From a Viral Tweet to Runable's First Tech Intern
By Niladri Hazra, GTM Engineer, Runable
A year ago I was a college kid who could write some code. That's the honest starting point, and I want to keep it that way instead of dressing it up.
Before Runable
Before this, I was working at a stealth startup, writing code during the day and posting on X like an unhinged person by night, about anything and everything.
One of those things was an open-source product I built called OpenFiesta, a multi-model AI chat playground with no subscription paywall attached. I built it because I wanted it to exist, not because I thought it would go anywhere.
I posted it on X, and it went viral. Not 3 comments saying "cool project bro” viral but actually viral. 32,000 people signed up. The GitHub repo climbed toward 1,000 stars. People I'd never spoken to were forking it, filing issues, sending pull requests at odd hours from time zones I wasn't awake for. Vercel noticed and sponsored me around that time. Then, in the middle of all that noise, Runable's account left a comment on my post. Things were about to get interesting.
How I Got to Runable
A while after that, I got a DM from Saksham Sarda. He said he needed to talk about something related to OpenFiesta. Given the sponsorship, I assumed it was more of the same, maybe a feature request or maybe a "can we use this internally" request.
It wasn't. It turned into an interview call.
By the end of that call I had an assignment. I sat down and finished it that same night. We went back and forth two or three rounds of revisions over the next few days, the normal back-and-forth of someone checking whether you can actually take feedback and not just take a compliment. Then I got an email: I was Runable's first tech intern.
I always like to tell this story that I wasn’t hired through a campus drive, no resume sent to 100 recruiters, no referral. Just a tweet about something I build, reaching people I didn’t expect.
One Year In
My first task at Runable wasn't growth at all. It was straight engineering. I built out image and video generation (which somehow became the carousel feature you all use now) and wrote our docs. Writing docs sounds boring, and it kind of is, but as the meme says it was “honest work”.
I was also running Runable's X account, and that's where Runclub started. It was a group of builders who'd show up just to build next to each other. We started running weekly hackathons and got 2,500 submissions in two weeks. Looking back at it, I was getting used to the high of chasing big numbers and reaching them. But the best one was yet to come.
Then things got a little scary. I was asked to lead the tech side of AI UGC, which basically means AI creators making content instead of hiring a person for every single video. Nobody here had done it before, so we made it up as we went. We built the pipeline, broke it, rebuilt it, and pushed content to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Two months later we'd hit around 80 freaking million views!
These days I run the tech side of scaling our affiliate program. I'm also building something I can't talk about yet, and honestly the secrecy is half the fun.
What Changed Me
I showed up as a college kid who could write some code. That was it. I had no idea what "fast" meant at a startup, or how much one person could get done in a day if they really went for it.
Then I watched these people work. Nobody ever told me to work harder. No one sat me down for a talk about pace or ambition. You just look at what the person next to you is shipping, and you really don't want to be the one doing less. I've seen people pull an all-nighter and walk in the next morning like nothing happened. Same energy, same jokes, straight on to the next thing, and nobody complaining about being tired. When you're around that every day, it quietly becomes your normal.
I've learned more this year than in everything before it put together. That includes the stealth startup and building OpenFiesta on my own. And it's all because of this team. It wasn't a course or a mentor or one great piece of advice. It was just being in the room with people who move like this every single day.
