Lalit Krishna — Designer, Developer, Filmmaker, Consultant

Lalit Krishna is a Designer, Developer, Filmmaker, Consultant based in India. This is a portfolio of ventures, creative work, and experiments. i collect ideas. sometimes they become companies. this isn't really a portfolio — it's just where i leave things.

About Lalit Krishna

i have commitment issues. that's why i build companies instead of finishing games. Currently building things that don't ship. Based in a small room, mostly. Available for one good idea per quarter.

Skills and Services

Work — Ventures, Creative Work, and Experiments

A collection of 13 projects. 8 finished, 3 discarded, 2 still cooking.

TENOR

AI-native LMS for Higher Education

Year
2025
Status
in-progress
Chapter
Startups
Role
Founder & Lead Product Engineer
Duration
2025–Present
Disciplines
Product Development, Business Strategy, UI/UX, AI Architecture
Tags
AI, EdTech, Startup, B2B, SaaS

Full story

The Problem

Universities are relying on infrastructure built in the early 2000s. Professors spend hours grading, navigating archaic UI patterns, and fighting with rich text editors that break tables. Students receive delayed, generic feedback and struggle to find course materials buried in deep folder structures. The friction of the tool gets in the way of the learning. We set out to build an LMS that feels like it belongs in the AI era—proactive, deeply personalized, and invisible when you don't need it.

The Architecture

We built the core engine on top of custom LLM pipelines, focusing heavily on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). The challenge was hallucination control. When a student asks a question about a midterm, the AI must strictly rely on the professor's syllabus, lecture transcripts, and uploaded PDFs. We implemented a vector embedding strategy that isolates course context into ephemeral sandboxes, meaning the AI knows exactly what context it's allowed to pull from at any given millisecond.

Current Status

Currently in closed beta with two private university pilot programs. The feedback loop is intense. We are learning that while AI grading suggestions save time, professors are highly skeptical of automated rubrics unless the reasoning is completely transparent. We are iterating heavily on explainable AI interfaces.

BCKYRD

Hyper-local community marketplace

Year
2024
Status
archived
Chapter
Startups
Role
Co-Founder & Head of Product
Duration
2023–2024
Disciplines
Product Management, Go-To-Market, UI/UX, Growth
Tags
Marketplace, Community, Mobile App

Full story

The Hypothesis

We believed that trust was the biggest friction point in peer-to-peer marketplaces. Craigslist is sketchy, Facebook Marketplace is filled with spam. By restricting the network to verified members of specific gated communities, apartment complexes, or college campuses, we hypothesized that transaction velocity would skyrocket. You are much more likely to rent a drill from someone if you know they live in building B.

Product Execution

We built the MVP in React Native. The onboarding flow was hyper-optimized around geolocation and geofencing. Users had to be physically within the boundary of a supported community to unlock the local marketplace. We implemented a token-based renting system where users earned community credits for listing items, which they could spend to rent items from others.

What We Learned

The hypothesis was correct—trust was high, and engagement was strong. People loved it. However, the market size within individual hyper-local networks was simply too small to sustain the unit economics required for a venture-scale business without expanding into broader, untrusted networks. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) was low, but Lifetime Value (LTV) hit a ceiling fast. We chose to archive the project rather than compromise the core value proposition by opening it to the public.

NewDen Productions

Boutique creative agency specializing in narrative commercials

Year
2023
Status
completed
Chapter
Startups
Role
Founder & Creative Director
Duration
2021–2023
Disciplines
Creative Direction, Cinematography, Business Operations, Copywriting
Tags
Agency, Film, Commercial, Direction

Full story

The Origin

Started in a dorm room with a rented camera and a lot of ambition. I realized early on that D2C brands were tired of standard product-on-white-background shots. They wanted narrative. They wanted emotion. NewDen was built to deliver cinematic storytelling at a fraction of a traditional ad agency's retainer.

Growth & Operations

We grew into a full-scale production team handling end-to-end creative direction. I handled pitching, storyboarding, hiring crew (gaffers, sound recordists, grips), and directing on set. We scaled to multiple five-figure retainers within the first year.

The Exit

After two years, the operational overhead of running a service business began to detract from the actual creative work. I decided to wind down the agency to focus on product building and software engineering, bringing the creative direction skills I learned into product design.

The Honour Club

Exclusive networking and mentorship for young founders

Year
2023
Status
archived
Chapter
Startups
Role
Founding Member
Disciplines
Community Building, Event Strategy, Curation
Tags
Community, Networking, Events

Full story

The Concept

The Honour Club was an experiment in engineered serendipity. We believed that young founders were often isolated and lacked access to established industry veterans who could provide unfiltered advice outside of formal accelerator environments.

The Execution

We hosted private dinners, pitch teardowns, and closed-door strategy sessions. The curation was strict—we looked for outliers. The project ultimately stalled as core members dispersed globally, but the network remains active.

Salad Days

Creative brand direction and campaign strategy

Year
2024
Status
completed
Chapter
Work
Role
Creative Design Intern
Duration
Summer 2024
Company
Salad Days
Disciplines
Brand Identity, Marketing Strategy, Photography, Art Direction
Tags
Branding, Marketing, F&B, Design

Full story

The Brief

Salad Days needed to shed the 'boring diet food' stigma and position themselves as a vibrant, lifestyle-first choice for urban millennials. They approached us with a simple request: make salads look like something you actually want to eat, not something you have to eat.

Art Direction

We moved away from clinical white backgrounds and opted for warm, high-contrast sunlight mimicking a summer afternoon in the Mediterranean. We incorporated bold, slightly brutalist typography to give the brand an edge.

Impact

The campaign ran across digital channels and select out-of-home locations. Engagement rates on visual content increased by 40%, and the brand successfully captured a younger, more design-conscious demographic during the critical summer quarter.

Meridian

Strategic consulting for digital transformation

Year
2023
Status
completed
Chapter
Work
Role
Strategy Consultant
Company
Meridian Consulting
Disciplines
Consulting, Digital Strategy, Operations, Data Analysis
Tags
Consulting, B2B, Strategy

Full story

The Engagement

Worked with a mid-sized logistics company to audit their internal operational workflows. They were dealing with legacy ERP systems that required manual data entry across three separate departments, leading to massive bottlenecks and data desynchronization.

The Solution

We mapped the entire lifecycle of a freight order and recommended a digital transformation roadmap. We identified API integration points between their dispatch software and accounting ledger that could be automated, ultimately recommending a phased transition to a unified logistics SaaS platform. Our analysis showed this would reclaim roughly 15% in lost operational efficiency.

Young Changemakers Programme

National social entrepreneurship initiative

Year
2022
Status
completed
Chapter
College
Role
Lead Coordinator
Duration
1 Year
Company
IIM Ranchi
Disciplines
Event Management, Strategy, Social Impact, Team Leadership
Tags
Community, Social Impact, Education

Full story

The Initiative

The goal was simple: expose high school students to the frameworks of social entrepreneurship before they enter college. We wanted them to look at local community problems not as inevitabilities, but as addressable market failures.

Logistics & Scale

Led a core team of 15 to organize a three-day intensive bootcamp and pitch competition. We vetted over 200 applications from across the country, managed accommodation, and curated a curriculum featuring professors and guest speakers.

The Outcome

We partnered with local NGOs and secured corporate sponsorships to fund the top three student-led social ventures. Several of those seeded projects went on to receive local government backing in their respective states.

Case Competitions

Strategic problem solving under pressure

Year
2022
Status
completed
Chapter
College
Role
Strategist & Presenter
Company
IIM Ranchi
Disciplines
Business Strategy, Data Analysis, Presentation Design
Tags
Strategy, Business, Competition

Full story

The Grind

Participated in and won several national-level case competitions hosted by top-tier consulting firms and FMCG conglomerates. These 48-hour sprints taught me how to distill complex, ambiguous business problems into actionable, data-backed slide decks under extreme time constraints.

E-Cell Leadership

Fostering campus innovation

Year
2021
Status
completed
Chapter
College
Role
Core Committee Member
Company
IIM Ranchi
Disciplines
Community Building, Leadership, Event Planning
Tags
Community, Startups, Networking

Full story

Building the Ecosystem

Organized speaker sessions, founder mixers, and the annual campus startup pitch event. Acted as a bridge between student founders building SaaS MVPs in their dorms and alumni angel investors looking for early-stage deal flow. Handled marketing collateral and outreach.

Portfolio Architecture

A personal archive built on Next.js

Year
2026
Status
in-progress
Chapter
Personal
Role
Designer & Engineer
Duration
Ongoing
Disciplines
Frontend Engineering, UI/UX, System Architecture, Interaction Design
Tags
Web, React, Next.js, Framer Motion, Typescript

Full story

The Philosophy

Traditional portfolios are rigid. They force you into a structure of 'Problem, Solution, Results' which doesn't work for side quests, failed startups, or weird art projects. I wanted to build a digital filing cabinet. An archive that could handle unstructured data gracefully.

The Stack

Built with Next.js App Router, Tailwind CSS, and Framer Motion. The entire site is driven by a flexible JSON-based CMS. Instead of fixed page layouts, projects are composed of dynamic block arrays (Hero, Text, Gallery, etc.) rendered by a central BlockRenderer. It's fully type-safe and SEO optimized via JSON-LD.

The Aesthetic

The visual language borrows heavily from editorial design, modern museum catalogs, and early 2000s Tumblr. Heavy use of film grain, translucent glassmorphism, precise baseline grids, and microscopic typographic details (like the 9px uppercase tracking used throughout the UI).

Nightdrive Radio

A 24/7 generative radio station that plays what the city feels like at 3am

Year
2025
Status
completed
Chapter
Personal
Role
Solo Builder
Disciplines
Web Audio API, Generative Systems, React, State Machines
Tags
Audio, Generative, WebGL, Side-Quest

Full story

The Origin

I was driving home at 3am and the radio played the same four songs it plays at noon. There was no station for the way the city actually feels at that hour—half-asleep, half-watching for headlights. So I started building one. Not a playlist. A thing that listens to the weather, the time, the traffic data, and decides what to play next.

The Mess

The first version was 800 lines of nested if-statements. If it's raining, play this. If it's late, slow it down. By week three it was a monster. I'd written myself into a corner where every new rule broke two old ones. The audio engine was fine—the decision tree was the problem. I was trying to encode taste in code.

The Clarity

A friend said: stop trying to teach it taste. Just teach it what doesn't go together. So I inverted the whole thing. Instead of a graph of what to play, I built a graph of what *never* to play next. Everything else was allowed. Suddenly it sounded like a person. Not a smart person, but a person. That was enough.

What Survived

A small WebGL visualizer that pulses with the weather. A queue system that knows about time-of-day. A public page where anyone can listen. A private admin where I can veto tracks. About 1,400 lines now. Half of what I started with.

What I Removed

User accounts. Comments. Likes. Social sharing. An algorithmic 'for you' feed. A recommendation engine. A mobile app. All of it. None of it was the radio. It was just stuff that surrounds radios on the internet.

AI & Interface Experiments

Exploring the boundaries of LLM integration

Year
2024
Status
archived
Chapter
Personal
Role
Researcher & Prototyper
Disciplines
AI Prototyping, Prompt Engineering, UX Research, LangChain
Tags
AI, LLMs, Prototyping, R&D

Full story

Invisible Interfaces

We are currently stuck in a local maxima where 'adding AI' means adding a chatbot to the corner of the screen. I spent a few months building weekend prototypes exploring how AI could be integrated into software predictively. Focus was on semantic state management—having the LLM infer user intent based on cursor movement and form field interactions, rather than explicit chat prompts.

Street & Architecture

35mm and digital photography

Year
2023
Status
completed
Chapter
Personal
Role
Photographer
Disciplines
Photography, Color Grading, Visual Composition
Tags
Photo, Art, Film

Full story

Contact

That's everything. Or at least everything i wanted you to see today. Say hello — hello@lalitkrishna.com

Hi,
I am

Lalit Krishna

i collect ideas.
sometimes they become companies.

this isn't really a portfolio.
it's just where i leave things.

About section background animation
about

i have commitment issues. that's why i build companies instead of finishing games.

currently
building things that don't ship
based in
a small room, mostly
available for
one good idea per quarter
work

things i started and
didn't always finish. sometimes did...

13 in total · 8 finished · 3 discarded · 2 still cooking
04 · contact

that's everything.
or at least everything i wanted you to see today.

say hello.

04 · contact

that's everything.
or at least everything i wanted you to see today.

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