Ashish
Pratap Singh

One Way Ticket. Zero Safety Net. Two Newsletters.

In June 2024, Ashish Pratap Singh walked out of his Amazon office in the United States for the last time. Not because he was fired. Not because the money was bad. But because he had decided, quietly and deliberately, that building something of his own mattered more than the career ladder he was already halfway up.

Two months later, he was back in India. By September, he was building AlgoMaster.io from scratch - a full platform, no co-founder, no VC funding, just a former Amazon SDE-2 and a decade of accumulated obsession with algorithms and system design. Five months after that, the platform launched. It promptly acquired 700,000+ learners.

The newsletter had already been running since March 2024. It hit 140,000 subscribers before it turned one year old.

This is not a pivot story. This is the natural endpoint of someone who cracked Amazon, Adobe, and Google interviews, spent years actually doing the work those interviews tested, then looked around and thought: someone should make this less terrible to learn. And then made it less terrible to learn.

He's Done What He Teaches

The credibility is not manufactured. Ashish is a Codeforces Candidate Master - a rank achieved by a fraction of the competitive programming population globally. He competed in ACM ICPC Regionals twice, in 2018 and 2019. He was selected for Google Summer of Code in approximately one month of focused preparation.

At Amazon India, he built an ML auto-labeling batch workflow that saved up to $6 million in human labeling costs. At Adobe, he led automation that cut reporting costs by 80% and identified over $50,000 per year in unused AWS resources. He's not a guy who read about distributed systems in a book. He's someone who built them inside companies that run at planetary scale.

And then there's the 1,583 LeetCode problems. He solved them. He'll also tell you that most people only need 300 well-chosen ones. That's the thesis behind AlgoMaster: the point is not volume. The point is pattern recognition. He learned this the hard way, across 1,583 problems, so you don't have to.

Learn What You Need. Build the Rest Later.

The LinkedIn post that broke through first was not about algorithms. It was about showing up to a new job without knowing everything - which is to say, it was about almost every software engineer who has ever taken a new role. The post got 10,000+ likes. Three hundred comments. It traveled because it was honest rather than aspirational.

That philosophy runs through everything he builds. AlgoMaster.io is not a firehose. It is a curriculum built by someone who has observed, through years of both passing and studying interviews, what actually matters and what is noise. The courses cover DSA Patterns, System Design Fundamentals, System Design Interviews, Low-Level Design Interviews, Concurrency Interviews, and Behavioral Interviews. No filler. No padding for padding's sake.

The platform is freemium with one-time payments and no auto-renewal. He has kept infrastructure costs deliberately minimal so core content remains free. For a creator who could charge recurring SaaS prices on a platform with 700,000 users, this is a choice. He made it anyway.

85,000 Stars. Zero Marketing Budget.

Before the newsletter, before the platform, there were GitHub repos. Ashish built curated resource lists - awesome-system-design-resources, awesome-low-level-design, awesome-leetcode-resources - and they found their audiences organically. Combined, they have accumulated over 85,000 stars. His code is archived in GitHub's Arctic Code Vault. Whatever happens next, his contributions are physically preserved in permafrost in Svalbard, Norway.

The repos were not a growth hack. They were a developer doing what developers do: solving a problem they had, publishing the result, letting the internet decide if it was useful. The internet decided it was very useful.

Eight Years. Four Companies. One Exit.

Two Newsletters. One YouTube. Every Week.

AlgoMaster Newsletter goes out every Wednesday and Sunday. That's 104 newsletter issues per year, minimum. The open rate is 34% - roughly double the industry average for email newsletters. He does not miss publish dates.

There is also AI Minded, a second newsletter covering AI concepts and tools, which he launched in July 2024 while simultaneously winding down his Amazon career. It hit 9,000+ subscribers. Running two newsletters while building a platform while transitioning careers is the kind of thing that sounds unreasonable until you notice the results.

His YouTube channel - 263,000+ subscribers - covers the same terrain as the newsletter but in video form: DSA patterns, system design walkthroughs, interview prep. The audience is predominantly 25-34 year olds, 86% male, with a heavy India and US split. These are working developers preparing for roles at companies that use exactly the kind of interviews Ashish has spent a decade understanding.

What He Actually Says

Where It Started

BITS Pilani is among India's most selective engineering institutions. Ashish graduated with a 7.96 GPA in Computer Science. By the time he graduated, he had already cleared Google Summer of Code and was heading into Morgan Stanley.