Building Trigr: 45 Days, One Market Crash, and a lot of DC Coins
A dev blog by Team AlooParatha β Guidewire DEVTrails 2025/2026
Day 0: Wait, We Are a Startup Now?
Most hackathons start with a Discord announcement, a problem statement PDF,
and 24 hours of caffeine. DEVTrails started with something different: a
briefing that made us feel less like students and more like three people who
just signed a lease on an office they cannot afford.
The rules were simple. You are not a team. You are a startup. You have DC
Coins, the in-universe currency of the hackathon. You spend coins to operate,
to seek guidance, to protect yourself from events. You earn them by supporting
other teams. And every week, something happens that you did not plan for.
There are three of us on Team AlooParatha. We spent the first day arguing about
what we were actually going to build.
The problem space was InsurTech. And once we started looking at it, we could
not unsee it.
The Problem We Could Not Ignore
India has over 12 million platform-based delivery workers. Swiggy. Zomato.
Blinkit. Zepto. These are people working 10-hour days on two-wheelers, earning
somewhere around Rs 4,000 to Rs 5,000 a week.
Then the monsoon arrives.
Three days of heavy rain in Mumbai means three days of no deliveries. No work.
No pay. No recourse. No claim to file because there is no insurance to begin
with. There is no product in India today built specifically for this gap.
We called our product Trigr.
The idea: workers pay a small weekly premium. When a verified external
disruption hits their zone, a flood, severe AQI, a curfew, a city bandh,
Trigr detects it automatically and sends a payout directly to their UPI.
No paperwork. No claim filing. No waiting.
We had our problem. We had our solution. Now we had to build it in 45 days
while the hackathon tried to break us.
Building It
We will not go into the full architecture here, that is for another day.
What we will say is that Trigr has multiple moving parts working together:
an engine that handles income verification and weekly pricing, a system that
monitors external disruptions and fires automated triggers, an intelligence
layer that handles risk and fraud, and dashboards built for three different
types of users.
Every design decision came back to one question: what does a delivery worker
in Dharavi actually need when it is raining and he cannot work? The answer
is not a claims form. It is money in his UPI before the day is over.
Phase 1 Submissions. Then the Market Crashed.
We were three days from Phase 1 submission. The README was almost done.
The demo was almost working. We were, in the language of startup founders
everywhere, almost there.
Then this arrived in our feed:
"500 delivery partners. Fake GPS. Real payouts. A coordinated fraud ring
just drained a platform's liquidity pool and yours is next."
The Market Crash event. A challenge injected mid-hackathon by the Guidewire
team. We had 24 hours to respond.
We stopped. We held our Phase 1 plans. We got on a call and started from
scratch on the problem.
We will not detail our solution here, but the core challenge was this: how
do you protect genuine workers from being caught in the crossfire while
making sure fraudsters do not get through? Getting that balance right was
the hardest design problem we faced in the entire hackathon.
We updated the README. We submitted Phase 1.
What DEVTrails Actually Is
Here is the thing about this hackathon that no description quite captures:
it does not let you coast.
Normal hackathons have a problem statement, a deadline, and a demo. DEVTrails
has DC Coins that simulate startup funding. You spend coins to keep operating,
to get mentorship, to protect yourself from market events. You earn them by
supporting other teams in the ecosystem.
The Market Crash was not the only curveball. Quizzes dropped mid-phase.
Challenges appeared that forced us to rethink assumptions baked into our
product weeks earlier. Every time we thought we had things locked, something
arrived that made us go back to first principles.
This is what building a real product actually feels like. The requirements
do not freeze at kick-off. The market does not wait for you to finish your
README.
We are a 3-person team. We are a startup. We have completed Phase 1.
What Is Next
The grind continues. More updates from the Trigr journey coming soon.
And if you are a delivery worker in anywhere in India wondering when the next monsoon
payout is coming, we are working on it.
Team AlooParatha. Building Trigr at Guidewire DEVTrails 2025/2026.
Massive shoutout to the Guidewire team for building something that actually
teaches you what startup culture feels like, not just what it looks like
on a slide.
Top comments (2)
Great write-up! The startup simulation aspect of this hackathon sounds intense but incredibly valuable. Trigr is a fantastic concept, and it sounds like you guys handled the Market Crash pivot perfectly. Keep up the momentum for the next phase! π
Thanks!