We started with 50 phone calls, not a product idea.
Every company between roughly 30 and 100 people hits the same wall. What worked at fifteen — just ask in the group chat — quietly stops working. Reimbursement requests get buried under forty messages. The finance manager chases approvals person by person on WhatsApp. Nobody can answer the simple question of what is actually pending.
Before building anything, we spent four weeks calling ops managers, HR leads, finance managers and founders in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune. We asked how internal requests actually moved through their company. The answers were remarkably consistent.
50
discovery calls across five cities
72%
were running requests through WhatsApp or Slack
54%
named reimbursements as the single biggest pain
4 wks
spent listening before writing any code
Why narrow
The tools built for this problem are built for companies three times the size. Keka, Darwinbox, Zoho People and Freshservice all assume you have an HR or IT team to configure them and weeks to spend on implementation. At 50 people you have neither. The alternative — Notion, Google Forms, Slack workflows — is free and falls apart at exactly this size, because it depends on someone remembering to check.
So Opslane deliberately does one thing. Not payroll, not performance reviews, not compliance. Just internal requests and the approvals that go with them, working on day one without a setup project.
Who is building it
Opslane is built by Nathan Maharaj Kharwanlang, a computer science and AI/ML undergraduate at PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, currently on a SURF research internship at Purdue University's Convergence Design Lab.
It is bootstrapped and deliberately small. We are early — we are onboarding our first customers now, and the quotes on the home page come from research conversations rather than from paying users. We would rather say that plainly than dress it up. If you are evaluating Opslane, you will be talking to the person who builds it.
Where your data lives
Everything is stored in Mumbai, on infrastructure that separates each company's data at the database level rather than in application code. The details are in our Privacy Policy.
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Tell us how requests move through your company today.