I started HEXSOCIETY in my second year of B.Tech because the curriculum at the time wasn't going to teach me what I actually wanted to learn — Web3, AI, security primitives, the new stack. A small group of us started running our own workshops, which started attracting students from other colleges, and the thing took on a life of its own.
What was originally "let's figure this out together" became, over time, a real platform with sponsors, partnerships, and a brand.
Three things mattered, in order of importance:
- Quality over reach. Workshops were curated tightly. We turned down speakers who didn't fit, even when we needed bodies on stage.
- Real alliances, not logos. I treated every partnership pitch as a B2B sale — what does this org want from a student community, what can we credibly deliver, what's the actual win-win.
- Compounding through events. Each Illuminati edition built on the last — the 2023 edition got us in the door for 2024's bigger sponsors.
- 600+ members across multiple colleges
- Strategic event alliances closed with Polygon Vadodara, Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC), and AWS Community
- 4,000+ participants at Illuminati 2024, scaled across institutions
- TalentForge — a sub-initiative bridging member skill development with industry-aligned outputs
- Sponsor lifecycle management end-to-end: outreach, pitch, contracting, activation, post-event reporting
HEXSOCIETY was my first real exposure to the gap between what a community wants to be and what it can sustain. Growth without infrastructure is fragile. We hit moments where membership outpaced our ability to run good programming, and the answer was always to slow down, fix the process, then grow again.
The other big lesson: in BD, the pitch isn't the hard part. The hard part is doing what you said you'd do, on time, every time, for long enough that partners start referring you to other partners. Reputation compounds slowly and breaks fast.