I wasn’t technical at all when I started Clavikl. No CS degree, no fancy bootcamp just a bunch of YouTube tutorials (Code with Harry), late-night Stack Overflow scrolls, and of course, posts here on Dev.to that made things click when nothing else did. I also ended up DM’ing a few folks from the Dev community who were way ahead of me and surprisingly, most of them replied. That’s how I started figuring out what to build, what to ignore, and how to actually ship something.
I wasn’t planning to build a community. I didn’t even like forums.
Most of them felt either dead, full of spam, or weirdly fake-helpful.
They’re always saying “be active,” “don’t spam,” “read the rules first” all valid stuff, but it felt like shouting into a silent room.
So when I ended up building my own forum for medical students in India Clavikl, even I was confused.
No perfect branding.
No big launch.
Just a few hundred users talking like real people.
Over time Clavikl grew.
Some students started sharing prep books.
Others wrote brutally honest stories failed attempts, drop years, mental health.
It got emotional really fast.
And that’s when I realized: maybe this is what forums were supposed to be.
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