Chanakya.

The Client

Chanakya is the Finance & Investment Cell at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar College, DU — a student society publishing real research on markets, policy and the economy. They were running on a drag-and-drop site builder that could hold pages and nothing else: no way to publish a paper properly, no mailing list of their own, and no way to know whether anyone was reading.

What We Built

A full rebuild as a financial media platform, styled like a terminal rather than a college microsite — deep navy and ink, cyan accents, up/down red-green, and a market ticker running across every page. Eleven publications with their own covers and downloadable PDFs, plus sections for the team, events and their FinLit initiative.

Underneath it, the part that actually mattered: a mail system and admin portal the committee runs themselves. Five tabs — subscribers, per-publication download counts, first-party traffic, a composer, and full send history.

The Hard Part

Sending mail properly is where these projects usually fail. Every recipient gets an individually addressed message with its own one-click unsubscribe header — no BCC anywhere, which is most of why it lands in inboxes. Sends run in batches of twelve through a self-reinvoking worker, so list length never touches a function timeout, and a daily cap parks the job and resumes it the next morning on its own.

Press send twice and it refuses: campaigns are fingerprinted for 24 hours, with an explicit override if a resend is genuinely intended. Analytics are first-party counts only — no identifiers, no cookie banner — and the whole thing ships under a DPDP Act 2023 notice with a 23-test end-to-end suite behind it.

Why It Matters

The list lives on their own site. It doesn't walk out of the door when the committee changes in March — which, for a student society, is the entire point.

Direction

Visit chanakyafic.in ↗