Founder story
The man behind MINUS
Hardeep Shahran · Founder
MINUS is somebody's idea before it is an app. That somebody is Hardeep Shahran — the person who knew this game long before it had a screen, and the reason it now has one.
It began in a village, with friends and one deck of cards
Hardeep learned this game from a friend in his village. It was not something anyone downloaded. It was a deck of cards, a floor or a charpai, and whoever turned up — the same faces, evening after evening, arguing about a bid that was one trick too greedy. That is where the rules in this app come from, and it is why they are the rules this app refuses to bend.
The game deserved a place in the digital era
Years went by and everything else moved onto a phone. Friends moved to other cities. The circle that used to meet every evening became harder to get into one room. Hardeep did not want this game to be the thing left behind on the way — he wanted it carried across, given a name of its own in the digital world instead of surviving only wherever four people happen to sit together.
That is what MINUS is: the village game, kept exactly as it was played, handed a table that four friends can reach from four different cities.
Built night and day, by someone who refused to stop
He did not start with a studio behind him. He started by building it — learning as he went, working after hours and through them, using modern LLM tools like Claude to write and rewrite the app until the game on the screen behaved like the game in his memory. The bidding, the scoring, the way a hand feels when it goes minus: all of it argued into shape over long nights.
Where he got stuck, he did not abandon the piece — he brought in private freelancers to finish exactly that part, then carried the work on himself. Every screen in the app has been through that loop more than once.
Why it matters: nothing here was outsourced wholesale. The idea, the rules and the standard the app is held to belong to the person whose game it was in the first place.
Where it stands today
What began as one remembered game is now an app that holds a lot at once: online rooms where friends play the same hand from anywhere, voice at the table while the cards move, bots that bid like people rather than like software, Hindi, Hinglish and English throughout, share cards for the scoreboard at the end of a night, and challenges that pull the old circle back together. It is still growing, and it is still held to the same test it started with — does it play like it did in the village?
Suggestions, complaints and stories about your own table are read personally. If something in the game does not match how you have always played it, that is worth an email.