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LaunchViharSync · 6 min read

Everything between a working app and a launched one

ViharSync V2 runs end to end on a demo society. Here is the honest list of what still stands between that and real money moving through it.

VCKJAPAVinit Churi, Kenil Joshi, Abhilash Pal & Abhishek

Engineers love the day the demo works. Users don’t care about that day at all. For a product that handles other people’s money and personal data, the distance between “works on the demo” and “launched” is mostly paperwork, accounts and trust — and nobody writes about it. So here’s ours, in public.

Today, ViharSync V2 runs a full demo society — Shreeniwas CHS — end to end: billing, payments through a mock gateway, receipts, complaints, gate traffic, statements. Anyone can sign in as a demo user. That last sentence is exactly why it isn’t launched yet.

The launch checklist#

  1. 1

    Live payments

    “Pay now” uses a mock gateway in development. Real money needs a Razorpay live account, business KYC, live keys, the webhook configured — and one small real payment tested end to end, including a refund. Production already refuses to start without real keys.
  2. 2

    SMS that actually arrives

    Login is by phone OTP. In India that means MSG91, DLT entity and template registration, and checking delivery across Jio, Airtel and Vi — not just one test phone.
  3. 3

    Android, properly

    Most residents use Android, often on low-end phones. Both apps need full Android builds, checked against the payment, PDF and secure-storage plugins, on a cheap device.
  4. 4

    Hosting with a tested restore

    The target is a small, boring setup in Mumbai’s cloud region with a managed Postgres — and backups we’ve actually restored from, not just configured.
  5. 5

    Store releases

    Developer accounts, icons, screenshots, listings, privacy policy and data-safety forms for two apps on two stores.
  6. 6

    DPDP basics

    Residents’ personal data falls under India’s DPDP Act 2023: a privacy policy, terms, consent text at login and a data-retention statement.
  7. 7

    A security review

    Money plus personal data means auth, tenancy and payment flows get reviewed, dependencies audited, and rate limits set at the edge.

Why we’re writing this down#

Two reasons. First, it keeps us honest: a public list is harder to quietly shorten. Second, nearly every small team building for Indian users hits the same wall — KYC, DLT, store forms, data-protection text — and the knowledge is scattered across forum threads. If this list saves someone a week, good.

How we’ll take it to societies#

Our bet is that societies don’t buy software from a website — a committee member hears about it from another committee member. So the plan for V2 is unglamorous: make onboarding a society — wings, flats, charge heads — take minutes with the building builder, put a real treasurer through a real month-end close, and let that close be the demo they show the next committee.

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