Coup De Mela: fundraising in fundraising

2026-02-28 :: 1120 words :: 6 mins

This is a story of how to make money as a guy who knows how to write software. Little bit of mafia-ism, deal making, cut throat business. With a hint of over exaggeration for dramatic effect.

In our college, we have an annual fund raising event called Mela in which student's set up stalls and sell things. The profits generated from these student stalls can be kept by the students themselves and the college makes the fund through the stall rental fees.

College rents stalls -> Students pay rent -> Students sell things -> Students keep the PROFIT

Setup

It all started with a man with a craving for Pasta, my dear friend Mr. P ¹. He was good chef and a great guy, but of course no man can achieve greatness without having people with him. I joined him in his endeavor along with Ms. Purple and Mr. Shark, and we decided to setup a pasta stall known as "Fasta Pasta" ².

We made posters, we made promotional videos ³, and we did PR. It did help that Mr P was quite a rather socially gifted person, and I myself wasn't exactly that socially challenged. Pre-orders were lining up, things were going good. But I wasn't satisfied.

It was apparent that my people were in it for the fun of it, as was I. But then, I saw others- who, in my opinion - where a tad bit more capitalistic. I chatted up with some friends, and friends of friends, and roughly got to know how much money was involved in this whole event. Let's just say, people were ballin.

Prisoner's dilemma

One thing I noticed was that half the stalls were worried about getting customers, as they weren't quite confident in their marketing nor brand recognition. The most lucrative of all (atleast on paper), the game stalls were rather worried over buying prizes, as they couldn't just give out prizes for everybody. At the same time, the food stalls were worried that they might not even get enough customers to see green. And people were rather suddenly put into this because the exams had just ended a week ago.

Let me introduce you to, Inter Stall Discounts.

As Mr P our boss, was not a hosteler, and since I was, I took up the job of negotiating these discounts with the other stalls. People were actually interested, as this is a win-win scenario for all involved. The food stalls could just hike up the prices by 10% or something, issue a lot of discounts coupons across the game stalls, which will funnel all those people to our stall.

As I was discussing this with the other stalls, the food stall guys had concern, what if the game stalls kept on issuing these coupons. Fine we'll make it limited. What if the people who get the coupons don't actually come to the stall?

They wanted a solution, which could see who had what coupons, and maintain the amount of coupons. Well obviously paper wasn't gonna cut it, so software it was.

Software Design and Development

Introducing Mela Coup. The Coupon Management System for stalls in Mela 2026. Free to use for partners of "Fasta Pasta", and full access for inter stall coupon network for a fixed fee.

Most of the app was made in 3 hours in Antigravity. Tech stack was standard React + Next.js combo with Supabase handling database. I wanted the UI to have an authentic feel as this was a product which needed to be sold, and had to have a level of human effort visible. ⁴ Nothing fancy was needed, this was basically a use and throw software.

Architecture was basically:
PWA <-> Next.js <-> Supabase

Every user is a stall with their own dashboard. Stalls decide who they want to colab with, how many coupons could be issued, who got issued what coupon, proper coupon tracking, customer convenience, etc.

I did wish to make an admin panel, but as the actual program essentially did not have any algorithmic part to it, apart from being a CRUD interface for the supabase tables, directly adding and deleting rows from its dashboard made the most sense.

There was no option for a new user to be registered, it had to be done manually by me by using a little node.js script I made. Anything happens, call me. The app was useless without me. Highly useful approach when you're monetizing something.

Day of Action

Thing was a hit. We had around 6 stalls who signed up, with a 7th stall asking to join in the morning.

The fact that this could be sold had been in my mind, but Mr. Shark ¹ is the one who actually connected me up with the clients. I went to their territory, laid the terms of service and money involved, negotiated, and finally shook hands on a good deal.

Contrary to my expectations, there was only one instance where the app had issues, that too under time pressure, the stall owners dealt with it his way. In the post-mortem I realized that it was poor UX design on my part combined with the poor (actually lack of) onboarding of stall owners. Overall performed good for a project made in 3 hours. Some customers tried stacking up their discounts, overlooking the T&C that discounts couldn't be stacked. Then again, our fantastic PR work and fair item pricing ensured that it couldn't affect us. We happened to be the only pure vegetarian stall ⁵, with also one of the most affordable proper meals, combined with a Mojito.

At the time of writing the site is still up at https://mela-coup.vercel.app/, which shall remain there until Vercel or Supabase removes their bountiful free tiers. Thank you for reading my article.

Please share any thoughts/comments you have via mail at vicfic@pm.me