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I am an internal medicine resident doctor living and working in Brooklyn, NY. My family comes from a small village in Punjab, India, though I grew up in rural Wisconsin.
Right now, I run a project called BOLO Instinct. It’s an ad-free, 100% free website that helps kids in rural Punjab study for their Class 10 and Class 12 board exams (the PSEB state curriculum).
In Punjab's government schools, these exams make or break a kid's future. If you pass with high marks, you qualify for science and college tracks. If you fail, you usually end up doing daily wage manual labor. Wealthy families in cities pay for private coaching apps, but kids in farming villages can't afford monthly subscriptions, and commercial apps are too bloated to run on cheap Android phones.
During medical school, the only reason I passed my USMLE licensing exams was question banks—tools like UWorld and Amboss that don't just show flashcards, but make you answer tough multiple-choice questions and then explain why every wrong option is wrong. I wanted village kids in Punjab to have that exact same high-yield study tool, written bilingually in English and Gurmukhi Punjabi, without paywalls, ads, or logins.
My goals for the next 12 months:
Finish the interactive multiple-choice question engine for Class 10 Science and Math, complete with detailed step-by-step rationales for every single answer choice.
Build out the Class 12 Science curriculum (Physics, Chemistry, Biology).
Keep the platform completely free, without ads or accounts, forever.
How I'll do it: I do all the coding myself in VS Code, using LLMs like Claude and Gemini to speed up drafting the curriculum questions and frontend code. The basic site and all 16 chapters of Class 10 Science are already built and live on bolo-instinct.com.
I’m designing the platform to be as lightweight as possible—plain web pages that cache locally, so even if a student is on a cracked $60 phone with spotty 3G data in a village, it still loads in under two seconds. To get students using it, I’m working directly with local teachers, village gurdwaras, and community libraries to put up posters with QR codes and spread the word.
I’ll use the money for three concrete things:
Server and Database Infrastructure ($800 – $1,200): Paying for reliable cloud database hosting (Supabase / Render) and domain maintenance so the site doesn't crash when hundreds of students take mock tests at the same time.
AI API Tokens for Question Calibration ($1,200 – $1,800): Drafting, auditing, and translating thousands of practice questions with thorough answer explanations takes a lot of model compute. API credits let me run batches through frontier reasoning models to verify syllabus accuracy.
If I get the minimum ($1,000), it covers the database and API costs for the Class 10 launch. If I get the full amount ($3,500), it covers both Class 10 and Class 12 plus hosting runway for the next two years.
It's just me.
I'm currently an internal medicine resident physician. Before this, I went to medical school and completed my undergraduate degree in Wisconsin.
During medical school, I co-founded an admissions workbook and planner project for pre-med students, so I have experience building educational resources from scratch. For BOLO Instinct, I've done 100% of the software development, database setup, and content authoring on my own time during residency weekends and post-call days. I don't draw any salary from this; it's a personal seva project.
The biggest risk isn't the code—it's distribution. If teachers and parents in rural Punjab don't hear about the site, or if they assume it's a scam because it's free, kids won't use it. I'm mitigating that by relying on direct grassroots contacts: village teachers, local gurdwaras, and physical flyers rather than online social media ads that rural students never see.
Another risk is slow internet and low-end hardware. That's why I deliberately built BOLO Instinct as a lightweight web app that doesn't need an app store download, doesn't require creating an account, and doesn't load heavy trackers or video files.
Lastly, residency hours are long. But the platform architecture is already live and functioning. Adding new chapters is modular, and I treat building this as my creative outlet outside the hospital.
$0 from outside sources. I’ve personally paid around $800 to $1,000 out of my own residency paycheck to cover domain names, server tests, and LLM API costs.
I also submitted applications to The Awesome Foundation ($1,000), Emergent Ventures, The Pollination Project ($500), and an outreach proposal to the AAPI Charitable Foundation, but none of those are awarded yet.