Inside SoftCircuits Labs: The First Log Entry

Welcome to the first edition of our weekly blog - Inside SoftCircuits Labs.

9 years ago, we started SoftCircuits from a small room in Delhi and today, I am writing this blog from our lab in a remote village in the hills of Himachal. In this weekly blog I will try to share the ideas and stories behind our products, our success and failures and hopefully make you walk along with us on our journey of building a hardware lab. And I would be sharing all this without the use of AI/LLM, because writing this blog is like writing a personal journal, and no LLM can do that for us. I plan this blog to be like a conversation between me and the readers, and not be like a polished post meant for gaining traction.

Front view of our lab

A sudden 9 Year Milestone

Recently while filing some forms, I realized that it has been more than 9 years since we started our company, and I must admit it was a surprise. We have been so engaged in building products, designing solutions, writing code, debugging the hardware and keeping up with the paperwork, that we never stopped to count the number of years we have spent in our lab. Maybe it’s a good thing, because it implies we were happy doing what we wanted to do and time just flew by. Or maybe we were just busy trying to survive in a business world when none of us knew how to actually run a business. All we knew was how to build products ( electronics, mechanical and sometimes software ), and we just learnt everything else that would let us continue that work (like marketing, accounting, basic graphics design etc.). And just like that we have come close to a decade. 

Since our Co-founder Arpit is a pure tech guy who processes all his thoughts in images, I had to put our story into words. But writing has never been my strong suit either. I feel like the words cross my mind faster than I can write/type, and so, I could never complete any writeup. Also, it takes a lot of effort for me to switch mental gears between hardware design and writing. 

But now that we are so close to completing a decade, I intend to write one post every week, and unlike earlier, I would post it even if it feels incomplete or imperfect. I might not be able to convey my thoughts completely, but I hope writing them down  will help us reflect on and analyze our ideas, and with time, all these ramblings will start making sense. And when we are about to complete 20 years, we will look back at these times and these will be the stories that our kids will grow up listening to.

Finally, let me introduce myself. I am Swati Saryan Negi, Co-Founder and CEO of SoftCircuits Labs.I am an Electronics Engineer by education, but I also handle everything from paperwork & finance to social media posts for our small company and now I would like to see if I can be a storyteller as well..

Thanks for reading. See you next week.