My 1-Year Journey as a Design Founder

Last year at this time, I was completely clueless about what I wanted to do. I had a severance, so I knew I had little time left. I’m a product designer and started giving interviews the day we heard the news. Within the next 15 days, I received a job offer from Okta. However, since the HR representative knew I had been laid off and was desperate to find a new job, she offered me 1L less than my base salary and a level below what I had previously held. I decided I would get better opportunities and walked away.

I started giving interviews in major companies, and a lot of people told me that I have a Higher CTC compared to what other folks have with the same experience. So half of them couldn’t match the CTC, and the people who were from FANG were very rude and didn’t know how to even interview. Few companies even ghosted, and few leaders said Isko maza nai ayega, consumer products me kaam Kia hai na.

I gave up; the entire process drained me so much that I felt like leaving the field and doing something else. The only thing that I like is to build a product, and no one was allowing me to enter in Industry.

So I decided that I would build my own product

My vision is to create an ecosystem of design products that helps both early-stage startups/solo entrepreneurs and designers — a tightly connected suite of products, much like what Adobe offers, but in a more ethical, community-driven way.

Here is the detail about the products I want to build:

First Product: Kimko Design

Having run a small design studio in past, I noticed a recurring problem: agency owners constantly switch between multiple apps throughout the design process — from Google Forms for briefs, to emails, then to Figma, and finally WhatsApp for feedback (especially Indian clients — they love WhatsApp for everything). It’s messy, time-consuming, and inefficient.

That’s when the idea of creating CAAS (Creative as a Service) came to mind.

Also, in 2024 alone, over 200 companies went through layoffs, leaving many designers struggling to find stable work. I wanted to create a closed marketplace for Indian designers and integrate CAAS as a workspace for both clients and designers — basically, exporting Indian design talent to the world.

Second Product: Kimko Stocks While building the Kimko Design platform, I realised there were multiple touchpoints where designers still relied heavily on external platforms for fonts, icons, and illustrations. Funded companies can afford dedicated designers to create unique styles — but what about early-stage startups or solo founders?

Right now, they’re using the same old libraries, and there are very few resources built by or for Indian Products & designers.

That’s when I decided to build Kimko Stocks — starting with a high-quality icon library that would be free for Kimko Design subscribers, but also available as a standalone product. After months of research, I decided to focus on three core principles:

Unique, Consistent, and Country-Specific design assets.

There are two more products in the Kimko ecosystem — I’ll talk about them later.

Here’s how the past year unfolded:

Oct-Dec 2024: Prepared a pitch deck for investors and cold-emailed many of them. To my surprise, several actually replied.

However, most of them felt the idea wouldn’t scale. Everyone seemed busy investing in AI products — even ones with little real-world value.

Though my product did include some AI features, maybe it didn’t resonate with investors the way I hoped.

In Jan, I tested the Kimko Design idea with a few clients — and they loved it.

I also spoke to a few mentors who saw potential in the concept, which boosted my confidence. I started talking to developers to get cost estimates — which, of course, turned out to be higher than what I could afford.

Since I was running out of cash and needed to keep things going, I onboarded several Shopify clients and took on part-time design work.

June: At this point, I had two options — continue as an agency, or take a leap and build the products I have been thinking of

In my 30s, I’ve found clarity: I love building products, and that’s what I want to do. Also, every second person is opening a design studio, which is driving rates to an all-time low. One of my clients told me they received a quotation from a new design studio that is ready to design the entire app for 20k INR.

So, I invested everything I earned into building Kimko Stocks, since it was more affordable to start with than the Kimko Design platform.

In July, I onboarded 2 developers, 1 Visual designer and 1 Product Designer — all talented Friends I’ve worked with before.

Together, we started developing Kimko Stocks while simultaneously working on an end-to-end experience for the Kimko Design with other PD.

After all the ups and downs, we have finally launched Kimko Stocks. We have around 2K daily active users on the platform. Please do support the platform, we will be adding lot of categories in the coming months.

https://stocks.kimko.design/