Sirkoi (Quit The Startup)
Named it, designed the logo, built the MVP UI — then left when the founders refused to acknowledge zero PMF and started populating the app with fake users.
Last updated on
2024 · Exited
What
- A startup founded by friends at Colby and Pomona.
- Initially a Rate My Professor for Bangladesh
- I named it, designed the logo, created the user journey, did initial UI mockups in Figma, created the website
- All of this was done pre-AI
Why I Left
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Zero Product-Market Fit: The founders were operating with no roadmap and no compass. They didn't realize that only two universities in Bangladesh (NSU and BRAC) actually let you choose your professors. The rest of the country doesn't work like the US. We were building a feature for a market that didn't exist.
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When the numbers didn't show up, they started populating the site with fake users. I wasn't okay with that.
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A year later, they raised $50k to pivot into "AI-Generated Question Banks" for IAL/IB students. I told them this was unsustainable. Making a valid IAL Physics question requires expert pedagogical knowledge; you can't just ask an LLM to hallucinate one.
- My counter-proposal was simple: Build a Database of real questions and use AI to curate them based on student weaknesses. They went with the Generative AI hype instead because that's what American investors buy. They essentially sold a hallucination to people who don't understand the Bangladeshi education market.
Outcome
The startup has since burned the $50k raise and shut down.
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