I built a chess website in 3 months. Here's what nobody tells you about..
It started with a phone call.
My cousin called me one evening asking if I
could teach him chess online. He lives in a
small town in UP. His internet is slow. His
English is basic. I sent him a Chess.com link.
He called back 10 minutes later.
"Bhai I can't understand anything. It's all
in English."
I didn't have a good answer. I just said sorry.
That night I couldn't sleep.
---
I am a college student. I have no money. I
have no team. I have never built a real-time
multiplayer application in my life.
But I kept thinking — Chess.com has 100 million
users. Lichess has 150 million. India has 1.4
billion people. Viswanathan Anand is a living
legend. Praggnanandhaa just challenged Magnus
Carlsen for the world title. Chess is in our
blood.
And not a single major platform has Hindi support.
Not one.
So I opened my laptop and started typing.
---
The first two weeks were embarrassing.
I didn't know Socket.io. I didn't know how
real-time multiplayer worked. My first attempt
at a chess room was two browser tabs that
sometimes synced and sometimes didn't.
I remember sitting at 2AM watching a pawn move
on one tab and NOT move on the other and wanting
to close the laptop forever.
But I kept going.
---
Week three I finally understood Socket.io rooms.
The idea clicked — every game is just a room.
Two players join the same room. Moves broadcast
to everyone in that room. Simple in theory.
Absolute chaos to get right in production.
Disconnections. Reconnections. Game state lost
when a player refreshes. Edge cases everywhere.
Each bug taught me something Chess.com's
engineering team probably solved years ago with
10 senior developers. I was solving it alone at
my desk with chai and YouTube tutorials.
---
Month two I added the language support.
This was the feature closest to my heart.
I added Hindi. Then Tamil. Then Telugu. Then
Kannada.
I sent my cousin the link again.
He called me back in 5 minutes.
"Bhai yeh toh Hindi mein hai!"
That was the best moment of the entire project.
Better than any launch metric. Better than any
upvote. My cousin — the whole reason I started
this — could finally read the interface.
---
Month three I added the AI opponent.
I named her Maya.
20 difficulty levels. From fully random moves
to actually threatening play. She has different
expressions for different difficulty tiers.
Smiles at beginners. Goes intense at advanced.
My friends thought I was crazy spending time
on an AI avatar face when the product wasn't
even launched.
But I knew — chess is emotional. The opponent
matters. A friendly face changes the experience
especially for beginners who are scared to play
real people.
---
The hardest part wasn't the code.
It was the silence.
Building alone means no one tells you if you
are going in the right direction. No cofounder
to say "this looks good." No manager to give
feedback. Just you, your laptop and the
question — is anyone going to care about this?
Some days I was convinced it was brilliant.
Some days I was convinced it was pointless.
Most days I just kept typing.
---
Three months later IndiaMate went live.
Real multiplayer. Real ratings. Daily puzzles.
Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada UI. An AI
opponent named Maya who smiles at you when
you make a good move.
Built by one student. Zero budget. Zero team.
The site is at indiamate.onrender.com — free
hosting so first load takes 20 seconds. Please
wait for it.
---
What I learned that nobody tells you:
The first version will embarrass you. Ship it
anyway. Waiting for perfect means waiting
forever.
Real users find bugs your testing never will.
My first real player found a bug in 4 minutes
that I had missed for 3 weeks.
The feature you think nobody cares about is
often the one that makes someone stay. Maya's
smile kept three people on the site longer
than any other feature according to my
analytics.
Build for one person first. My cousin in UP
was my one person. If it works for him it
works for millions like him.
---
India has produced world chess champions.
We taught the world this game 1500 years ago.
It is time we had a chess platform that speaks
our language.
IndiaMate is my attempt at that. It is
imperfect. It is unfinished. It is built by
a student who is still learning.
But it is live. It is real. And it is in Hindi.
That is enough for today.
— Junaid
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