We made the TechStart finals. Then we learned what the project was actually about.

We submitted Knight Wallet to Rutgers TechStart thinking we had a credentials problem to solve. By the end of the day, I realized we'd actually been building something much more personal to people — and that we'd almost buried it under a pitch deck.

The core idea was solid: Rutgers students and alumni have no verifiable, portable proof of their achievements. Diplomas live in PDFs. Club leadership positions exist in GroupMe messages. Honors are self-reported on resumes with nothing behind them. Knight Wallet would let Rutgers mint those credentials as on-chain NFTs — tamper-proof, instantly verifiable, yours forever regardless of what email address you graduated with.

We made the finals.

Then the scope started creeping. The business model slides turned into a whole DeFi ecosystem — ScarlettCoin, a campus lending protocol, NFT event ticketing, a merchant payment layer, staking yields. Each idea made sense individually. Together they were a pitch for "crypto Venmo + LinkedIn + Venmo again for Rutgers." We kept adding because we thought bigger meant more impressive. It meant more confused.

The moment that reframed everything came from Ankit Mithbavkar, the president of the club hosting the event. He got up and talked about why this problem was personal to him. He'd dealt with people in his own circles lying about what they'd built, what positions they'd held, what they'd achieved. Fake GroupMe screenshots. AI-generated recommendations. People slapping credentials on their profiles with nothing real behind them. He was tired of it — and more importantly, he couldn't do anything about it. There was no way to check.

That was the product. Not ScarlettCoin. Not a lending pool. The thing Ankit described — a world where when someone says "I was VP of this club" or "I graduated with honors," you can verify it in two seconds with cryptographic certainty — that's what we should have stayed focused on the whole time.

We didn't implement ScarlettCoin. Didn't have time, and honestly, the day showed us we didn't need it for v1.

What I'm taking from it: The revenue model and the ecosystem can come later. The thing that makes people lean forward in their seat is the why — and ours was right there the whole time. Lead with Ankit's story, not slide 12.

Scope is a trap. The core is usually enough.