When Mythri Kumar, co-founder, Timbuckdo, describes her company, she rarely uses the language of startup bravado. Instead, she talks about 17-year-olds taking Rs 2 lakh loans to play fantasy games, students working part-time shifts at pizza counters, and a generation that ‘doesn’t feel like they belong anywhere’. It is from these fragments that Timbuckdo, a student-focused gig work platform, was shaped.
Hustle is the fuel
In an interview with financialexpress.com, Kumar describes how she did not build this company for students until her younger brother inadvertently pushed her into it. Her story begins in a Tier-3 town, moving to Bengaluru to study at Mount Carmel College, where the cultural dissonance was immediate. “Everyone dressed up like they were walking on the ramp that day,” she recalled. Pocket money was never an option; part-time jobs became non-negotiable. “I used to earn about Rs 1,500, Rs 1,600… in the pizza shop, about Rs 90 a day”.
Years later, the turning point came at home. She discovered her younger brother was secretly working as a delivery executive, despite receiving ‘fairly decent money’ from her. He wanted to fund his trading habit without using her earnings. The moment led to “a major fight in the house,” she said, until her father reminded her of her own early hustles.
That set off a chain of events: sending him to internships, only for him and his friend to quit because they were unpaid and the job was not in line with their interest. It forced Kumar to ask a bigger question:
Why were internships the only formalised earning opportunity for students?
A survey followed. Over 1,200 students responded, and 82% said they preferred gigs over internships, citing curriculum pressure, lack of pay, and the fact that most internships came only in the final year. “So, we do want to do gigs… we understand hustle is part of the culture,” she said.
And thus, Timbuckdo was launched in 2022.
Deeper social vacuum
Timbuckdo’s differentiation, according to Kumar, is breadth: “anything legal, anything that allows students to earn money by giving dignity of labour… gets listed.” That ranges from baristas to telecallers to pet-sitting gigs where “students are earning about Rs 14,000–18,000 per month,” she added.
But the platform still operates in a structurally grey space. Verification is thin, “KYC… only to know from, are you in legal age… and where do you reside”, and while the company draws a self-imposed line at 18+ workers, it does so because “below 18… they only have Aadhaar… So, that was one of the reasons we don’t want to break a rule under the Data Protection Act,” she added. When we tried the app, it asked for a valid college ID as well.
The company also caps student work at 22 hours a week, inspired by international labour policies. “Here, there is no such law. But we have consciously kept that,” she commented. Risk remains a constant.
The company uses a third-party plugin to score employers: “If it is below 80%, we don’t let them on our platform at all,” Kumar noted. It has also built an SOS escalation chain that rings up to her and her co-founder.
The internal system has logged only one complaint so far, and even that involved a student’s ‘laziness to return a SIM card’. But the absence of red flags does not prove the absence of risk. Gig work is unpredictable by nature; student gig work is even more so.
The CAC in question
The business model rests on two pillars; the employer subscription fees range from Rs 499 to Rs 4,999, as per Kumar. The second pillar is exclusive student discounts on select brands, which the company has collaborated with, while charging a commission for the same.
Employers pay because Timbuckdo manages verification, hyperlocal matching, automated contracts, and an internal arbitration layer. The unit economics are surprisingly lean: student CAC is Rs 5.5–6, down from Rs 15 last year; employer CAC ranges from Rs 5–20. “Each profile would cost them anywhere between 25 to 30 rupees. We are just the lowest in the market,” she added.
Timbuckdo plans to start charging students Rs 100–Rs 120 per payout in four quarters. “When they get those Rs 8,000-9,000, can we take about Rs 100-120 from that?” A company built to help students earn will soon depend on taxing their wages.
The ambassador economy
One of Timbuckdo’s fastest-growing business lines is its campus ambassador network, with 300 universities today, planned to triple. “Nothing goes free. This is our mantra,” Kumar said. Ambassadors earn Rs 12,000–13,000 a month by working not just for Timbuckdo but for brands that use the network for micro-activations, sampling, surveys, UGC reels, 5,000–6,000-follower ‘micro-influencers.’ “That is also a very large revenue driver for us,” Kumar stated.
The company eyes overseas market expansion, projects monthly revenues of Rs 55–60 lakh in eight months, and expands its campus ambassador network to 900 colleges, as per Kumar.
It’s a clever loop: students generate content, brands pay Timbuckdo, and gig supply gets amplified on campus. But it also blurs the line between opportunity and exploitation.
Scaling ambitions
As per the ROC filings issued by Tofler, Timbuckdo’s revenue from operations for 2023-24 comes out to be Rs 5.5 lakh, whereas the loss stands at Rs 10.6 lakh. According to Kumar, Timbuckdo expects to hit 2.5–3 crore students in 3–5 years, 10% of the market. Monthly revenue is currently Rs 10.2 lakh, trending towards Rs 17 lakh this month, with an MRR target of Rs 55–60 lakh within eight months. The company has raised Rs 4 crore in 2024, including investments from Morton Mayerson, “the guy who invested in Mark Cuban first,” she noted, who passed away a month ago. International expansion is already mapped, “Singapore… Malaysia… Indonesia… maybe Australia… It will take about five quarters from now.”
“In India, there is no culture of gigs part-time… every day our marketing efforts are to bring that trust and culture.” South-East Asia, she believes, will be more frictionless.
As of last year, Timbuckdo has signed an MoU with Karnataka’s Department of Collegiate and Technical Education to create structured access to part-time jobs and internships for college students across the state. Last month, it appeared on Zee’s Ideabaaz, where the company successfully secured Rs 1 crore investment from Anupam Bansal (Liberty Shoes), Shaili Chopra (SheThePeople), Arjun Vaidya (Dr Vaidya’s) and Sandesh Sharda.
Timbuckdo’s origin story is rooted in a social truth: students today want autonomy, money, and mobility far earlier than stepping into the formal job sector. “Students are more… our efforts are to create more job options for them,” Kumar noted. “With an employer, a lot of effort goes into acquiring an employer… versus having students acquired,” she added. But that is precisely where the model risks overstretching. A student gig economy depends on continuous job creation, behavioural safeguards, and norms that India has never formally adopted. It must remain safe, reliable, and non-extractive, while monetising the very users it claims to empower.
Kumar’s vision is simple: “Think student, think Timbuckdo.” But the ambition is harder. The company wants to capture household influence, not household spending. “They don’t have purchasing power… but it is their influential power that will decide a lot of decisions.”
In a country where teenagers already navigate rising financial pressures, digital borrowing traps, and informal work, Timbuckdo sits in an uneasy middle: part safety net, part marketing engine, part gig marketplace. The question is whether it can grow without reinforcing the very precarity that created its market.