London, September 2025 to June 2026.
When I moved to the UK to start at Warwick, I knew one thing before I had even finished unpacking: finding a job here was not going to be a task. It was going to be a project. An entire project, with its own moving parts, its own inefficiencies, and its own quiet ways of wearing you down.
I was right, and then some. What follows is my side of how that job hunt eventually turned into Muesli, and how Muesli ended up on stage at The Shard.
A project of its own
The hard part of job hunting as an international student is not that any single step is difficult. It is that there are so many steps, and almost all of them work against you. Every listing lives somewhere different. Every application asks for the same details typed out from scratch. And sitting behind most of them is an ATS, an applicant tracking system that quietly filters you out before a human ever reads your name, on rules you never get to see.
So you spend real effort just getting past the machinery. And even when you do, even when everything is submitted cleanly and on time, you are still one of hundreds, sometimes thousands, applying for the same role. Rejections come with the territory, not because you did anything wrong, but because of the sheer volume of people in the queue beside you.
Once I understood that, the conclusion was obvious. If the volume is unavoidable and the friction is everywhere, then the one thing genuinely in my control was how efficiently I moved through it all. Streamlining was not a nice-to-have. It was the whole game.
It started with a spreadsheet
I did not start with anything clever. I started where almost everyone starts, with a table. Google Sheets, because it is the tool everyone already reaches for and nobody needs teaching. I wanted to optimise the most basic thing first: simply knowing what I had applied to, where each one stood, and what was coming up next.
But a tracker is only useful if you actually keep it updated, and updating it by hand is exactly the kind of small, repetitive chore I knew I would start skipping. I had been reading about n8n and what it can do with automations, so I decided to give it a proper go.
That turned into its own piece of work, which I wrote about separately in how I automated my job application tracking with n8n. The short version: I paste in a job link, and the workflow fetches the page, parses out the title, company, salary, location and deadline, and logs all of it into my tracker automatically. No retyping, no switching tabs.
Then I pushed it one step further. I built a second n8n workflow for the part I dreaded most, tailoring a CV for every single application. I give it the details of a role, and it takes my base resume, swaps in the specific content that role needs, and produces a Word document I can convert to PDF and send off. The thing that used to eat a whole evening now takes a moment, and it logs itself while it is at it.
None of this was a product yet. It was just me, refusing to do the same boring thing twice.
Warwick made building feel normal
Around the same time, the environment I was in started changing how I thought. I was taking modules on leadership with my course director, Dr Bo Kelestyn, and on digital business strategy with Professor Jochem Hummel, and the whole place is wired for building. Between those classes and a steady run of entrepreneurship clubs and societies, the idea of actually making something stopped feeling like a leap and started feeling like the obvious next step.
I also had some form for this. I had worked on zero-to-one ideas back in India through 2025, and I am currently building one of my own products in stealth. So when I looked down at my little pile of job-hunt automations, the question almost asked itself: why not turn this into something real? Entering the Gillmore FinTech Hackathon around then only pushed me the same way, toward creating rather than just coping.
Why it felt realistic for me
There is a real difference between wanting to build something and believing you actually can. For me, the belief came from two places.
The first is my background. I have spent the last three years or so as a product manager and a business analyst, which means I am comfortable taking a messy real-world problem and turning it into something structured, scoped, and buildable. That is most of the job.
The second is timing. The technology available right now, with Anthropic and OpenAI at the frontier, has quietly handed people like me a new kind of power. As a product manager, I can take an idea and bring it to life in a way that simply was not realistic a couple of years ago. That combination, the product instinct plus the tools to act on it, is exactly why this felt within reach instead of aspirational.
The golden opportunity
The moment it all came together was the Google x NatWest hackathon, though getting there was anything but automatic. Everyone on the team had walked in with their own idea of what we should build, and they were spread right across different industries, from finance to education to the usual agentic pitches that float around every hackathon. I genuinely believed mine was the one we should back, because it was the problem we were all living, so I had to make the case for it and win people over, one by one, until the room agreed. That took some real convincing, and how that conversation actually went is a story in itself, which I have told in the write-up of that hackathon.
Once they were in, we built. We took it from idea to working prototype in three days and pitched at the Google London office, finishing Top 4 out of 26. Honestly, the result mattered less than what we saw while standing there. We could tell exactly where the gaps were, what we had glossed over, and what a serious version of this would need to answer. Those gaps quietly became our homework.
That product was Muesli: everything about a job hunt in one place, so you spend your time applying instead of organising.
Everything sorted at the Shard
By the time we reached the Shard Startup Summit, we were not improvising anymore. Every question that had caught us off guard at the hackathon, we now had an answer for. We knew our target segment and exactly who we were building for. We knew the ask, the timeline, the kind of users we were going after, the technology underneath it, and the finances behind it. We had a detailed, honest plan for why this actually works.
So we went all in. On the day we gave a presentation we were genuinely proud of, and we could feel the difference in the room. There were strong teams pitching, but we carried a clarity most of them did not, for a simple reason: this was the second time we were taking Muesli to a stage, and the second time you tell a story, you tell it far better.
We finished as first runner-up. The full account of that day lives in my write-up of the summit, but the honest headline is that the win was built long before the day itself, in every small automation and every gap we had bothered to close.
What I actually believe now
If this whole stretch taught me anything, it is this: start with the minor inefficiencies in your own workflow, and build the bespoke thing that fixes them. That is where real products come from, far more often than from some grand idea dreamt up in a vacuum.
The goal I keep moving toward is a setup where the repetitive, time-stealing work is fully automated, so the hours it frees up go to the things that genuinely deserve a person. Operations should be handed to the machines. Strategy, innovation, and the whole design-thinking process should stay firmly in our hands. Augment with AI where you can, automate entirely where it makes sense.
AI will not replace humans. But the humans who use AI will replace the ones who don't.
I do not mean that as a threat. I mean it as an invitation. The tools are here, they are astonishing, and the barrier to building your way out of your own problems has never been lower. Muesli began as a spreadsheet I was too impatient to keep updating by hand. I would genuinely encourage anyone to start there, with the small thing that annoys them, and see how far it can go.