DEV Community: Tanay Haldar

You Don’t Need to Live in a Startup Hub to Build a Startup

Tanay Haldar — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:05:37 +0000

Nobody in Bongaon is building a mobile game studio. I know, because for a while, I was fairly sure I was the only person trying.

Bongaon isn’t on anyone’s map of Indian tech. It’s not Bangalore, it’s not Mumbai, it’s not even a tier-2 city with a coworking space and a founder meetup every other Thursday. When I tell people here that I co-founded a game studio, the first question usually isn’t “how’s it going” — it’s “wait, from here?”

That question used to bother me. Now I think it’s the most useful thing anyone’s ever asked me, because answering it honestly taught me something I didn’t expect: the hub was never the point.
The myth I believed for longer than I should have

For a long time, I assumed serious company-building needed proximity — to investors, to other founders, to the kind of casual hallway conversation that turns into a deal. That belief is everywhere in how startup culture talks about itself. Hubs get the press. Hubs get the “ecosystem.” Everyone else gets told to move.

We didn’t move. Quantam Core exists because three of us decided the studio would run on whatever infrastructure actually mattered — and none of that infrastructure cared what city was on our address.
What actually makes a studio run

Look at what our entire pipeline is built on: Unity for the engine, GitHub so three people can work on the same codebase without stepping on each other, Google Play Console to ship, AdMob to monetize, Google AI Studio and Canva for the parts that used to need a bigger team. Every one of those is a browser tab. Not one of them asks where you’re sitting when you open it.
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That’s not a workaround for not being in a hub. That is the industry now. The bottleneck was never geography. It was whether you actually opened the tab.
What you don’t get, and have to build yourself

I want to be honest about the part that doesn’t get easier: there’s no ambient network here. No founder down the street to grab coffee with when a decision is eating at you. No investor event to wander into. Every relationship we have with anyone outside the three of us, we built on purpose, over the internet, from zero. That takes more deliberate effort than it would if we could just show up somewhere and be in the room.

And there’s a smaller, quieter cost: the loneliness of doing something nobody around you has a frame of reference for. Most people in a hub are surrounded by other people doing something adjacent to what they’re doing. We’re surrounded by people who are, reasonably, a little confused about what a “finance lead for a game studio” even does for a living.
What you get instead

What we got in exchange was a runway that stretches further, because the cost of living here isn’t fighting us the way it would in a metro. As the person who watches our budget line by line, that’s not a small thing — it’s the difference between having six more months to get a game right and not having them.

We also got forced self-reliance early, which turned out to be a strength disguised as a disadvantage. When there’s no ecosystem to lean on, you learn to answer your own questions instead of asking around for who already knows. You get comfortable being the first person in the room who’s tried something, because there was never a room to begin with.
The actual lesson

Carrom King Classic is live on the Play Store right now. It got built by three people, none of us in a hub, using tools any founder anywhere in the world has access to. The lesson I keep coming back to isn’t “small towns are secretly great for startups” — some days they genuinely aren’t. It’s simpler than that: the map of where you’re allowed to be ambitious is a lot smaller than the map of where you actually can be. Most of the difference between the two was never about location. It was about whether you were willing to be the first person from where you’re from to try.

If you’re building something from somewhere that isn’t supposed to produce people who build things — I’d like to hear about it. And if you want to follow along as we ship the next few titles out of Bongaon, I’ll be writing more of this as it happens.

Quantam Core is an indie mobile game studio based in Bongaon, West Bengal, India. Carrom King Classic is live now on the Google Play Store.

I Left Ethical Hacking to Co-Found an Indie Game Studio. Nobody Warned Me the Hardest Part Would Be the Spreadsheets.

Tanay Haldar — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:36:47 +0000

A year ago, if you’d told me my job title would include the word “Finance,” I would have laughed. I was the guy who broke into systems for a living — ethical hacking, backend development, the kind of work where the only budget you think about is your compute bill.

Then, in September 2025, two friends and I sat down and decided to build a mobile game studio from scratch. We called it Quantam Core. I became the co-founder and finance lead. And I quickly learned that the scariest attack surface I’d ever have to defend wasn’t a server — it was a runway.

This is the story of what that pivot actually looked like, and the handful of lessons that might save you some pain if you’re building something similar.
The team, and the bet we made

Quantam Core started with three people splitting the work the way small studios usually do: a CEO handling vision and direction, an Executive Producer who also doubled as editor and music director, and me — half backend developer, half accountant, all nerves.

None of us came from AAA studios. What we had was a cybersecurity and systems background on my end, creative production experience on my co-founder’s end, and a shared stubbornness about wanting to ship, not just plan.

We picked Unity as our engine, Android Studio and Google Play Console as our deployment pipeline, and GitHub to keep three people from destroying each other’s code. Nothing exotic. The unglamorous stack of people trying to get a real product out the door on a real deadline.
The unsexy truth about “finance lead” at an indie studio

Here’s what I actually do most days, and it has almost nothing to do with hacking:

Tracking every rupee against a budget that has to stretch across engine costs, ad network setup, and the slow bleed of “small” subscriptions nobody accounts for until they add up.
Setting up and managing AdMob ad units — banner, interstitial, rewarded interstitial, native — and understanding that every placement decision is really a finance decision in disguise.
Building expense-tracking habits before we needed them, not after we’d already lost the thread.
Translating “we want to build five more games” into “here’s what we can actually afford to build first.”

The skill that transferred surprisingly well from ethical hacking wasn’t technical at all — it was the instinct to look for where things quietly break. In security, that’s a vulnerability. In an indie studio’s finances, it’s a subscription you forgot to cancel or a feature that’s eating your ad budget for no measurable return.
Shipping the first game

In June 2026, we launched Carrom King Classic on the Google Play Store. It was our first real product — not a prototype, not a pitch deck, an actual game a stranger could download.
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I won’t pretend the launch was flawless. But watching something you built from a shared Google Doc turn into a live listing with real installs is a different kind of high than anything I felt patching a vulnerability. There’s a finality to it. You can’t quietly fix it in a code review before anyone notices — people are already playing.
What I’d tell someone about to do this

If you’re technical and thinking about co-founding something that isn’t purely technical, a few things I wish I’d internalized earlier:

Your non-technical skills will carry more weight than you expect. I assumed my value would be backend code. It turned out my value was just as much about discipline — the willingness to sit with a spreadsheet until it told the truth.
Pick a lane before you need one. We split responsibilities early — vision, production, finance — instead of all three of us doing a bit of everything badly. It’s not glamorous, but it’s what let us actually finish something.
The pipeline is longer than the launch. Carrom King Classic wasn’t the plan, it was step one. We already have several more titles in different stages of development, and each one gets easier to budget for because we’re finally tracking the right numbers from day one instead of retrofitting them.
Cheap tools, used consistently, beat expensive tools used sporadically. Our stack is about as unglamorous as it gets — and it works because we actually use it every day.

Why I’m writing this

I’m building Quantam Core in public, in the small ways I can — sharing what launching an indie mobile game studio in India actually looks like from the finance and operations side, not just the highlight reel. If that’s useful to you — whether you’re technical and eyeing the business side, or just curious what it takes to get a small game studio off the ground — follow along. I’ll be writing more as we ship the next titles.

Quantam Core is an indie mobile game studio based in West Bengal, India. Carrom King Classic is live now on the Google Play Store.