When Krrish Goel joined a San Francisco hackathon during the founding UG cohort’s time in Silicon Valley, he chose a problem close to home: how an exporter could understand the effect of changing tariffs before a shipment.
In his public project account, Krrish calls the prototype TariffLens. He describes his family’s logistics work across India, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal, and the delays, tariff changes and squeezed margins his father has had to navigate.
Starting with a decision an exporter faces
Krrish says he built TariffLens at the Harness Engineering Hack at AWS Builder Loft in San Francisco, hosted by tokens&. A user uploads a trade invoice; the prototype shows tariff exposure in current, best-case and worst-case scenarios, the dollar impact and a suggested next step.
He connects that design to watching his father make shipment decisions as policies changed. An invoice makes the question concrete: what could this change do to the margin on the next shipment?
Making a product idea concrete
Krrish says he arrived after a day at an Adobe immersion program and had about two hours to build. He deployed the prototype and submitted it before the hackathon deadline.
In his follow-up account, he describes a pipeline that gathers tariff articles, structures rates by tariff code and feeds the three-scenario view. The live demonstration gave judges a specific invoice-to-decision flow to examine, rather than just an idea for an exporter tool.
Krrish reports placing in the top six among more than 300 participants. That result and the build details come from his own account; TariffLens is presented here as a hackathon prototype, not an established commercial or customs-advisory service.
Connecting product work with the immersion
Krrish shared the project during the founding UG cohort’s Silicon Valley experience. His post also mentions a summer program at UC Berkeley. The hackathon was a setting in which he independently brought a familiar business problem into a product-building challenge.
The family problem gave Krrish a starting point, while the hackathon forced him to turn it into a working invoice-to-decision flow under time pressure. His reported result belongs to that specific project and build.
What you can explore next
Our UG curriculum combines business subjects with applied AI, product management and building experiences. Krrish’s project shows how a business problem can give a technical build its purpose.
Read our business, AI and product-building guide for examples of how to start, and our curriculum guide for the four-year learning map. Krrish’s linked account offers a concrete project to discuss when you join the UG information session.
