About
About me
Hello! I’m Roshan Mishra, a programmer, writer, and builder in Bangalore. Over the last decade, I’ve led technology teams from scratch to launch AI SaaS products, recommendation engines, edtech curricula, Fortune 500 market research, and open-source strategy for non-profits. At their core, these efforts involved taking systems apart and working backwards from my ultimate goal to the current state rather than pushing forward from a standpoint of existing tech infrastructure. It’s been both mentally and professionally fulfilling.
Problem
More often than not, agencies, consultancies, and non-profits sustain themselves on low-budget but high-impact systems that were cobbled together on the fly and are seldom documented. These systems are almost always load-bearing systems. In other words, they lie at the heart of what the organisation does. I’ve been part of and run several small businesses. Over the years, I’ve seen them all lurch from one shore to another on the strength of whatever duct-tape kludge just happened to be lying about. Examples include:
- A Google Sheet used as a database, riddled with hard-coded lookup tables
- A Zapier workflow with no error handling and no end-to-end testing
- An unvetted AI model, an unregulated API, and some mental gymnastics used to raise the bar for client delivery
Bit by bit, the duct-tape workarounds accumulate and large-scale fragility follows in their wake. No one can tell what’s going to snap next.
Solution
Let’s take your operational mess for a walk through a series of audits, find the risk, and fix the critical part:
- Map the tools, workflows, and manual processes
- Find the single points of failure and information bottlenecks
- Rebuild fragile systems from the ground up, making them fully documented and maintainable in the process
I work with your existing tools: Airtable, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Supabase, Retool, Python scripts, Google Apps Script, and even a few custom web apps. Only when the tool is the problem do I replace it.
Focus: Small teams
Large businesses obviously have IT departments. Small teams do not. In fact, many of them don’t even have one, every such operation relying on the founder or a single ops manager to grasp a vague idea of what they’re doing. This leaves gaping holes and just growing the business makes it harder to put out fires. My focus is on making the internal systems of growing businesses reliable. Not necessarily to scale them up to enterprise transformation, but to get ahead of the inevitable.
A note on AI
If you’re not using AI tools, you’re one of the few. More likely, your team already is, with or without approval. I can help you discover what’s actually in use, map the data flows, and establish policy and guardrails that make your team faster while letting you sleep easier knowing your client data is handled securely. Think of it as a quick operational hygiene exercise you’ll want to do anyway, both for your own understanding and to answer those pesky security questionnaires.
Engagement model
Most engagements jump straight into fixing the thing that’s causing pain: a Workflow Rebuild Sprint or a Systems Handover Pack. When you know something’s wrong but not where, an Internal Systems Risk Audit comes first: fixed-scope, time-boxed, and targeted at producing a clear picture of the systems and what might go wrong with them. Every engagement I offer is fixed-scope and fixed-fee, no hourly billing and no open-ended retainers. You know what you get, when, and how it ends.
If what you’ve read above bears a worrying resemblance to your own business, give me thirty minutes to discuss the operational pain you’re feeling and work out whether (or not) an audit might be appropriate. No hard sell, no on-the-spot proposal, just a relaxed conversation about what the next step might look like.
Elsewhere: LinkedIn · GitHub · Twitter/X · hi [at] roshanmishra [dot] in