From a Nokia phone in a village to launching an AI startup — the real story behind RexiO

A few days ago RexiO went live on Product Hunt. What most people saw was a clean launch page and a working product. What they didn't see is where this actually started.

I'm Sijan, the solo founder behind RexiO. I didn't come from a tech family, a CS degree, or any kind of funding. My first real "internet" experience was on a Nokia button phone I could barely afford to put credit on — I didn't even understand what the word meant at the time.

Years later, my first paid coding job was a website I built with ৳20 of mobile balance and zero real knowledge of what I was doing. RexiO itself started as an accident — I was building an unrelated social app, added a small AI chatbot just to answer support questions, and that chatbot slowly became more interesting to me than the actual product. I eventually scrapped the whole thing to chase it.

Since then it's been a solo build: writing my own orchestration layer, an intent classifier, 30+ tools, model routing across providers, and fine-tuning our own Bangla-first models on borrowed Colab GPUs — plus a full frontend rewrite along the way, more 12-hour bug hunts than I can count, and a relationship ending in the middle of it that honestly redirected the whole direction of my life.

I wrote the entire story down — unfiltered, no corporate polish. If you're building something solo, or you're curious how a Bangla-first AI actually gets built from a village with no team and no funding, it's a long read but I think it's worth it:

👉 Full story: https://blogs.rexio.pro/posts/from-a-nokia-phone-to-rexio

Try RexiO: https://rexio.pro

SpritEX AI: https://spritexai.pro.bd

Happy to answer questions here about the build, the architecture, or the journey.