“Students were spending six or seven days just searching for a place to stay.”

That observation stayed with Vishal for years.

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Not because he heard it somewhere, Because he lived it.

Before becoming the founder of SEECOBO, Vishal was simply a commerce student from Pune preparing for Chartered Accountancy.

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Like thousands of other students moving to cities for education, he was navigating a routine that felt exhausting long before studies even began.

-Finding the right coaching class.

-Looking for a hostel.

-Checking mess facilities.

-Searching for a quiet study space.

NONE of it existed in ONE place!

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And what should have been a simple search often turned into 6/ 7 days of:

-running around the city,

-asking people,

-checking rooms,

-shifting accommodations,

-adjusting budgets &

Repeating the same process again if something didn’t work out…

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For Vishal, this wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was a pattern he kept seeing around him.

LIKE A NEVER ENDING LOOP

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Students arriving in a new city were always lost in the same maze.

And that’s where the first idea quietly took shape.

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The first attempt

Back in 2018, Vishal decided to act on that observation and launched a platform called classplanner.in.

The idea was straightforward.

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Create a platform where students could easily find information about coaching institutes, hostels, mess facilities, and study spaces in one place instead of spending days searching across the city.

It was a practical idea built directly from a student’s experience.

But like many early startup attempts, timing had other plans.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, offline education stopped almost overnight. Coaching institutes shut down, hostels emptied out, and maintaining the platform became nearly impossible.

The project had to be paused.

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This was A phase of uncertainty!

After classplanner.in stopped, Vishal explored different directions.

He moved into online teaching, trying to stay connected with the education ecosystem.

Later, he started a food business in his hometown, hoping to build something independently. That venture ran for about one and a half years before eventually shutting down.

At that point, like many aspiring founders, Vishal also stepped into the corporate world & took up a job.

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But the idea of building something of his own never really left him…

Time did pass. But, the problem he had noticed years ago still existed.

Students were still struggling with the same issues when they moved to new cities.

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Restarting the idea - this time differently!

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In 2024, Vishal decided to revisit the idea again.

This time, the platform returned with a new name and a clearer structure: SEECOBO

The name itself explains the platform’s purpose:

SEECOBO- Search. Compare. Book.

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Instead of students spending days moving from one place to another, covo aims to bring everything onto one platform - helping them discover hostels, mess services, study rooms & coaching resources quickly and reliably. The platform is currently launched in Pune, where students can browse available options & reduce the search process from 6 / 7 days to just 1 / 2 days.

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For students moving to a new city, this difference matters. Even parents who often try to arrange accommodation for their children from another city, could explore options more safely & confidently.

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The platform is free for students, while revenue comes from service providers like hostels & mess owners through subscriptions / commissions. At the same time, the platform also helps these local providers digitize their services and reach students more easily.

Right now, SEECOBO has an Android application live, with iOS development planned next.\

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A shift in mindset

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While building SEECOBO, Vishal also became part of the 18startup Inner Circle program and that experience helped reshape the way he approached entrepreneurship. Until then, much of his journey had been about ideas and experiments. But like many early founders, he had already gone through phases that tested his patience and confidence.

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Some of the challenges he navigated along the way included:

• Building his first platform classplanner.in and watching it pause because the pandemic shut down offline education

• Trying a food business in his hometown, which eventually failed after running for nearly one and a half years

• Moving into a corporate job, while still holding on to the ambition of building something of his own

• Restarting the same idea years later, this time with clearer conviction and a stronger execution mindset

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The 18startup program helped him look at this journey differently.

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Instead of just thinking about ideas, Vishal began focusing on execution & momentum. The environment also encouraged founders to talk openly about their work, exchange feedback and build connections with people who were solving different problems in their own startups.

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For him, that shift mattered. Because sometimes the biggest change for a founder is not the idea itself, it’s the way they start approaching the journey.

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What comes next

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Today, SEECOBO is still at an early stage.

But the direction is clear.

The goal is to gradually expand the platform beyond Pune and across multiple student cities in India, making it easier for students to find essential resources when they move away from home.

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For Vishal, the idea isn’t complicated. He simply wants to remove a problem he once faced himself.

A problem that thousands of students still face every year.

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What began as a personal frustration during CA preparation has now turned into something Vishal is steadily building-

One step, One city & One student problem at a time.

And sometimes, that’s how most startup journeys actually begin.

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If you want to hear Vishal talk about this journey in his own words from his CA preparation days to building NAME you can watch the full Inner Circle podcast episode on YouTube.

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