What Cashfree and CARS24 Taught Me About Building Habits at Scale

Most advice a JEE or NEET student gets about staying consistent comes from a teacher, a topper, or a parent repeating "be disciplined" for the hundredth time. Mine doesn't come from any of those places. It comes from seven years of building products at Cashfree and CARS24, where the actual job was getting people to come back and do the same thing again, reliably, without anyone standing over their shoulder.

That's not a metaphor I'm stretching to fit. It's the literal mechanic underneath Arjun Pathshala.

A habit is not a personality trait — it's an engineering problem

In consumer product work, nobody ever ships a feature and hopes users "remember" to use it. That's treated as a design failure, not a user failing you. Instead, every retention-focused product is built around the same three-part loop: a trigger that doesn't depend on the user remembering anything, a low-friction action that takes seconds, and a visible reward that closes the loop immediately.

A payment reminder doesn't ask you to remember your due date — it pings you on the day, at a time your usage pattern says you're likely to act, and shows you exactly what happens the moment you tap. None of that works because users are disciplined. It works because someone else engineered the trigger so the user never had to supply it themselves.

"Just be more disciplined" is a product built with no trigger

Here's the uncomfortable translation: telling a student to "be consistent" on their own is asking them to be their own trigger system, every single day, for two years, with no external check. In product terms, that's the equivalent of shipping a great feature and hoping people remember it exists. It fails for the same reason apps with no notifications fail — not because the people are lazy, but because remembering-to-act is a genuinely unreliable mechanism, for anyone, at any age.

This isn't a controversial idea in product circles. It's why every retention-serious app invests heavily in exactly the part students are told to provide for free: the reminder, not the willpower.

What we actually borrowed for Arjun Pathshala

The daily 15-minute mentor check-in is the trigger — external, scheduled, and it doesn't rely on the student's own memory or motivation on a bad day. It happens whether or not the student feels like it, the same way a well-timed notification fires regardless of how the user feels about opening the app that day.

The session itself is deliberately low-friction: 45–50 seconds per student, not a long sit-down. Any habit mechanic that asks for too much per repetition collapses fast — the same reason the best-designed daily actions in a product are the shortest ones, not the most thorough.

And the weekly review is the reward loop — a visible signal of progress (attendance, consistency, backlog shrinking) that closes the feedback loop the same week it happens, instead of a JEE result that only arrives once, over a year later. Students who wait a full year for their only feedback signal have nothing pulling them back day to day. Students who see a weekly signal have something concrete to respond to.

Why this matters more than another motivational framework

I've also lived the other side of this — a regular school in Kaushambi for Class 11, then Kota for Class 12, which I've written about separately. That experience taught me what the missing piece looks like: someone checking in daily. My time building products taught me why it actually works, mechanically, instead of just believing it works because it felt true to me personally.

Both things had to be true for Arjun Pathshala to be more than a nice story. If you're trying to figure out whether a program like this could actually help, that's the honest pitch: we didn't design a motivational system. We designed a trigger, sized to be impossible to skip and light enough to sustain, the same way you'd design any habit that's actually meant to stick.

If that's the piece you or your child is missing, apply for the Lakshya Program.