Founder

Shiva Kumar Esakki Pandiyan

Solo founder and operator of Starvo — a review management SaaS for owner-operated local businesses. One person designed the product, made every decision, shipped it, and runs the live service.

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Who I am

I'm Shiva Kumar Esakki Pandiyan. I completed my Class 12 schooling under the ISC board in the Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry stream, with results in May 2025. Starvo is what I chose to do next — not a class project, but a real, paid software product used by real businesses.

I am the only person behind Starvo: I scoped the product, designed the user flows, made every product and operational decision, and ship every change. There is no co-founder, no agency, and no team.

What Starvo actually does

Starvo is a production SaaS, not a prototype. It takes real payments, stores real customer data, and runs unattended on a schedule. As the sole operator, I own every layer of the product:

  • Product. The customer-facing review flow, the owner dashboard, the admin tooling, the marketing surface — all designed end to end.
  • Billing. A full monthly-subscription model on Dodo Payments (Merchant of Record): upgrade, downgrade, cancel, manual paid-period grants, and a self-healing daily reconciliation job.
  • AI features. Server-side reply drafts and review sentiment / topic analysis, with a shared per-location monthly quota that resets on each business's own billing anniversary.
  • Integrations. Google Business Profile (OAuth + daily review sync + reply-from-Starvo), Resend for transactional email, and an optional WhatsApp Cloud API channel.
  • Marketing site. A full server-rendered marketing site (pricing, features, docs, industry pages, comparisons, guides) with structured data so AI assistants and search engines can describe Starvo correctly.
  • Compliance & legal surface. Clickwrap consent at onboarding, versioned Terms, a Privacy Policy that covers GDPR + DPDPA + CCPA, and a Data Processing Agreement at /dpa for EU/UK/Indian business owners.
  • Operations. Daily cron jobs covering Google sync, email automation, escalation, and account-deletion cleanup — running unattended in production.

How I operate the product

Running a payment-processing product alone forces a discipline that a class project never does. A few principles I hold to as I make decisions and ship changes:

  • Honesty in copy. The product pages describe what the product does, not invented customers or features that don't exist. The Terms describe the actual refund policy, not an aspirational one.
  • Security is server-enforced. The UI hides what a user shouldn't see; the server rejects what a user shouldn't do.
  • Correctness over speed on money paths. Plan changes and quota decisions are designed so concurrent activity can never double-spend or double-charge.
  • It ships and runs. Starvo is deployed, monitored, and operated as a live service — not a demo.
  • I read every support email. Every message reaches me directly and is answered within a day.

Why Starvo

Local businesses live or die on their Google reviews, yet the software that helps them collect reviews is priced for mid-market chains and locked behind sales calls. I wanted to build the version a single restaurant, salon, or clinic could actually use: free to start, self-serve, Google-policy-compliant, and genuinely useful from day one. Starvo is that product, and I'm still building it.

Get in touch

I read everything that comes in. For Starvo support, partnerships, or anything else:

About StarvoWhat Starvo does