Sketchnote

You know, when I first started the idea of Sketchnote, it was because I wanted a tool like this for my own startup. Above all, I wanted to give back to the community by helping them with:

• Mentorship
• Guidance
• Even financial support

This paved the way for grants!

The amazing response we were getting from early-stage entrepreneurs in SE Asia, EU, Latin America and India, made this a no-brainer. We wanted to give them fuel for their growth.

Naturally, we wanted to start a micro-VC fund to nitro their dreams. Thus was born our funding programme! This would give us access to amazing startup, and make it easy to monitor their journey and help them grow.

So... our beta launch plans were severely hampered. And COVID's second wave in April 2021 meant we were screwed!

But this phase also showed us the importance of being in touch with our end user constantly. Back to the drawing board, we started implementing changes from alpha feedback.

We also kicked off doing remote monthly demos via video to potential B2B clients. The reaction we had was overwhelming and very encouraging. This fueled us on!

Twitter was also of great help at this time, helping with word of mouth—or should I saw word of tweet!

I could write a book about how to work remotely on a startup you've only just begun working on, in the COVID era. But that's another story! We continued the grind till the end of 2020, with things going as smooth as possible.

Our grand plan for February 2021 was to test our massive platform in India, Indonesia, and Spain. Our cool MVP and detailed UI/UX study with 25 entrepreneurs was on track. We were confident about the robustness of the platform.

Till we found a major flaw in our UX.

We were back to square one.

I reached India only a day before all international travel was stopped and the COVID pandemic struck.

But we couldn't stop building. Julio and I continued working on the product—recruiting content writers from Spain, India, and the US. They were all either VCs, angels, CFOs or startuppers.

Since the platform predominantly has sketches and illustrations, it was a mammoth task to get just the right guys for the job. We recruited freelancers from NID—India's premium design institute.

And that's how Sketchnote mentors were created!

To give you an idea of the work that's gone into building the platform, we have over 3,500 illustrations and 250,000 words on Sketchnote... and counting!

And soon, we put our Avengers—the core team for tech, design, and content—in place by August 2020!

Julio to the rescue!

He was working in Japan at the time, and invited me to Tokyo to speak with him. I took his offer to speak with entrepreneurs in Japan too!

I explained all the information I had gathered over the past year to Juli, and we shook hands at 10:30 pm in a Tokyo coffee shop. He agreed to be the co-founder on Sketchnote!

The very next month, Julio suggested I try working with this amazing design team in Madrid. Some startups he had worked with had tied up with this design team with great results. And I was glad for this recommendation!

The startup was really taking shape now.

I then did three months of behavioral learning patterns in India. I was finally ready to test it!

Having had hand illustrated sketchnotes, I scanned them on Figma and made clickable prototypes. These were presented to users—we even paid them a cool 500 bucks for helping out too!

After having interviews about 25 early-stage entrepreneurs, I flew back to Berlin for a bigger sprint to nail the UX. We wanted to collate and make sense of all the research!

Here's where things got difficult (as they do!). The UX took us six whole months to crack! I'd spoken to 50 entrepreneurs, but my brain was stuck. I needed a co-founder!

While in Germany, I spoke to my then lead investor, board member, and a dear friend, Julio. He invited me to Madrid and set up interviews with the biggest accelerator in Europe—Telefonica.

Julio is a force to be reckoned with in the European startup space. He'a invested in more than 40 startups and is also an LP in a Madrid-based VC fund. His word was law!

On my way to him, I realized the problem of literacy isn't just cultural. These early-stage, first-time entrepreneurs had an idea to change the world but didn't know how to.

At Telefonica we interviewed five startups and saw our hypothesis turn concrete before our eyes.

We hooked up with one of the best design teams in Germany for the first five day design sprint. We gleaned that learning is hard; business learning exponentially so. We also needed a way to take boring business concepts and turn them in a way it would be fun and effective at once.

After having early success with my last startup, Diabeto, I was invited by several accelerators to share my learnings. Diabeto was acquired by Livongo in 2017, and I learnt a lot from that phase—lessons I was more than willing to share with up and coming entrepreneurs.

One such accelerator, Zone Startups, was investing in very early hardware startups by women. And the quality of women entrepreneurs was so good—they were killing it!

But one common issue they all seemed to face was lack of business knowledge. One entrepreneur sent me a 3k worder business plan explaining her product tech, when I asked for an investor deck!

To counter this, I'd draw Sketchnotes—a mix of caricature illustrations and text—to help them grasp concepts better. The visually rich sketches did a LOT better than lengthy lectures did, to aid understanding of startup information.

Contrary to popular belief this wasn't just an Indian issue. I found entrepreneurs involved in a pitch session at Volkswagen's internal accelerator in Munich face similar issues.

And thus began the idea of Sketchnote!