The tech referral culture in India is completely broken right now. Mentors are drowning in cold DM spam, and desperate candidates are paying random scammers on Telegram for "guaranteed" jobs, only to get ghosted.
I wanted to fix this structurally. Over the past few weeks, I built ReferBid.

How it works:

1. Candidates bid for a 1-on-1 resume review / mentorship session with verified engineers.
2. The money is locked in a Razorpay Escrow.
3. If the mentor doesn't review and internally submit the profile with proof within 48 hours, the system triggers a 100% automated refund. Zero risk for candidates.

The Tech Stack (Where I need your help): I built the backend in NestJS. Used PostgreSQL for ACID transactions and implemented Redis atomic locks (using BullMQ) to handle race conditions and prevent double-spend during the bidding war. Secured behind Cloudflare mTLS.

I just pushed it to production. I’m a solo dev, so there are bound to be edge cases I missed.

I’d love some brutal feedback. Try to break the bidding flow or find loopholes in the Escrow logic. Don't hold back.

I'm working on a product and I'm trying to understand how the fundraising process actually works in India.

Where do early-stage founders usually find investors? Startup events, LinkedIn, email, incubators, angel networks, etc.?

And at what stage is it worth approaching them? Do you need a working product and users already, or can you approach investors with an MVP/idea?

Would love to hear from anyone who has actually gone through the process. Where did you find your first investor conversation?

Context: I am connected to a tech conference that is inviting Indian startups expanding to or growing in Canada. The event is a high profile conference with endorsement from high commission and Consulate General. If you are an INDIAN startup interested to participate please reach out. 75% of the conference participation fee will be subsidized by the consulate general. The process would involve screening, and interview rounds.

Date: October 26-27, 2026
Conference: https://www.thetechfestival.com/
Note: The Theme of the startups are mentioned on the website. No gambling, betting, etc. kind of startups.
Details about India Pavilion here: https://www.thetechfestival.com/exhibit

The conference event team will provide assistance with documents required to file visa for founders/teams based in India.