Growing up in the suburbs of Norway didn't stop Bani Singh from exploring opportunities outside of her comfort zone: "Before my freshman year of high school I realized that I didn't have a good understanding of what the world had to offer." she recalls.
At 15, she started experimenting with programming after attending local events and conferences for entrepreneurs and investors. She realized that many of the people who inspired her had one important skill in common: They were active programmers and could build their ideas into reality. After being inspired by meeting founders in the Norwegian ecosystem, she started experimenting with her own ideas and building out scripts in Python and Javascript that would help her learn the basics of programming. Even then, she wanted to move faster.
College and immersing in the world of tech
Eager to explore what the world had to offer, she skipped a year of high school to pursue her undergraduate degree at Minerva University in San Francisco. Here, while majoring in Computer Science, she got her first chance to share her apps with the world after becoming an avid hackathon participant. The then 17-year-old attended hackathons at locations like Samsung Headquarters, Johns Hopkins, and even traveled to the only hackathon that has been organized in the Vatican State - VHacks. Beyond attending, she ended up winning at a lot of them as well.
At hackathons, participants compete in teams to create business ideas that they present to a panel of judges. They often last 24-48 hours and the events are known to be sleepless and filled with panels, energy drinks and non-stop work. "My favorite part was working alongside strangers under pretty stressful, but fun challenges - there's a camaraderie that exists during these hackathons that I have yet to find anywhere else," she notes.
Alongside her formal Computer Science education, the hackathons helped her understand how to build full-scale applications. Her first attempt at launching one herself was during the summer of 2018 when she built an application to trade football cards on Ethereum's Blockchain. The application was launched during the FIFA 2018 World Cup and she received a grant from the 1517 Fund to launch the application.
"Going from hackathons to a full-scale application that had to be maintained every day was completely different. I'd encourage any engineer who is learning how to code to push themselves and launch a production-ready application - it would probably teach you the most in the shortest amount of time," she says.
Bani further immersed herself in the world of tech by interning at coveted companies like Cloudflare and Microsoft, built a large portfolio of side projects and at the age of 19, she became the technical lead at JUV Consulting, a marketing consultancy helping brands like VSCO and Cole Haan market to Gen Zs. Here, she helped the team with building small-scale apps to drive operational efficiencies internally.
WaitlistAPI and Learning How to Market Products
When the pandemic came around, Bani set herself an ambitious goal: To code every single week for a year and learn how to build more enduring applications that thousands of people would also find useful.
Just before turning 21, she launched WaitlistAPI - a software product that allows businesses to put no-code waitlists on their website, and generate referral links for users to share with their friends. If users share the link with their friends, they are moved up on the waitlist, and ultimately gain access to products earlier than everyone else. "WaitlistAPI allowed brands to identify their biggest fans before launch. Turning those fans into brand evangelists functions as a powerful growth driver."
She took three weeks to build the product after a friend shared his frustrations with launching a waitlist on his landing page for an upcoming launch. "I asked him a few questions about what he wanted and then went to work. It sounded like a well-scoped and fun product to build," she shares. She eventually launched WaitlistAPI on a forum called ProductHunt, where it ended up becoming the #1 Product of the Day after receiving thousands of upvotes from users on the platform.
Here, Bani learned the importance of marketing your product. "I had previously built apps in silos where I would spend the most time programming and not marketing. With WaitlistAPI, I was now working actively to market my product on forums, Twitter and product boards. An important lesson I gained was the importance of marketing your product aggressively. If you're an engineer wanting to make an impact, you have to be good at marketing - only then will you reach users who could find your product useful," she shares.
After college: Starting a company
After graduating from Minerva University in 2021, Bani wanted to take her lessons to the next level. "I wanted to truly bring together everything I had learned so far and gear up to spend my next 10 years building something truly impactful," she says. Mid-2021 she started researching challenges and problems on internet forums and talking to users. It was then that she found various communities on Reddit that were using Google forms to launch auctions, drops and sale formats that could not be satisfied by platforms like Shopify and Squarespace.
"It was mind-blowing to me how people would cobble together custom solutions for sales that didn't have a reasonable platform to use. You can't launch an auction easily on Shopify, so I wanted to experiment with building something that would be useful for launching sales with alternative formats". She began working alongside a community of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts who actively use forms to launch their sales and launched Limited in November 2021. The company has received institutional funding, done 5-figures of GMV and hundreds of purchases have been made on the website. "Our goal is to enable new forms of commerce for people who can not take their sales to Etsy or Shopify," she shares.
Keeping up her love for programming and looking ahead
Now a team of three, Bani shares how she still actively contributes as a programmer on the team. "I'm fortunate to be able to work on both the business and the technical side of Limited," she shares. Her biggest advice to anyone wanting to become a better programmer or start their own business is to iterate and experiment. "I look fondly back at every side project I've had in the past as they've helped me become a better programmer. I would encourage anyone to build and be comfortable with launching small things, even if they don't end up being successful."
