India is a big, diverse country. What if hundreds of millions of Indians could read, write, and share their stories in their own language?
What if hundreds of millions of Indians could do all this at any time, anywhere?
What if a small group of young founders could create the world's largest platform for reading and writing in Indian languages?
My product design career began with Pratilipi - a startup in Bangalore, India where I was the very first employee. The CEO, a good friend and former colleague of mine, saw that while there were many avenues for Indians to read and write stories in English, there was no such platform for the diverse array of Indian languages. Why don't we build it ourselves?
I came from an Engineering and Business background and new little of design outside branding, but we had the energy of young idealists and that was enough to start. I directly worked with them till mid-2016, and even did some work in 2017, which has included:
As a small team of 6 people, when I started there were barely 2,000 people reading on the platform in a day, and today more than 5 million people have downloaded the app. While initially there were barely a few hundred writers, today, more than 92,000 people write on Pratilipi.
And the App has an overall rating of 4.7 on the Google Play Store.
Finally, while during the time Pratilipi was trying to raise money from small Indian accelerators, today Billion dollar funds like Nexus Ventures, Omidyar Network and Shunwei Capital are invested in Pratilipi.
(Small note: I am an early stage angel investor in Pratilipi)
The Pratilipi App has thousands of 5 Star ratings on the Google Play Store
I presented the logo design (in mid 2014) as a conversational presentation with three logo concepts. The final concept was chosen by the founding team, and still adorns the product after around 5 years.