handling, and the call to action.
We're building this in public. Every decision, every wrong turn, every commit. If you're building something for Indian SMBs — or just figuring out payroll compliance — we'd love to hear from you. Email founders@cohort26.com.
Upload your employee list. Get PF, ESI, PT, TDS, net pay — all calculated instantly in your browser. No login. No data stored. Works for all 28 Indian states.
Run payroll free →