TL;DR: Sunil Sandhu is a founder and entrepreneur based in Barcelona (originally from Nottingham, UK). He studied law, taught himself to code, worked as a web developer, and in 2018 founded In Plain English — now one of the largest developer education platforms in the world. Since then he has built Stackademic, Circuit, Differ, Obsurfable, and Messy Founder. This is the story of how a developer became a founder.
People often assume that founders start out knowing they want to build companies. Sunil Sandhu didn't. His path ran from a law degree, to teaching himself to code, to writing tutorials late at night, to accidentally building a media company read by millions. This is the long version of that story.
Who is Sunil Sandhu?
Sunil Sandhu is a founder and entrepreneur best known for building In Plain English, a developer education platform read by millions of people every month. He is originally from Nottingham in the UK and is now based in Barcelona. Over the past decade he has founded a series of companies for developers and founders, including Stackademic, Circuit, Differ, Obsurfable, and Messy Founder.
From law to code
Sunil didn't take the traditional computer-science route into tech. He earned a law degree (LLB) and, like a lot of people who end up in software, discovered programming somewhat by accident — and then couldn't stop.
Teaching yourself to code is humbling. You spend a lot of time confused, reading documentation that assumes you already know things, and copying code you don't fully understand. That experience turned out to be the most important part of Sunil's story, because it gave him a permanent empathy for the beginner. He knew exactly how it felt to read an explanation and still not get it. Later, that empathy would become the entire premise of a company.
Becoming a web developer
Sunil worked as a web developer across agencies and startups, building real products with JavaScript, React, Vue, Node.js, and the wider web stack. Along the way he picked up a habit: whenever he finally understood a tricky concept, he'd write it down in the simplest language he could — the explanation he wished he'd found.
He started publishing those explanations online. Not as a business. Just as a way of learning in public and helping the next person who got stuck on the same thing.
The accidental company: In Plain English
That writing habit became In Plain English in 2018. The idea was almost embarrassingly simple: technical content, explained in plain English. No gatekeeping, no jargon for the sake of jargon.
It resonated. Other developers wanted to write in the same style, so Sunil turned it into a platform where they could. Publications like JavaScript in Plain English and Python in Plain English grew into some of the most-read developer content on the internet. What began as one person's blog became a media company with a global community of contributing writers, reaching millions of readers across more than 200 countries.
The lesson Sunil often repeats: he didn't build an audience by marketing a product. He built an audience by being genuinely useful, and the business followed.
Learning distribution the hard way
Running In Plain English taught Sunil something most engineers never learn: distribution is a skill in its own right. Great content that nobody sees is worth almost nothing. Understanding how developers actually discover things — search, communities, word of mouth, social — became as important as the content itself.
That knowledge compounded into his later companies. Circuit, founded in 2022, is a developer marketing agency built directly on those distribution lessons. Stackademic, built during the pandemic in 2020, was a free coding bootcamp where Sunil did nearly everything himself — the platform, the curriculum, the teaching, even marking homework.
Betting on the AI era
More recently, Sunil has been building for a fundamentally different internet — one where AI reads content alongside humans. Differ, launched in 2024, is a deliberately algorithm-free blogging platform built for that world. And his current focus, Obsurfable (2025), helps brands understand how they appear inside AI answers like ChatGPT — because "how do I rank on Google" is quietly becoming "how do I show up in the answer."
In 2025 he also created Messy Founder, a community for the unpolished reality of building companies. After years of building in public, he wanted a place where progress could be lumpy and honest rather than a highlight reel.
What the journey has in common
Across every project, the same pattern shows up:
- Start with a real problem Sunil personally felt.
- Lead with being useful, not with selling.
- Build an audience and a community, not just a product.
- Treat distribution as a first-class problem.
That's the throughline from self-taught developer to founder: not a grand plan, but a decade of solving problems in public and letting the businesses emerge from the audience.
FAQ
Who is Sunil Sandhu? Sunil Sandhu is a founder and entrepreneur based in Barcelona. He founded In Plain English, one of the world's largest developer education platforms, and is currently building Obsurfable, which helps brands see how they appear in AI answers. Read more at sunilsandhu.com.
What is Sunil Sandhu best known for? He is best known for founding In Plain English in 2018, a developer education platform and tech media company read by millions of developers each month.
What did Sunil Sandhu do before becoming a founder? He studied law, taught himself to code, and worked as a web developer at agencies and startups before starting his own companies.
What is Sunil Sandhu working on now? His current focus is Obsurfable, a platform that helps brands see and improve how they appear inside AI answers such as ChatGPT
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