Why I Built a Chatbot No One Asked Me To!

It Started with Maggi!

It's 11pm. Peak placement season. I'm in the middle of my own prep - resume, company research, the usual spiral and I get hungry. Like any person making excellent life decisions, I crave maggi. I drag my friend to the cafe.

My phone doesn't stop buzzing. Every 15 seconds. I keep texting with one hand, eating with the other. My friend who is also stressed, also in the same placement season, grabs my phone, looks me in the eye, and asks me to do a breathing exercise.

I would have found that funny if the deadline for one of the companies I was responsible for wasn't at midnight. And people were still asking me what the deadline was. After multiple reminders. In the group. I snatch my phone back. One message: "what's the submission link?" Another: "do I fill the Excel and also apply in Skynet?" Another: "what are all the deadlines this week?" It felt like being in customer support except nobody signed up for customer support, and I was supposed to be redrafting my own resume right now.

I could handle it. That was never the question. The question was: should I be doing this at 11pm with cold maggi in front of me?

Some context, quickly

I did my MBA from a top one-year program. Average batch age: 30. Experienced people - real jobs, real responsibilities before this. I was part of the 7-member placement committee managing placements for the batch. Our communication channel was a single WhatsApp group. Our job was to post every update; which companies are visiting, what roles, when applications open and close, what format to submit in, when the PPT is, where it's happening. All 7 of us, across 35+ companies, across months. You already know what a WhatsApp group looks like when 7 people are posting time-sensitive updates for weeks on end.

The actual problem

A company like Accenture might be hiring for three different roles and each role has its own process. One through our internal portal, one through an Excel sheet submission, one through Accenture's external portal or everything at once.

Three steps, sometimes three different deadlines. That's one company. There were 35+ of them. Add PPT schedules. Add brochure submissions. Add prep sessions. Now try to find that specific message about the deadline that was posted eleven days ago, somewhere between two memes and an "all the best everyone!" message. Students started pinging us individually. Same questions, to all seven of us, repeatedly. Not because they weren't paying attention, the information was there, somewhere. It just wasn't findable when you actually needed it at 11pm.

Why nothing got fixed in time

By the time you understand a problem clearly enough to fix it, you're usually too deep in it to fix it. I had the thought of building a simple deadline tracker midway through placement season. A central sheet, everything in one place. Good idea. I was neck-deep in placements. It didn't happen. The other issue: one-year programs don't have great institutional memory. Every batch discovers the same problems at the same point in the season, and by then it's always too late to do anything except survive. The next batch starts from scratch.

So why build it now, after graduating?

I have time. I wanted to learn something. And I knew with pretty high confidence that the exact same chaos was coming for the next batch. The problem doesn't retire when we do. As part of a documentation effort for the incoming committee, I figured: why document the problem when you can hand over a working solution? So here we are.

What I wanted to build and why I changed my mind twice

First instinct: the Excel tracker I never got to build during placements. So I built it. All the data - companies, deadlines, PPTs, brochure items in one structured sheet. Functional. Shareable. But an Excel sheet makes you go looking for information. A stressed student at 11pm shouldn't have to open a file, find the right tab, filter a column, and read a table. That friction is small but it's real, and it's exactly the kind of thing that sends people back to the WhatsApp group asking the same questions again. Second instinct: AI chatbot. Connect the sheet to an API, let students ask natural language questions, get answers back. That felt smart. Then I thought about it more carefully. What if it hallucinates a deadline? How would I even evaluate that? And here's the thing - I won't be in the committee next year. Who fixes it when something goes wrong? I'm not building a product with a support team. I'm handing something over to a batch of students and walking away. It needs to just work, reliably, without anyone maintaining it. Smart wasn't what I needed. Correct was what I needed.

Why Typebot and why that's actually the right call

Typebot is a no-code chatbot builder. It pulls data from a Google Sheet and serves it through a structured conversation flow - menus, buttons, conditional logic. No language model, no interpretation, no hallucinations. And when I actually thought about the questions students ask, they're not that varied. What are the upcoming deadlines? When is the PPT for this company? What do I need to submit for the brochure? It's a short, predictable list. You don't need AI for a short predictable list, you need a clean menu and reliable data.

Someone might say: "why not just send a PDF with all the deadlines?" Sure. And then send another PDF when something changes. And another. 300 PDFs later, let me know how that went

PlaceMate pulls directly from the Excel sheet, serves it through four menu options - PPTs, Application Deadlines, Placement prep sessions, Brochure items and returns clean formatted results. Company, deadline type, date, time, link. No room for misinterpretation.

What PlaceMate covers

The data behind it has five areas: company profiles and roles, application deadlines with format and submission links, Pre-Placement Talk schedules, prep sessions, and brochure-related deadlines. Each entry has an urgency tag — so the most time-sensitive stuff surfaces first without anyone having to sort or filter anything.

The goal was simple: a student should be able to open PlaceMate at 11pm, get exactly what they need in under a minute, and go back to their resume. No digging. No pinging the committee. No cold maggi.

What this isn't!

It's not a big product. It solves one specific problem for one specific context, and that's by design. Not everything needs to scale. Some things just need to work for the people in front of you.

In Part 2, I'll walk through the actual build, how Typebot works, how I connected the data, and what the flow looks like. More screenshots, less philosophy.