The story
Where this started, and what it’s building toward.
How it started
It began out of boredom. No grand plan, no market-research spreadsheet — just idle curiosity on a slow evening. I’d been looking at interactive city maps that exist for places like San Francisco or Bangalore, and one question followed me around for days: why doesn’t Hyderabad have something like this?
So I built one. A startup map, plotting the city’s companies at real office locations, filterable by sector. Nothing fancy in scope — just something that didn’t exist yet. I posted it around a few platforms without much expectation, and the response surprised me. People shared it, asked when their company would be added. The gap wasn’t that Hyderabad lacked substance; it was that nobody had built a visible, digital layer on top of what was already here. That reaction turned a bored evening into a direction.
The next idea was impossible to miss if you live here: a new cafe every week, sometimes every few days, and no good way to actually explore it. So the second build became the Eateries Race — a discovery map with a leaderboard, weekly themes, and a GPS-verified check-in so claiming a spot means you were actually there. A game layered on a map, for a city where the food scene is one of the fastest-changing things about it.
Two projects in, the realisation landed: why stop at startups and food. I grew up in this city and live in it now, and there wasn’t one place to understand any layer of it — heritage, neighbourhoods, water, weekends — all of it scattered across government PDFs, outdated blog posts and word of mouth. That became Mapping HYD, shaped alongside my cofounder Shiva Chandra Takkelapati from a loose ambition into a real series: startups, where to live, weekend escapes, lakes, heritage — each a separate layer of the same city, under one growing product.
Why a series, not a single app
A single app has a ceiling. It solves one problem and plateaus. A series compounds: every new map extends the reach of the whole, every mention strengthens the same domain, and every person who finds one map has more waiting once they’re in. Mapping HYD isn’t six apps that share a brand — it’s one product with six features, shipped one at a time.
How the pages are built
The plan is simple to state and slower to execute: keep shipping one layer at a time, keep the pages specific instead of general, and let the domain do the compounding while the content does the answering. Every locality gets its own page. Every lake. Every landmark. Dozens, eventually hundreds, of specific answers instead of one general page trying to rank for everything.
What’s live
- Hyderabad Startup Map — companies, open jobs, funding.
- Eateries Race — discovery map with a city leaderboard.
Deccan Heritage, Where to Live, Weekend Escapes and Lakes are in progress.