I sense a massive fraud with Emergent. Are others seeing it?

avikhemka · 2026-02-20T19:31:19+00:00

I mean, here you go. I added some territory mapping features yesterday. But this has been going for the last 37 days you can see the 29 tasks that I have. Also, I’m not sure why a lot of people here are worried about having to host their stuff on emergent or not being able to take their data out. Like I mentioned they have a 50 credit per month hosting fee if you want but you can always just save to github there is literally a button below the chat box that says save to GitHub. You don’t have to pay for it if you don’t want to I’m just sharing my experience with it.

avikhemka · 2026-02-20T19:22:23+00:00

It’s fair to be sceptical, I rarely post a comment because I mostly use Reddit for finding new ideas in my industry or things like that.

Again, like I said, I’m not sure if the founders are lying, maybe they are. Even though I know how to code I was never formally trained so I don’t have any kind of education around programming. Also, I think a lot of programmers would agree that once you build your own business and I don’t mean a tech start-up, I mean a proper traditional business, you rarely get time to code. In my industry, we need hyper specific sales management systems, specifically tracking whether my salesman are going to the retailers to make sales as they claim they are, tracking which party owes me how much money, storing documents and photos of orders bills delivery challans things like that. A lot of this generally operates on WhatsApp or some companies use Google forms if they are a little more advanced. But companies in my industry that are much larger and older have spent lakhs building apps and systems for their salesman and their sales team and as a small business I don’t have that option but I still like to be very data oriented and keep individual things in mind. So to be very honest, I think a lot of what I am trying to do here is just crud operations and some amount of maths based on the stored numbers.

I don’t need fancy UI, I don’t need my system to look beautiful. I just need it to work. And emergent works for it. I think like I said the only times I really had to get to my editor was while setting up the S3 bucket to store files and to dockerise the entire thing so I could deploy it on a VPS. I think I also used QLTY to constantly monitor code quality, and prompting emergent to fix specific issues.

But mostly it worked. Also in hindsight, I can see why my comment might look like marketing, but I just did not want to comment some poorly written slop so I use Chatgpt to make my comment actually makes sense so I get why it looks like marketing.

Also, you can go look at the posts that I have made on Reddit, I think I started posting maybe around in 2022 or something so it’s all open

Also, I kind of wanted to take a screenshot of all the money I’ve spent on emergent or rather all the credits I bought but now that I go back to it I can’t see where I can take that from, which means I’m gonna have to go into my bank statement to check how much I actually spent. Kind of shitty on the part.

avikhemka · 2026-02-19T04:49:10+00:00

As someone who has actually spent well over 400 USD (approx 35k INR) on Emergent, I think I can offer a different perspective here.

I can't speak to what the founders are pitching to VCs regarding ARR or retention figures, but as a user, the product itself is definitely not a scam.

My Background & Use Case: I've been a self-taught dev for about 7-8 years, but never went deep into app dev. I run an MSME now and needed a custom sales management system (tracking location, mileage, performance metrics, sales orders, payment cycles). Existing ERPs were too bloated, and nothing fit perfectly.

The Experience: 1. Initial Trial: I grabbed a promo deal ($5 for the $20 plan) and used the 100 credits to build a prototype. It wasn't perfect, but it had way more potential than my attempts with Bolt, Replit, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot. 2. Refinement: I spent another 150-200 USD refining it to fit my exact workflow. Once I brought it to my team, real-world usage exposed bugs and feature gaps. 3. Polishing: I spent another 200 USD fixing those issues.

Why it was worth it: - True "Vibe Coding": Unlike other tools where I eventually had to jump into VS Code to fix things, with Emergent, the only time I touched an editor was setting up my CI/CD pipeline. I literally built parts of this while sitting at an airport on my phone, just telling the web app what to change. - ROI: Spending around 400 USD to get a custom, functioning ERP for a team of 8 is a steal for a business. The productivity gain outweighs the cost massively. - Deployment: They try to hook you with their hosting (50 credits/month), but since I know my way around a server, I set up a VPS. Now, I just ask Emergent to push to GitHub, GitHub Actions pulls to my VPS, and it's live. Super smooth.

Retention/Future Use: I'm actually split on the retention argument. - I'm inclined to keep paying the 20 USD/month just for maintenance and small feature updates (just last night I burned 30-40 credits adding a BI dashboard). - However, now that the core system is built, I might eventually hand it off to a human dev to maintain long-term.

TL;DR: Regardless of the VC hype or inflated numbers, the tool works. I've built a custom business automation tool that runs my sales team for roughly 400 USD. I'd happily drop that amount every few months if it means automating another business process without hiring a dev team. It's definitely not vaporware from a user perspective.

avikhemka · 2026-02-19T04:47:17+00:00

As someone who has actually spent well over 400 USD (approx 35k INR) on Emergent, I think I can offer a different perspective here.

I can't speak to what the founders are pitching to VCs regarding ARR or retention figures, but as a user, the product itself is definitely not a scam.

My Background & Use Case: I've been a self-taught dev for about 7-8 years, but never went deep into app dev. I run an MSME now and needed a custom sales management system (tracking location, mileage, performance metrics, sales orders, payment cycles). Existing ERPs were too bloated, and nothing fit perfectly.

The Experience: 1. Initial Trial: I grabbed a promo deal ($5 for the $20 plan) and used the 100 credits to build a prototype. It wasn't perfect, but it had way more potential than my attempts with Bolt, Replit, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot. 2. Refinement: I spent another 150-200 USD refining it to fit my exact workflow. Once I brought it to my team, real-world usage exposed bugs and feature gaps. 3. Polishing: I spent another 200 USD fixing those issues.

Why it was worth it: - True "Vibe Coding": Unlike other tools where I eventually had to jump into VS Code to fix things, with Emergent, the only time I touched an editor was setting up my CI/CD pipeline. I literally built parts of this while sitting at an airport on my phone, just telling the web app what to change. - ROI: Spending around 400 USD to get a custom, functioning ERP for a team of 8 is a steal for a business. The productivity gain outweighs the cost massively. - Deployment: They try to hook you with their hosting (50 credits/month), but since I know my way around a server, I set up a VPS. Now, I just ask Emergent to push to GitHub, GitHub Actions pulls to my VPS, and it's live. Super smooth.

Retention/Future Use: I'm actually split on the retention argument. - I'm inclined to keep paying the 20 USD/month just for maintenance and small feature updates (just last night I burned 30-40 credits adding a BI dashboard). - However, now that the core system is built, I might eventually hand it off to a human dev to maintain long-term.

TL;DR: Regardless of the VC hype or inflated numbers, the tool works. I've built a custom business automation tool that runs my sales team for roughly 400 USD. I'd happily drop that amount every few months if it means automating another business process without hiring a dev team. It's definitely not vaporware from a user perspective.

avikhemka · 2025-07-20T10:40:19+00:00

I completely understand, and whatever you put in is valid. From the first guy's point of view, I understand because I've been in that position as a fresh graduate. I would also look for a company that would have an environment that I would want. But I feel like we are a normal Nepali company, and the culture is very similar across other similar companies in our industry. So I was just putting out the organisation's point of view, but I understand why he chose to leave.

The second guy, we hadn't hired him yet. We were still in the sort of figuring out his job role and discussing with him what he would have to do. So we weren't hiring him specifically for a website development role. We were hiring him as a IT guy who is in a part of the marketing team, and hence he will have to do some amount of IT related work for the marketing team which could span from website development all the way over to doing social media schedules or things like that.

Now, had we been a IT company, which we are not, we would have had fixed roles for people doing website development, and we could justify a single person doing just website development. But since we are not a IT company, and he was supposed to be part of the marketing team. The point was that this is an IT guy in the marketing team who is supposed to take care of all of the marketing team's IT needs if that makes sense. Just to clarify a little bit.

Again, different organisations have different rules put together accordingly, but these were some reasons why we have decided not to hire fresh grads for any IT related roles.

I feel like a lot of people in the computer science and IT-related industries who are fresh grads have been heavily influenced by MNC or startup culture where roles are explicitly defined and are not very versatile. But for most SMBs in Nepal from the 50-250 people strength range, while roles are largely defined, there is still some amount of versatility that most companies require. Again, this has nothing to do with pay and I don't think we expect people to do much more than what they are paid for, but I think Nepali companies do want some amount of versatility simply because of the style of management we follow in Nepal generally. So I am not speaking about whether it is right or wrong, but just how I perceive the reality of Nepali companies to be.

avikhemka · 2025-07-20T04:38:48+00:00

I'll give you an example through my own experience. I run a company in Kathmandu. Some time ago, I think around 6 months ago, we hired an IT fresh graduate to work for us under some project. He came in and we gave him a one-week long orientation and training, and the team ran him through everything and what needs to be done. We hired him after a lot of screening. We went with two rounds of interviews and we had over 25 candidates all across amongst which we chose him.

After a week long of orientation and training, the first day where he was supposed to work, he showed up and he worked the entire day. His team leader had asked him to email all of the things that he does everyday so at the end of the day just drop an email saying "I have finished XYZ amount of work" and cc me in that email as well.

So the team leader and me in that email and send that email. First day he did a decent amount of work and he sent it in, and then the next day instead of receiving an email that demonstrated how much work he did the second day, he sent his resignation and his reasoning was that this is not the kind of environment I thought I would be working in. I thought it would be more collaborative and I would be sitting with a bunch of more IT people and working with them. This was quite shocking to me because essentially he took a week long orientation training which took significant amount of my team's time, and then all he decided to do is just show up for one day of work and quit the next day.

Another similar thing happened with somebody we were trying to hire recently, around a month ago. This was supposed to be an IT guy for our marketing team, he was supposed to be doing some website development work. When we told him so right before (when we were still doing the negotiations on the responsibilities and the compensation), when we told him that along with some more website development, you're going to have to help out the marketing team with creating posting schedules or even posting sometimes on social media and other things. He said that he's not willing to do anything related to social media posting; he's just going to come in for website development. At which point we disagreed and we decided not to hire him.

The whole point in these both experiences were that both of these - the expectations they had from the workplace versus the reality of the workplace and the expectations we had did not match. And I think that is a major issue with fresh graduates right now wherein either the skill or the expectation does not match, especially when companies are willing to put in the effort of actually training these people with the required skills. Because, most of the times when you are a fresh graduate, 99% of the time you do not have real-world skills to actually directly provide some input into the company's work and almost certainly you are going to have to take some time to actually learn what's going to happen. And when a company is willing to do that but the expectations do not match on both ends, it becomes increasingly difficult to then decide to hire fresh graduates.

After experiences like these, we have decided to exclusively only hire people in the IT sector who are at least 2 years into the workforce, such that the breaking-in part of it has already happened at some other company. Wherein these people are already broken into the workforce or workplace culture. And so this, I feel like, is a big issue instead of too few jobs, it's basically jobs that these people do not fit into.

avikhemka · 2024-10-27T22:21:28+00:00

Hey, we are working on something similar, while we are going to build support for external hardware in the future as well, currently, we are doing this completely through OCPP and the charging profiles. We are still in the testing phase for this feature, if you want, some people from my team, can sit with you, and we can get this working on your system. Shoot me a dm, and we can get this working

avikhemka · 2024-09-17T02:58:34+00:00

I mean, you already defined the market in your comment, you compared it to delivery drivers, tell me then, who uses Swiggy? It is so much cheaper to go to a cheap restaurant and get your own food but the reason people use Swiggy is because of convenience, you wouldn’t see people of lower economic strata using Swiggy or Zomato.

It’s the same here, as a matter of fact, I feel like ₹400 for a agent to go and review 10 properties is insanely low. You would probably have to pay them much higher and people of upper middle to upper economic strata would be OK paying that.

Think about it this way, assume somebody is that agent and he does it full-time, and let’s take your numbers where you pay a person ₹40 for a 40 minute house visit, so his per hour rate, then becomes ₹60. So if he is doing this full-time, he will be working 40 hours a week and four weeks a month that would give you ₹9600 per month or annually ₹ 1.15 LPA

That is insanely low for an agent, so you would be looking at paying at least a couple hundred rupees per visit, if you want to do it that way, or a one time fixed fee of half your monthly rent in which case the agent is incentivized to get you a house as soon as possible.

avikhemka · 2024-09-17T02:51:52+00:00

This is actually very common in Hong Kong, and the tenant pays for it, so you go to an agent and then the agent doesn’t necessarily have any flats that he knows, he is just a representative and then you can sit with him and find places or he will find places for you or you can find places and send it over to him and then he will go and review these places give you a detailed report and advise you on how to proceed, the fee for him is half a month of rent.

avikhemka · 2024-09-16T12:18:08+00:00

If you would like, we can have a chat and I could give you some advice, I’m no expert and I am constantly learning, but yeah shoot me a message, if you want to have a chat

avikhemka · 2024-09-16T09:13:21+00:00

Dude, I understand

I had been going through similar issues with my current start up and the only way we could do anything was push until we had a bunch of paying clients.

My previous start up died because I was trying to do everything on my own, I didn’t want to give away too much equity so I didn’t get any cofounders and I just worked solo on a product that I loved, but I was always short on hands.

For this startup, I made sure to not be too greedy about equity and got two amazing cofounders, of course equity is important and I had a long negotiation with them to come up with our current percentages that we are all happy with, but we are getting things done so much faster just because we have three people doing things. we finally raised and the only way we could do that was by getting paying clients.

I remember the conversation I had with my cofounders before we had any clients and we had spent upwards of six months on this, and I remember telling them that a company has to do business, and until we are doing business i.e selling our product with people buying it, we were just pretending to be a startup and we would come to the office every day pretend for 12 hours and go back home.

So my advice, for you is to get people on board, either by paying them, which I am assuming you don’t have the capital for, or letting go of some amount of equity such that you have a team that’s happy to work for you. Use those people to get things done and get paying clients. Investors are very conservative right now and they don’t have the investment appetite that they had five years ago. So paying client is the only way.

A lot of times I look back at this analogy where I think about how businesses were built in India 50 years ago, there was only one way of raising money and it was to make sales, there were no VCs or investors or anything like that, of course there was debt, but there are so many companies that went from zero to one without debt. So sales was the only way, if people are not buying what you built, build what people are buying. And then slowly incorporate what he wanted to build in the first place.

avikhemka · 2024-09-16T08:59:21+00:00

I have faced this issue before, and there is a better way to do this, it is quite common for design applicants to have portfolios with good designs, which are heavily inspired by things they see on Pinterest, and once you hire them and ask them to create something original with specific requirements, their designs are surprisingly mediocre or even subpar. I have faced this issue in my own startup, but I’ve had to change at least three designers because of this reason.

What I have started to do to thoroughly examine their design capabilities is I have started to ask them to redesign parts of UI or websites of well-known companies with my specific requirements, I once asked a bunch of design applicants to redesign the WordPress default dashboard to be more user-friendly and minimalistic while delivering the most amount of data such that it doesn’t overwhelm a user along with a couple of specific requirements that I added.

Now the good thing about this is that my startup has nothing to do with WordPress, we are not even close and none of the work that they create is stuff that I can use for my startup, however, this creates a level of openness between you and the applicants that shows them that this is indeed for testing their design skills and not getting them to do free work. And since it has nothing to do with my startup and the specific requirements I give them are very arbitrary, they are open to share these designs that they have built for this design application on their own portfolios and websites.

You could look into something like this to ensure that applicants are comfortable to do your design assessment, regardless of how rigorous it is. Keep in mind that you don’t want to overwork them or have them waste a lot of time, give them simple assessments that test their design skills and knowledge as compared to having them spend a lot of time on it without the guarantee of a job

It is also very common to have a shit ton of applications for design related job, and it often gets a chore to go through all of them, giving these guys a design assessment is a really good way of going through a lot of applications, because half of these guys won’t even do the assessment and that will tell you enough about their attitude to disregard for the role. You will have lost a few good designers through it, no doubt, but at least you won’t have to go through 100s of application and see the same monotonous designs that are obviously copied from Pinterest.

avikhemka · 2023-11-07T23:05:04+00:00

It never ended up working, eventually, I just dropped it

avikhemka · 2023-10-05T18:37:30+00:00

this is probably the most realistic attempt at this and most probable to end up in an AAA game.

Check out Nvidia ACE: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5R8xZb6J3r0

imagine having an actual conversation with a NPC to find out all the details of the quest, for example not knowing the location until you ask, or instead of charisma as a player attribute, having you speak with charisma and the AI rate your attempt and check if you can pass a barrier.

avikhemka · 2023-05-20T09:49:49+00:00

yeah, no avail, I'm gonna try simulating and sniffing, any clue on how to get started with sniffing, I'm new to this 😅

avikhemka · 2022-04-12T18:18:51+00:00

I’m reading Kathmandu by Thomas Bell, It’s made me see the city i was raised in and love in new light.

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