Chaithanya Donda
I build things. Then I build systems that build things.
Strategy manager by day, product builder by night.
At Recykal, I design ₹780 Cr marketplaces and India's first state-level DRS. After hours, I build AI-powered products — voice assistants for hospitals, automated content pipelines, fantasy cricket analytics. I've been shipping since my 3rd year of engineering, and I haven't stopped.
What I'm working on right now
Most of what you see below was built with Claude as my co-pilot — not as a code generator, but as an engineering partner. I describe the system I want, Claude writes the first draft, I stress-test and refine. It’s how one person ships 10 products in parallel.
Website Revamp Engine
4 Live Client Websites — Jewellery, Eyewear, Healthcare
I take existing websites, tear them apart, and rebuild them as award-worthy experiences. Not templates — each site is custom-designed with scroll-driven animations, industry-specific design systems, and performance-first architecture.
- • RR Jewellers — Dark luxury theme with horizontal scroll galleries, 3D card tilt, real Shopify product data
- • SpecsIt — Full-stack eyewear e-commerce with Neon DB, Razorpay payments, virtual try-on ready
- • Dr. Sanika Kulkarni — Oncosurgeon personal brand, "Premium Practice" archetype, patient-first design
- • Shraddha Hospitals — Patient platform with live booking, queue management, and AI-powered tools
Dugout League
Fantasy Cricket Platform — From Spreadsheets to Live Product
Started in 2022 as a Google Sheets league with 5 friends. Scores were manually calculated days late, shared via WhatsApp screenshots. By 2025, we had live APIs, real-time leaderboard updates after every ball, and 50+ users.
- • Cricket Clash — Head-to-head PvP fantasy battles against friends
- • Daily Challenges, Mini-Games (GK Quiz, Mock Draft), and Wrapped season recaps
- • Live scoring with ball-by-ball leaderboard updates across 3+ simultaneous leagues
Social Media Content Engine
Automated Weekly Content Generation for Instagram
A skill-based system that takes a client's brand config and produces a full week of ready-to-post content — calendar, captions, carousel text, reel scripts, and asset briefs. One command, seven days of content.
Setu (Vaadhi)
Distribution ERP for a Water Bottle Brand
A small business in Hyderabad needed to manage their entire water bottle distribution — purchase orders, sales, inventory, retailer pricing, invoices. I built them a full ERP that runs on Google Sheets as the backend.
- • FIFO costing engine computes margins from actual purchase costs
- • Auto-generated invoices with SKU-level analytics and date-filtered dashboards
- • Live at vaadhi.up.railway.app — 3 users, zero downtime since launch
Robotics Research
Industry Intelligence — 9 Chapters, 370+ Quiz Questions
A deep-dive knowledge platform on the robotics industry. Editorial essays covering the robot family tree, competitive landscape, Physical AI, India’s builders, and a full execution playbook — paired with a Duolingo-style quiz and Kindle-like annotation system.
- • 9 chapters: from taxonomy to competitive landscape to an India-specific execution playbook
- • 31 interactive lessons with XP, hearts, streaks, teaching cards, and 5 question types
- • 371 pre-populated annotations from iPad reading — highlights, underlines, margin notes
Housie
TV-Cast Game Management for Offline Gatherings
A conductor runs the app, casts to TV, calls numbers. Physical tickets stay — the app handles prizes, winners, leaderboards, and celebrations. 29 game patterns, 5 themes, spin wheel, confetti — zero server, zero framework.
- • Pure HTML + CSS + JS — no build step, no server, no dependencies
- • Canvas-powered spin wheel + confetti celebrations + Web Audio sound effects
- • Full crash recovery via localStorage — rejoin mid-game with a room code
Where I've Worked
Recykal
Founder's Office · Manager, Strategy
Designing India's first state-level alcohol DRS (Goa — 24 Cr units/month, ₹230 Cr annual). Managing ₹780 Cr metal marketplace. Leading enterprise partnerships with Tata Steel, Swiggy, L'Oreal, Volvo, Toyota.
Dream11
Product Analytics Manager
Improved tournament retention by 70% (14% → 24%) for 2.6Mn users. Ran ad monetization experiment on 1.9 Cr users, closed ₹88L Swiggy deal. Reduced contest creation from 7 steps to 4.
Citigroup
Senior Business Analyst
Built VBA automation tools that saved 3,880+ man-hours/year — first ever in Citi AML, rolled out globally. Fast-track promotion in 18 months. 10 awards in 3 years.
Selected Work
Things I've built, shipped, and scaled.
Goa DRS
Designed India's first state-level alcohol container deposit return scheme. Collection point mapping, logistics operations, stakeholder coordination across an entire state.
T20I World Cup Passport
Retention campaign for 2.6Mn private contest users. Analyzed spending behavior, designed tiered engagement, targeted communications that increased participation 3x.
Citi AML Automation
Built the first-ever automation tools in Citi AML. Deck creation and project inventory management — deployed globally across investigation teams.
UrFaCT
Interactive DemoSaw fantasy cricket team selection as a constrained optimization problem. Built a full pipeline: data scraping, player clustering, venue analysis, point prediction. Tested by ~50 users.
BOND
Interactive DemoIoT device from my IIT Madras hostel. The light switch was across the room — every time I got up, I lost my sleep. So I built a Raspberry Pi + relay system to control it from my phone.
NotOut
→Cricket web app for artificial turf players. Stadium-equivalent experience with live stats tracking, leaderboards, and session history. Built a team of 5.
A decade of building
I made a rule in my 3rd year of engineering: learn something new every year. Then ship it.
First website
Taught myself web dev in 3rd year of engineering. Made a rule: learn something new every year.
BOND (IoT)
Built a Raspberry Pi device to control room lights from bed. PHP + MySQL + hardware.
Joined Citi
Discovered I could build tools that saved thousands of hours. Got hooked on automation.
UrFaCT
Fantasy cricket as an optimization problem. Python, clustering, live predictions. 70% win rate.
NotOut + Dugout League
Cricket stats app for turf players. Started Dugout League as a Google Sheets fantasy league with 5 friends.
Dugout League goes live
From spreadsheets to live APIs, real-time scoring, head-to-head battles. 50+ users and growing.
10 products in parallel
Voice AI, website revamps, content engines, ERPs, game apps, logistics models. Building at 10x speed with Claude.
About
I'm Chaithanya — an engineer by training, strategist by education, and builder by instinct.
In my third year of engineering at IIT Madras, I made a rule: learn something new every year. Web development. Video editing. Hardware. I built an IoT device because I was too sleepy to walk to the light switch. I built a fantasy cricket optimizer because I saw an optimization problem hiding in plain sight. I've been building ever since.
The formal career took me from Citi (where I built tools saving 3,880 hours/year) to ISB (where I got the strategy lens) to Dream11 (where I learned product at 10 Cr+ user scale) to Recykal (where I design national-level systems from the Founder's Office).
But the most interesting work happens after hours. Right now I'm running 10 products in parallel — a fantasy cricket platform with 50+ users, website revamps for real clients, a social media content engine, logistics models, an ERP, and a game app. The common thread across a decade of building: I find complex problems, build systematic solutions, and ship things that work.
Education
Indian School of Business
MBA · Strategy & Marketing
Young Leader of PGP’22 (23/900+)
IIT Madras
MTech + BTech · Chemical Engineering
Published in IFAC · Secretary, ChemE Society
Let's Talk
I'm open to conversations about strategy, product, building, and interesting problems.