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.
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