TechVerse Enclave did not launch at 500 members. It launched at a handful of students at VSICS who wanted somebody to look at their code. Between that and the LinkedIn community we opened in September 2025, the growth came in four phases, and each one was a decision rather than an accident.
Phase one: the thirty
The first thirty members were recruited by hand — people who had built something and would post it. That set the culture: projects, not motivation. Many later communities fail here by optimising for numbers first.
Phase two: sessions on campus
The AI Mentorship Session at VSICS in April 2025, run under the TechVerse Enclave banner with Raman Shukla and Saksham Gupta, put the community in front of a seminar hall. Students who attended a hands-on session joined; students who saw a poster did not. Sessions were the growth engine, and the format is in a tech club session format that works.
Phase three: wins that travelled
Team TechVerse's first prizes at Changethon, Product Genesis and BYTEBATTLE were posted under the community's name. Students in other colleges saw a group from a tier-2 college winning at IITs and universities and wanted in. Results are the best recruitment material a community has.
Phase four: structure and launch
Six admins owning six tracks, a weekly rhythm, and in September 2025 a public LinkedIn community for AI, web, cybersecurity, data and startup learners. By then the numbers were 500+ members and 200+ students mentored, and the structure could carry them; see the TechVerse Enclave playbook.
What I would tell a student starting one
- Recruit builders first; the feed follows the first thirty.
- Run a hands-on session before you run a poster campaign.
- Post your members' wins more than your own announcements.
- Write down who owns what before you need to.
Communities are how mentoring scales beyond one person's inbox. If you are starting one and want a session to kick it off, that is a thing I do — see how to start a tech community on your campus.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
