POD WEBSITE DESIGN

Background

Pod is a fundraising platform that provides CCD and Equity funding with small ticket size of Rs. 20,000 to retail investors and collaborate with incubators and accelerators.

I joined POD in june 2022 as a UI/UX designer and i'm working for the next launch of POD where I am the sole UI/UX designer and also the only designer in the firm that has given me a lot of opportunity to create something meaningful and something that is very new in the market. I collaborated with the product managers and developers to come up with a solutions to increase the performance of our product and also increase the .

I've grown tremendously in the past couple of months, some key achievements of which I have listed below:

• Implementation of design process - This has helped our team establish more structure to how we conduct our work and allow other teams to gain visibility across our upcoming sprints.

• Identifying gaps in the product - Working with a small team allowed me to find gaps in the product that helped to reduce manual interaction with the user by 55- 60%

• Improved usability of the product- We tried testing the product after every sprint to improve the flow of the procust and make is more accessible to all the stakeholders.

• Establishing of design Kit - This has helped to maintain consistency in the look and feel across different parts of the platform.

• Establishing of design system - This has helped the Engineering and Product teams to understand how and why we choose to implement certain components over others.

Understanding the journey

1. Why is Fundraising Important ?

Today, fundraising is a critical step in the development of a startup's identity, and the platform is one of those that facilitates the process. Consider the following scenario: people have the idea of starting a company but lack the resources to do so; as a result, people abandon their startup idea. POD is here to make the process simple and painless.

2. How POD got its start ?

Pod began as a platform for entrepreneurs to raise financing for their pre-seed or seed round, with chosen startups made available to investors via the website and subsequently made available for retail and angel investors to invest in.

Pod works for equity and ccd financing which makes the startup choose according to the investment made as a startup can not have more than 200 investors or stock holders in one of the mentioned range so the micro ticket to fill their startup size has been kept for 20,000

As we all know, tike and sateeq are some of our competitors that have also been making the micro ticket size accessible in 5000, so what sets us apart?

Our distinction stems from our CCD, which is Compulsory Convertible Debenture, which makes investing in startups easier and attracts more people to invest.

3. In terms of startup financing, how skilled is our audience?

People who have previously invested in startups are familiar with the ecosystem and the terms connected with it, but our target client is the retail investor, who is unfamiliar with it. What we overlook while discussing CCD is that it is a Convertible Debenture that is turned into equity upon any trigger event. whereas on other sites, users believe they are investing in equities or stocks without understanding the distinction.

CCD - A CCD can be converted at any point in the startup's life cycle, which could include adding them all to the Cap table or just making some by selling the ccd of others with their consent, where they can exit at that point only and the other section of people who bought the ccd get the convertible equity share. Now the group of people that sold their cap tables achieves financial independence and no longer has to be connected with the company for an extended period of time.

CAP TABLE - A capitalization table, also known as a cap table, is a spreadsheet or table that shows the equity capitalization for a company. A capitalization table is most commonly utilized for startups and early-stage businesses but all types of companies may use it as well. In general, the capitalization table is an intricate breakdown of a company’s shareholders’ equity.

Cap tables often include all of a company’s equity ownership capital, such as common equity shares, preferred equity shares, warrants, and convertible equity.

New Journey

I created a new sitemap for the upcoming product that takes care of the of the journey of startups from start to the end maintaining their upcoming compliance and management boards.

Public Pages

For now POD as a platform offered same pages before and after signing up but as we in this process are making the goal more toward providing end to end solution. I decided to initiate having a home page that we lack and a learn section.

As the flow for public pages was same as the investor or the startup pages the possibilities of exploring was limited after creating the profile.

But by increasing the steps are we limiting the interaction of user to the platform or creating more possibilities?

We went through multiple websites to figure it out and also calculates the time spent on any of such websites for a user who is just to get to know more about the platform spends minimum time and wants to know more about from the first impression only.

We intended to attract only those who have a company or are ready to invest in developing companies for the public pages, but in order to disseminate this information, a brief introduction of the web page is required, therefore the invest page is the landing page and no home page is supplied. Working on this revealed that people's view of the website important on the first glance, therefore the first page must be a home page, and because we also wanted people to learn more about the business in order to convert visitors to customers, a learn section became necessary.