The freight-bus-sized gap.

Saurav Kumar Nanda did not set out to start an agency. He set out to ship things, and kept noticing the same gap.

He is based in Chicago. He holds an MS in Technological Entrepreneurship from Illinois Institute of Technology and a BS in Computer Science. By day he is a Sales Operations Executive at MAC Properties, one of the larger residential operators in the city, where he learned how a real operating business runs: the unglamorous machinery of contracts, renewals, and the difference between a number on a slide and a number in a bank account.

He is also CEO of Nandighosh Mobility, a bus transportation company he runs remotely. Nandighosh moves real people between real cities in Odisha, on a schedule, every single day. Running a transport company from eight thousand miles away teaches you something specific: a system either works without you in the room, or it does not work. There is no in-between, and there is no faking it.

Then there is the product work. Saurav ships software constantly, under his own name, as a habit. ApplyAI, a tool that helps job seekers reach the recruiter who actually owns a role. LovedPDF, a document product. MyHomeversity, student housing near the University of Chicago. MatchYourSaaS, a software comparison engine. None of these are hypotheticals. They run, they have users, and several of them are the case studies on this site. That is deliberate. Holdfast will not sell a method it has not run on its own work first.

The intern pipeline came out of necessity and turned into a conviction. Saurav hires engineering interns from NIT Rourkela, one of India’s hardest schools to get into, and trains them on the lab projects, the ApplyAI and LovedPDF kind of work, where being wrong costs a day and teaches a year. The good ones become senior, by Holdfast’s definition rather than by their years. The bench in Bhubaneswar grew directly out of that.

So why an agency, and why this one?

Because Saurav kept watching founders he respected get caught in the same trap. They needed one feature shipped. They did not need a 12-month staffing contract, a sales VP, a 50,000-dollar conversion fee, or an offshore team they would never meet. But that was the menu. On one side, the staffing marketplaces: Andela, Turing, the body shops. On the other, the premium freelance networks: Toptal and its cousins. The gap between them, the place where a founder could buy one shipped, guaranteed feature at a fixed price, was empty. Wide enough, as he likes to put it, to drive a freight bus through.

Holdfast is what fills that gap. One feature, 14 days, fixed price, money back if the date slips. The AI-augmented part is not a marketing layer. It is the reason the math works: tools like Claude Code collapse the tedious 40 percent of an engineer’s day, and instead of pocketing that as margin or hiding it behind “premium senior hours,” Holdfast passes it through as a shorter deadline and a fixed number.

The things Holdfast refuses are as important as the things it does. No retainers. No minimums. No conversion fees. No junior engineers on client work. No sales team between you and the person who will build your feature. Saurav runs every intro call himself, writes every spec, and signs every contract. If that does not scale past a certain size, so be it. He would rather Holdfast stay small and keep its word than grow and break it.

He will also, on a real share of those calls, talk you out of buying. If your project is two sprints, he will say so. If your own team could do it in a week, he will say so. If it is a greenfield product that needs a discovery phase, he will tell you, and often tell you who to call instead. A money-back guarantee only survives if the scoping is honest, and the honest call is free.

That is the whole company. One founder who ships, a senior bench he trained, a fixed promise, and a flat refusal to pretend the promise is bigger than it is.