Hamster

Last updated March 18, 2025

Hamster was my venture right out of college along with a friend. We were trying to build personal tutors for standardised competitive exams, long after the final days of the online learning frenzy. We thought LLMs could finally help solve Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem. This was back in ‘22–23 when LLMs were nowhere close to as good as they are now. I remember spending over a week in March of ‘23 just to make sure GPT-3.5 could give us a structured output. This sounds like a foreign concept in ‘25.

This was more of a research project in hindsight. We spent more time tinkering with models, and barely any time talking to users. After a few attempts at finding a wedge into the market (different exams where LLMs would work better instead of JEE which is math heavy / trying to sell a related solution to schools etc), we figured it made sense to build for a more relatable consumer if we were going to have fun doing it.