My guest today is Abhinav Chhikara who is the founder of 10kdesigners.com which is the design school of the future. Previously, he was the head of design at the unicorn education startup Unacademy. In this episode, we discuss the power of peer learning in college, why your college GPA doesn't matter, convincing Indian parents to continue doing freelancing, why Abhinav joined Housing.com, getting featured in TechCrunch, meeting Gaurav Munjal, and joining Unacademy as a founding designer, growing the Unacademy design team, generating passive income, why future of design education is live learning and starting 10kdesigners! For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
Watch the video version of this interview on YouTube
GUEST BIO:
Abhinav Chhikara got his start in design in 2011 by designing iOS apps for freelance projects on oDesk. Prior to that he was an early employee & the Head of Design at Unacademy, an ed-tech startup that's now valued over $1.4B & has raised from global investors like SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Facebook, General Atlantic etc. After spending 2.5 years there, building the design team from scratch & helping build one of the biggest live learning platforms in the world, he realized that he wanted to fix the state of design education. So Abhinav quit his job to build 10kdesigners which enables the next generation of designers and product thinkers.
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Namaste and welcome. This is Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to The design MBA. This podcast is a real-life MBA program for designers where we interview design hustlers and learn the skills, mindset necessary for a designer to launch a business venture. You can learn more. Find past episodes and stay updated at designMBA.show.
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Jayneil Dalal: Thank you everybody for tuning in today. This episode is really special to me because I have a freaking amazing guest today, Abhinav Chhikara.
So, who is Abhinav? Abhinav got a start in design in 2011 designing iOS apps for freelance projects on oDesk which, I believe, now is called Upwork. Since then, he's worked with 50+ founders and startups across the USA, Europe and India. He's a startup founder himself and co-founded a music chat app called Listen that had its moment of virality with 8K+ users. He's also the author of Amazon bestseller Pajama Profit, a book about building a freelancing career. Most recently, he was an early employee and the Head of Design at Unacademy, an ed-tech startup that's now valued over 1.4 billion, that's billion with the b, and has raised from global investors like Softbank, Sequoia Capital, etc. After spending 2.5 years there, he got some kind of enlightenment after building the design team from scratch and helping one of the biggest live learning platforms in the world, he realized that he wanted to fix the state of design education. So, he did something that's really hard to do, which is quit his job full time to build an education startup of his own, one that enables the next generation of designers and product thinkers. So, if you are a designer anywhere in the world and you were like “Holy cow! Man, I want to up my designs because I want to learn how to use web flow, I want to start my own freelance career and I don't want to make the same mistakes that have been already made and kind of like move faster,” then you need to go ahead and right now check out 10KDesigners.com. And, yeah, tell him that Jayneil sent you.
So, without further ado, Abhinav, thank you so much, man, for coming on the show.
Abhinav Chhikara: Hey, Jayneil, thanks for having me. I loved that intro and super looking forward to this conversation.
Jayneil: Yeah, man, I was just reading so much about you, what you did, your videos and stuff and my favorite part was, how do I put it, going back to know when you were going to do college, the thing that hit me the most is that you said that you kind of got okay grades in college. Is that correct?
Abhinav: Yeah. I can tell you a little bit about what okay means in this scenario. I enrolled in Computer Science Engineering because I watched the social network and I was like “Okay, let's do this. Let's build the next Facebook.” The first year, my GPA, in India it’s out of 10, I got something like a 6. Something, which is like just passing and I was like “Okay, it's because the first year isn't computer science. It was physics, chemistry” and I was like “Okay, second year is going to be better.” Second year was like 6.3 and I was like “Okay, this is not going where I intended it to go. I need to figure out my own thing that I can do, my own game that I can play.” That's what got me into design. I often joke that if I got really good grades, I wouldn't be forced to figure out design and find my own path.
Jayneil: That's so true, man. And, by the way, I’m in the same boat as you. I think my GPA, it one time crossed 7 but most of the time, the average that I have for all the four years, is 6.8 or something. And it was always around that. I did my college from Nirma University in Gujarat. There we had the mid-sem exam and the semester-end exam. So, you had two opportunities. So, I remember failing a lot of the mid-sem exams. And it's so ironic, I’m a designer now and there's this industrial drawing, dude, I cannot believe I actually failed in that in the finals and you get an IEF. And now, when I look back at the people who were called the toppers, they had like 9.4 GPA, they kind of took the conventional route which was “Okay, we're going to take a job at Deloitte, we're going to take a job at uh Infosys or something” and they're there. And I think, to your point, something about not being good enough in the education system there in India made you figure out what is that for you. And with the freelancing stuff, I’m kind of curious about what advice do you have for all the students in India who want to start a freelancing career because right now, in Upwork and stuff, it’s so competitive. And I know you started out way early on. So, what would your advice be to them?
Abhinav: I would say, college, for me, I think, is one of the best places for you to start freelancing just because a lot of freelancing is waiting on things to happen, especially when you start up. And when you send out applications on Upwork, you're not going to get replies to 80% of them. So, when you have college going on, it’s like this thing you can do in the evenings and it’s sort of like a slow burn. I feel like when you're outside college, you're like “Oh shit, I got to get something done. I haven’t had a project in two weeks” whereas in college you're like “It’s okay.” College stuff is going on and then this stuff on the side. So, my advice has always been college is a good playing ground for freelancing because you don’t have the pressure of actually doing something. You're like “Okay, if I get a project this month, it’s great.” And that gives you a lot of exploration mind that’s useful later in your career. I remember back in college, I tried starting a newsletter or starting a podcast. I did a bunch of stuff around trying to build this personal brand thing via blogs, via Dribbble, doing all of this stuff just as an experiment. And then later, the second time I had to do it, which is when I was like “Okay, this needs to work out,” I already had a bit of practice doing that earlier.
Jayneil: So, you did not go to what you do call the IITs of India, right? So, you didn’t go to the name brand colleges. So, where were you getting your inspiration from because usually the traditional would be “I should go to IITs. All the cool people are hanging out there.” So, where were you getting all this inspiration to do all these things when you were in college?
Abhinav: I went to Manipal Institute of Technology. This is in Karnataka. And the perception of Manipal from the outside, I can tell you, people that don’t know, it’s a place where rich kids go to spend four years partying and smoking out. So, that way, I had a really fun crowd to play with. And it is still a bit of a stereotype. There are all kinds of people there but that is how the stereotype is. So, for me, the way I was able to find this was not through the traditional route of seniors, which is what I see today, where a lot of seniors who have been designing. They sort of either set up these college clubs that help you get this entry. I almost had no interaction with my seniors because I had nobody who was a designer. So, what really helped was I had a bunch of friends and we started doing things like selling T-shirts and were like “Oh, dude, we’re raking in money through these T-shirts but it’s a pain going to hostel rooms and hand delivering them. Can we just make money in an easier way?” So, that’s when we started figuring out freelancing. And then a lot of them got into web dev. In fact, I said “I don’t want to do websites.” I wanted to go 100% into mobile. So, a lot of that was pure learning, which is one day you're sitting and a friend of mine calls me up and he’s like “Yo, I just got a project worth 100 dollars an hour. Damn!” And I was like “Oh shit! I didn’t know that was possible.” So, now, suddenly, I have to up my game and now I’m at that level and then somebody says “Hey, did you know Upwork lets you do this one thing where it increases your visibility if you do this or this.” So, it was a lot of pure learning and a bunch of us started figuring it out. And throughout that time, we had classmates who were like “You guys are making money? Tell me the scene.” So, I was like “Yeah. Okay, come to the hostel room.” Eventually, we moved out, we moved into this really nice apartment, it had a pool and everything. And we were like “Yeah, come over. We’re going to teach you what needs to be done and let’s just figure this out together.”
Jayneil: I think what happened was when I was in India, I remember like the scene going on which was the majority of the people who were stuck in this rat race where it was all about getting the GPA, getting that pointers, I think they call it the pointer system. So, it was all about “I want that pointers” and everybody was just obsessed with getting a job. And then there were a few people, I remember, who were more like the Three Idiots movie. So, there are very few people who are thinking like “What am I going to learn today?” and they were actually hacking things or doing freelancing. I think maybe the landscape has changed now. You're probably close to it. I think now people want to explore and hack away things.
So, when you were in college doing all these things, I mean, you also have Indian parents, was there pressure, the parents were like “Oh my God, what is Abhinav doing, man?”
Abhinav: For sure. I think it's easier said than done like “Hey, figure stuff out in college. That's how it's done.” For me, freelancing gave me an external validation. Back then we were designing screens in photoshop. Learning photoshop and everything is chill but unless you have this external validation from the outside world that tells you “Hey, you're doing okay actually. Just keep doing it,” you don't feel confident. So, freelance was that thing which gave me the confidence. And then once I started doing freelance projects, back then like the iPhone had come out a few years earlier, so everybody wanted to do an app. I was working with fitness trainers who were like “Let's make our own fitness app,” working with somebody who was like “Let's do an app that does XYZ.” So, I did a bunch of that. And then another form of validation for me was that that was the time when the startup scene in India started kicking up.
Jayneil: Wow!
Abhinav: So, I started getting a lot more requests from homegrown startups. My LinkedIn started blowing up, for example. And I was a kid in college. To me it was like “Why sit for placements which is like this thing where the employer has this power?” versus now I’m getting these messages on LinkedIn. So, I definitely used that to my advantage. There was this one time where I was like “Mom, look at my LinkedIn.” I was scrolling through my LinkedIn messages and I was like “I have EA Sports. I have this, that. I have these companies sending me job requests. Now, I’m not going to take them. So, don't get too excited but things are okay.”
Jayneil: I remember that I was finally able to get some kind of job placement. I think it's called a multinational company or an MNC in India and the job offer, dude, was for 2.5 lakh rupees. And, again, for preface, this was in 2012. And I remember very vividly thinking that 2.5 like rupees … and they had back then this Santro. You remember that car, the Santro? So, that Santro cost more than my salary. And I also remember that I went to this Sony showroom and I saw this TV like a Bravia, 40-inch LED and if you want to get the sound system, that even cost more than the salary and I was like “Damn! Dude, I think there's something better out there.” So, I’m kind of wondering, at that point you were doing freelancing. Were you making more money than those job offers on campus?
Abhinav: Definitely. So, when it was time for placements, it happened, I think, somewhere at the start of your third year into the fourth year, I didn't even fill out the forms. I was like “Number one, the best I can get would probably be TCS or Infosys because of my low GPA” because, typically, the better companies like Microsoft and Amazon have GPA caps. You need to have above an 8.5 to even apply. And then secondly, I was like “None of these are design roles. I don't want to waste all of the stuff that I’ve done and now get into an engineering role.” So, at that point I also had a little bit of leverage which is I could say no to a lot of these job offers on my LinkedIn because I was like “Hey, I am making a good amount just through freelancing. So, I can actually wait for a good opportunity that actually breaks me out of freelance.”
Jayneil: That's insane, man, just thinking about it. I’m feeling very nostalgic thinking back about the college years. I wish I could go back and tell myself “All is well. Everything is going to be okay.”
So, you graduate from college. What happens then? You're still doing the freelancing. What happened in the phase after that? All your friends have graduated. They've taken up jobs at these big companies. So, what are you doing at that point?
Abhinav: The group that I sort of was freelancing with, they decided to start up. So, they started this jobs platform called Jobs Bio. And they were like “Join as the designer” and I said no because at that point, I knew I didn't want to design for the web. I was like mobile or nothing.
Jayneil: Oh my God! What year was this?
Abhinav: Probably 2015 is when I graduated. I was like “I don't want to be designing dashboards. I just want to be mobile.” Interestingly, some of them are doing another startup right now and I’m an investor in that startup. So, we still sort of stuck around. So, right out of college, I continued freelancing, moved back to Bangalore where I am from. And for a good six to seven months, I was just working out of Starbucks.
Jayneil: Wow!
Abhinav: And I was like “Oh, this is great. I can get coffee. I can just work here” but it got super boring. At some point it was like “Hey, college was fun because in the evenings you could go chill with your friends yeah like you could hang out versus here, I’m just coming back home, working at Starbucks.” The work is chill but outside of that, I don't have much happening. So, I go through “Okay, what else can I do here?” And I had an email in my inbox from Housing.com. They had reached out back when I was in college saying “Hey, are you interested?” and I was like “Hey, I can do an internship but I can't do full time” and they were like “Okay, let's keep in touch.” So, just reached out to them and I’m like “Yo, are you guys still hiring?” and they're like “Yeah, for sure.” So, that's when I moved from Bangalore to Bombay. And one of the main reasons I actually picked Housing.com was at that time they had the best design team. For people who don't have that Indian context, Housing.com was the company that sort of defined good design in India. Even today, if you look at the designers from Housing, they're at almost every other company out there and they were the first ones to have a website which is like global standards. Until that point, I hadn't really worked with other designers. Me and a couple of people from college were all the designers I knew. And then everybody else were designers from Silicon Valley, who I was following on Twitter. I knew no Indian designers. So, I was like “Let me take this opportunity to then figure out what it's like to work in a team.” That is sort of the next shift. So, moved to Bombay. At its peak, Housing had about 55 designers.
Jayneil: Wow!
Abhinav: Not well utilized though. After a while, there were layoffs and there was a whole scene around it but that really helped me get a comparative angle which is working with these designers, I immediately was like “Hey, that is something I’m not good at yet” or this one skill, I now have a validation saying that “I’m as good as above the bar, amongst these 50 designers.” So, I think that was my biggest learning there.
Jayneil: So, now, at this point, you worked at Housing.com. Did you get this itch like “You know, maybe I can just join Google India” or something like that? I think the packages for designers in Google India can go up to 30 lakh rupees. So, did you feel like you just want to join a company full-time at Amazon India or Google India and just join as a designer?
Abhinav: There are two parts to that. One part would be working at a big company versus a startup. In college, I interned at Microsoft in Bangalore and they had the startup accelerator. So, I was within that, helping startups. And personally, I didn't really enjoy that Microsoft culture where it felt like a very tiered system where you have to climb this ladder. I don't know the titles exactly but it's Lead to Associate to Associate XYZ. You keep climbing those ladders. And it felt like a very corporate culture and I didn't really like that. And in terms of the money as well, Housing.com, they're infamous for ruining the market for all other startups, which is they overpaid the shit out of designers. So, literally, for a year or two afterwards, other startups in India had trouble hiring because salary expectations were through the roof.
Jayneil: Oh my God!
Abhinav: So, that way, I was pretty happy at Housing because I knew that I didn't want the company to get too big. I did prefer a smaller size and Housing was sort of like the perfect fit there.
Jayneil: Wow! So, after leaving Housing, what did you end up doing?
Abhinav: Interestingly, we had a hackathon at Housing where me and a bunch of other people, we built a music app that you could use to chat with your friends.
Jayneil: Wow!
Abhinav: And we built this prototype. Luckily, this hackathon, they didn't really say “It needs to be real estate specific.” They were like “Whatever you want.” So, we built the music app. And I think, towards the end of it, the layoffs at Housing happened and I survived the layoffs but I was like “Do I really want to stay here?” The team now is just like seven or eight people. The CEO was wilding on Twitter and Facebook and he was kicked out by the investors. Housing was super fun, it was amazing but I don't think I want to be there for the new Housing. Now, they're cleaning shop. They're like “Okay, let's focus on a thing.” So, me and two other people that I’d built this with, we were like “You guys want to do the music app full-time?” and we were like “Okay, what would that take?” And I think we had a really strong conviction that out of all the apps that we've designed from my freelance days as well, the music app, it was called Listen, it felt very sticky and we were like “Oh shit, this needs to go out ASAP.” We had a prototype which only worked on two phones. So, that gave us a lot of confidence like “Hey, this is something that we can totally build.” So, not roughly at the same time but we sort of quit our jobs from Housing. And then the three of us from Housing and then a friend of mine from Bangalore, who is also a musician, an engineer, four of us, we started Listen then.
Jayneil: And then during the seven or eight-month journey that you're doing Listen, were you funding this operation with your savings or were you still doing freelancing on the side to support day-to-day stuff?
Abhinav: I was doing a bit of freelancing. So, every couple of months I would do a freelance project. And overall, I think, Listen, we did it for about a year, a year and a half but it was totally bootstrapped.
Jayneil: And how did it feel? I’m assuming you probably went to some VC funds and pitched to them. can you name some firms and what was that experience like just going as a designer?
Abhinav: Yeah, for sure. The biggest validation that we had was we were in beta for about four months where we were just doing test flights, reaching out cold to people saying “Hey, try this out.” And we had a surprisingly amazing launch. So, we did great on product hunt, picked up by a bunch of press, eventually picked up by Techcrunch.
Jayneil: Yeah, I remember reading.
Abhinav: Some of the big publications. I think it was a much bigger deal back then. I’m not sure if it works now but an Indian startup that goes on Techcrunch without having raised money, it's a big deal.
Jayneil: That was the first time I read about you and I had not even started my podcast and I was like “Man, at some point I need to hit up this guy.”
Abhinav: Yeah. So, that really got us in the door with a lot of VCs. Internationally, we spoke to a bunch of VCs. We spoke to some of the investors behind House Party because we were doing social apps. We spoke to some of the investors behind Soundcloud because we were doing music apps. A bunch of investors around messaging apps as well. And in India, we spoke to nearly everyone which is like sequoia, I don't remember right now, but we spoke to a bunch of them. And I think the biggest feedback we got there was firstly, the niche we were in, it was kind of tight, which is people have existing music habits like I use Spotify, I use YouTube, I use Apple Music and then you're in messaging which people also have strong habits which is I use WhatsApp for friends, I use this other app for work. And now, when you combine that, what exactly happens? Do you expect people to stop using that current music app? Do you expect people to take a small use case away from music listening time or from messaging time? And they were like “You're doing great but for social apps, hey, if you didn't know this already, you can't talk to a VC unless you reach 100K.” You have to reach 100K downloads to even start talking because social apps, they flame in and out all the time. So, they were like “Of course, keep in touch but we'll see you at 100K.” So, we tried building it out. And I think the biggest bottleneck that we realized was that we were too dependent on Soundcloud and Spotify APIs. We, of course, didn't own the music. This is a very technical part but for somebody to become a Listen user … we had people, for example, who were using the app for eight hours a day within sessions and they wanted to invite all their friends but the way music APIs work currently, I mean, to this day is that if you use Spotify and I use Apple Music, we couldn't be in a Listen session because the APIs are different, you can't real-time match songs or time-stamps and you needed to be a Spotify Premium user. And, of course, Spotify wasn't even in India at the time. So, most of our users were in the US. So, it felt a little weird building for the LA demographic sitting in Delhi and Bangalore. I feel like that was one of the reasons we couldn't really reinvent ourselves either because we were kind of far away from the culture.
Jayneil: Wow! But it must be amazing, man. At least, now you've got a roster of all these VCs that know about you and then, hopefully, keeping touch with you. So, if you start a new venture, then you can be like “Yeah, remember me? I came and pitched back in 2016-2017” kind of thing. Wow!
So, was it hard to just decide that “Okay, we're going to shut down the service and just move on to the next venture”?
Abhinav: I mean, shutting it down was actually an easy decision for us because to actually make this work, we would have to change the product completely. From our research, the companies that make money in music are usually selling to labels. They do things like analytics or very deep use cases and we were like “Hey, it's great but we don't really want to do that.” And, of course, we had acquisition offers at this point. These were acquihires, technically. We had Hike, for example, the messaging app and they were like “Hey, let us acquihire you. Build out Hike Music. Be the Hike Music team.”
Jayneil: Wow!
Abhinav: “And move to Gurgaon.” We really talked about it. We were like “Do we really want to move to Gurgaon?” because at that point, our thinking was “Hey, if we actually wanted to work for Hike, we could very easily get into Hike.” So, the only advantage here is that you sort of get that acquisition amount as Hike stock. We could have more money. It's almost like you get a really nice joining bonus but you then become a designer at Hike. And, of course, you would have that autonomy to build your own team. For me, the biggest reason was “Hey, listen, I don't want to move to Gurgaon. This is at least a couple of years if we do this to be able to invest the stock and everything.” So, we decided to shut that down but very interestingly, that is how I transition into Unacademy. I had met Gaurav, the founder, because of Listen. He saw us on Techcrunch. We were talking on Twitter. And then once I shut it down, he heard about it and in fact, he heard about it also because of the press. We had a great launch. If you look at our mentions, we had a spike of press mentions at our launch and we had another spike when we shut down because we had Tech in Asia writing “Oh, the founder failed because here are the top five lessons.” So, we were very public about our story. That was another thing we were doing on the side but Gaurav called me up and he was like “Let's meet.” Within five minutes of meeting, he's like “Hey, let me acquire you guys. Build whatever you want here. We're still sort of figuring it out. You know how to build products.” And we talked about that as well but the rest of the team, they didn't really want to join Unacademy. Some of them wanted to move to their next startup. Some were like “I’m going to chill for a while, work a normal job and then think about it.” So, it sort of ended up being an acquihire of one.
Jayneil: Wow!
Abhinav: I ended up joining Unacademy. And I wasn't really looking for a job at that point. So, my first answer to him was “No, I’m not going to join Unacademy. Screw that.” And he was like “You can do whatever you want here. We have no product managers. Do you want to start that up? We have almost no designers. Is that something you're interested in?” So, within a day or two of conversation, I was like “Let's do this.” Of course, I got a good amount of stock. It was still an Acquihire in some sense. It was very serendipitous.
Jayneil: Now, in this case, man, you're directly negotiating the salary with the founder. So, I’m assuming that, in this case, you probably get a better deal than if you had to go through like an HR person or a recruiter like that, in terms of the deal.
Abhinav: For sure.
Jayneil: Wow!
Abhinav: And I think, also, it was like I wasn't really looking for a job. So, there was no interview. It was just me talking to Gaurav and he's like “What will it take for you to join us?” I was like “I didn't really think about this but let me get back to you tomorrow.”
Jayneil: Oh my God.
Abhinav: It was really quick like within a week I was working at Unacademy. It was a very quick decision for me.
Jayneil: And you were one of the youngest employees there, right?
Abhinav: If I’d to guess, yes. Youngest and also one of the earliest. I was around 40 something, the 40th employee but in terms of the product, I was one of the first designers. Tech team was just about 10 engineers or lesser at that point. So, in terms of the product team, I was maybe first 10 or first 15.
Jayneil: Wow! And then you worked there for two, two and a half years?
Abhinav: Yeah.
Jayneil: That is insane, man. I mean you got all these stocks. So, I’m assuming the vesting schedule is still three years there. So, when you left in two, two and a half years, did you leave all the stock on the table or maybe potentially more stock in the future? What was the scenario like?
Abhinav: So, it's a four-year vesting with a one-year cliff. So, I did vest two years of stock. And there was a small buyout for the employees in between. So, I cashed out some of that but I still do have my stock. I was really happy when I heard that we're now a unicorn.
Jayneil: Was it hard, man? I mean in two and a half years, you're the head of design, there's a lot of promotional opportunities, you can earn more stocks down the road, it's one of the top startups in India. I mean, dude, it takes fucking balls, man, to just leave such an amazing position like that.
Abhinav: True. So, one thing that I learned from Unacademy is that, and this is something that Gaurav says as well, which is if you're not considering quitting every six months, it means the role is not challenging. So, throughout my journey, I was like “Should I really be moving on? Why am I now looking at myself as this employee? I’ve never really been that kind of a person” but after two and a half years, my thinking was more around “Hey, actually, this is a great opportunity.” The fact that I’ve been thinking of quitting so many times and then have not done it means that the work is pulling me back. There is something there. And I had the opportunity to build up my own team which is to hire who I wanted to. So, towards the end, we were a team of about seven people overall. And, for me, my decision was “What's the upside in both cases?” So, to give some background, I joined maybe when we had just done the series B. So, it was worth maybe 50 million at the time. And by the time I left, they were worth about 500 million.
Jayneil: Damn!
Abhinav: And now they're worth about 1.4 billion. So, I was like “Hey, okay, me staying here, I know there is that multiplier” but I was thinking about the upside. I was like “The upside would mean building a much bigger team.” There is of course that financial upside but at this point, I had seen how Unacademy had scaled. I had a fair understanding of what it's like to build an education startup, what it's like to build a startup in general. One of my biggest learnings was just watching Gaurav operate, the way he dealt with things, the way he dealt with ambiguities, with teams. So, at this point, I was like “The upside for me, if I do my own thing, is going to be way higher” but then also there is that pressure which is I can't just quit and be like “Okay, let me move to Bali, do a few freelance projects, chill out.” I needed to really, really up my game yeah to firstly make the same amount of money but then also to prove to myself and then to the external world, the people who are watching. I know there's nobody who is really keeping track but I was like “I need to sort of get to that level.” Luckily, it worked out. I left earlier this year. So, that's January or February 2020. One of my first money coming in from side projects was UI Sources. So, UI Sources, I started it while I was at Unacademy. I was making about 50 to 100 dollars every month. So, it was just like ad revenue affiliates. And then the first months that I decided to monetize it, of course, you did a product hunt launch, changed it from free to a subscription. So, you now need to pay like 29 dollars or a 99-dollar plan. In the first month I made about four 4000 dollars.
Jayneil: Holy shit!
Abhinav: And I was like “Okay, it's not great but considering that I just turned on payments and didn't make any other changes, it was quite good.”
Jayneil: Oh my God! That was the first month you had launched while you were at Unacademy, the UI Sources, but since that point to now, I’m assuming the monthly revenue has gone up because more people have discovered about it.
Abhinav: It's sort of fluctuating. Even if you look at the terms of the subscriptions, the lowest you can buy is a three-month subscription quarterly. So, the spikes happen almost every three months when there are things like subscription renewals but I would say it's low four figures. UI Sources, it's not something I’m actively focusing on. It even drops month over month but then it's more of a very passive thing for me.
Jayneil: Dude, it's a true source of passive income, which is so surprising because now, you've got all these passives. If anything, you are, dude, ruthless in monetization. I think, if anything, you would have probably been a past gujju in your previous life or something because the UI Sources, that's like true passive income. Then you wrote Pajama Profits, the Amazon bestseller book, on freelancing and stuff. So, there's revenue from that coming in. Now, is that a substantial revenue because I also know that Bloomsbury is going to take a huge cut of that?
Abhinav: It’s not substantial at all. It’s peanuts, if I had to put it in another way. It’s almost like I don’t even account for it. In fact, the thing with working with a traditional publisher, and this is something we realized, it the first book, so it was me and Varun. Varun was one of the folks that I had started freelancing with back in the day. Today, he is the founder of Avalon. That’s the company that I’ve invested in. We knew we wanted to go with a big brand-name publisher because “Hey, it probably looks cool. Let’s see what that world is like.” Traditional publishers, they haven’t caught up with the digital age in the sense that to this day, we don’t know how many copies we’ve sold. Also, they sort of had that distribution network. They go to bookstores in India, physical bookstores. So, it takes time to get those numbers back but then, a year after launch, they were like “We’ll get you your first set of numbers one year after launch like how much money you make, how many copies you sold.” So, we’re like “Okay, let’s forget about it.” One year later we got the numbers and we’re like “We don’t know how many books we’ve sold but this is like peanuts in revenue.” So, I can tell you what the number is. The royalties per book for a physical book are something like 5% to 10% and for digital it’s like 15% to 20%. People still buy it, I think, because I see that Amazon rankings fluctuating but it’s not something I think about. And I think the next book or whatever else, I’m totally going to self-publish. So, no traditional publishers.
Jayneil: That makes sense, man. I remember publishing a book on computer vision with one of my best friends in college, Sohail Patel, and we did a packet publishing and today, I think, the total amount of money I made from it, if I had to put a number, was like 400 dollars. That's it. In the lifetime of the book. And it's just weird how royalties and everything works. And I was talking with someone who went through the route of self-publishing via Kindle and there she told me that they take 40% off the cut but I think it's still better than what the traditional book sellers are doing where they're taking most of it, it seems like.
Abhinav: And I think, today, there are things like Gumroad, there's Teachable where you would rather put in that extra effort and turn this book into a series of videos or some additional multimedia which is not just text on paper and totally own the email list, see who who's actually buying your book, own the entire marketing stack. I mean, publishers had their place but I don't think that they're going to still have it unless they reinvent themselves.
Jayneil: Wow! And speaking of which, you also sold your course on Teachable about Motion Design.
Abhinav: Yeah. So, this was maybe around the time when I left Housing or when I was just starting Listen. So, I’ve always been into this whole “make money online” niche. Ever since I started freelancing, I’ve always been lurking around SEO forums and people who've started WordPress blogs, “Hey, you should sell eBooks, do this, do that” but, for me, most of it, I was still trying to do it from a freelancer perspective. This was when I was like “Okay, let me just give this a shot.” So, I did a Teachable course. It took me about a month to put it together. And it was super niche. It was motion in app design. You needed to be an app designer and you needed to want to learn motion. And looking back, total noob move, I didn't promote it like literally after the launch I was “Okay, let's move on to the next project.” So, it did about 800 dollars on day one and I really used a lot of these email marketing techniques like sending drip emails, setting up free Medium articles which then had a lead magnet that gets added to you or this thing sends them automated emails and it actually worked out. So, it made a total of, again, low four figures. Today, it doesn't really make any sales but that really gave me that experience of putting together a course. And then, of course, that was sort of my first experiment in online education. Unacademy happened after, which really helped me understand it from an Indian perspective, which is all this while I was still looking at it from the perspective of the USA, which is setting up things like SEO blogs and WordPress sites, 999-dollar courses, eBooks that people buy. And then during Unacademy, I was like “Okay, hey, that's not going to work for India, of course, but what else does work?” So, it was really interesting to see what kind of things will people pay for in terms of online education from an Indian perspective at Unacademy.
Jayneil: Then you left Unacademy and then you started 10K Designers. So, why not just do another Ed-tech startup or start your own company or a consumer startup versus starting your own design school?
Abhinav: Interestingly, since doing Listen and Unacademy, I’ve developed a more balanced perspective on raising money and doing a venture-funded startup versus running a business which is either just side hustle or enough to pay yourself but you're not aiming to be a one-billion or unicorn company. So, with 10K designers, I definitely did get a lot of investor interest, some of the investors from Unacademy as well saying “Hey, if you have a startup, hit us up. You're from Unacademy. You probably know how this shit works” but then I knew that I didn't want to do a venture scale startup at this point at least. So, 10K Designers is an Ed-tech startup, to me. Right now, it's just designers. The sort of the model around this is the idea of cohort-based learning which is live instruction. You're doing it as a sort of a group coaching or group mentoring experience. It's a very different model from, let's say, something like Coursera or Udemy, very different model from Teachable which is these pre-packaged videos as well. It's similar to Unacademy. We did switch to live videos as a medium but then it's still a lot of stuff that I had to figure out myself. Right now, it's 50-50 but it's likely that I might go venture funded “Let's make this an Ed-tech startup. Let's get into more categories like Product Management, Development, maybe other things” but then it's equally likely that I’m going to be like “Hey, you know what, let me just do a few cohorts a year. Let me use the rest of the time to work on other side hustles and let me just figure that out by myself.” So, I don't know.
Jayneil: Yeah, there's a lot of pressure, man. When you take that money, it's like go 10X or go boom!
Abhinav: Yeah. I’ve definitely understood that doing a venture-funded startup isn't the only way. At Listen, in some way, we were building the products for the VCs along with building the product for the users because we needed to show certain things that show that you are now taking this huge market versus with 10K Designers, profitable from day one, it's a solo run business which is just me. I have a bunch of freelancers and people who are helping me out as well but then I realized “Hey, this doesn't need to raise VC money. This is going great without it.”
Jayneil: So, how did you go about designing 10K Designers? I mean, it seems to me that you've gone a route where it's more live and classroom-based interaction, which, I think, is a model that we've been used to in India versus just making a bunch of videos, watch it yourself and make it a truly passive income type kind of deal.
Abhinav: I remember when we switched to live learning from pre-recorded, in the back of my mind, I was like “It's counterintuitive. It seems like the wrong move” which is you can just pre-record and you can send this out to hundreds of thousands of people versus now, if you're doing it live, every single week, you have to be there or hire people or educators who have to be there. And I was like “Live learning seems like it's active. It's not passive at all” which is true to some extent but then I also realized that it's almost like where we are, 2020, right now, the waves of online education have sort of started with the MOOCs which is “Hey let's bring Harvard’s courses online. Let's bring Stanford's courses online.” That was a big deal. Now, you have availability. MOOCs are still around but then you have the marketplaces which is like Udemy and Skillshare where you're like “Hey, you have everything here.” Udemy, you buy individual courses. Skillshare, flat price, monthly access to all but then that led to like a commodification, you're buying a design course for 5 dollars. And when something like that happens, I feel like it affects learning outcomes, which is the more you pay for something, the more likely you are to stick through versus if I make an impulse decision like “Hey, today, I want to be a product manager. I’m going to buy this Udemy cohort for product management,” I’m never going to get back to it. It's 5 dollars and I’ve forgotten about it the next day. Also, you need that commitment that you're making. Money is one way to do it. You need accountability. Most people have a ton of online courses, they’ve never watched them or started off and then they dropped out. So, what are some of those reasons? One of those reasons is the commitment. When you buy something as an impulse purchase, you're probably not going to stick around. Secondly, watching videos to learn sort of puts you in the laid-back Netflix type of mode where you're just watching this. You watch somebody work in Figma and you're like “I understand Figma now” versus you actually now have to do it yourself. So, I sort of deconstructed that and I was like “Okay, I think the next wave of education is going to be live instructions. It is also going to be a smaller scale rather than bigger scale,” which is Udemy and Skillshare, they're going for millions and millions of users versus the model I’m doing is almost anti-Udemy which is the first cohort was about 30 people, second cohort was slightly bigger about 40 something and it’s a duration of three months where you are now held accountable by me and then we now have alumni mentors, we have industry mentors as part of this. And it’s a three-month course where you actually get to do this with other people. We’ve seen that from the first cohort, people have made really good friends here. When you're doing something like Udemy, you're watching videos on YouTube, you don’t really have that connection with other people. So, you sort of miss out on the social opportunities around, which happens in college. This is not a new thing that we’re inventing. College is all about things you don’t really learn in the classrooms. You learn everywhere else through all the other experiences.
I need to come back to your question on what is the design process for designing 10K Designers. It was a very slow burn. It started with the YouTube channel. I started that while I was at Unacademy mostly because a lot of Unacademy educators were youtubers themselves. So, I was like “Let me try to get into that mindset.” And the YouTube channel today is doing fairly well. It’s about 11,000 subscribers. I’m not that active there but that got me a lot of initial research insights which is, I figured out, “Hey, I’ll pull out all this free content.” I made an entire design crash course and it’s free on YouTube even today but then when I’d talk to people who had done it, they were like “This is missing” or “We’ve done all this but why is our output not good?” So, then I was like “Okay, let me collect these in a better way.” So, then I set up a Telegram group which today is about 2.5K people in the group. And this was just like a back and forth. People would ask me questions, I was answering them, I was saying “Hey, I’ll make a video about this on Wednesday. Wait for a bit” or “Hey, let’s do a live session this Friday. We’ll talk about some stuff.” So, all of that is actually documented on my YouTube but that sort of started giving me these insights that I didn't know at the time but would help me in figuring out the final curriculum, actual live curriculum for 10K Designers. In fact, the brainstorming process for 10K Designers, which is what exactly do I want to do, I did about a two-hour livestream that's still on my channel where I put these sticky notes in Figma, I was like “Okay, guys, we can do mock interviews but is it useful? What happens when you do this?” So, that whole brainstorming process was there as well.
Jayneil: Damn! So, if I go right now to 10K Designers and I sign up as a student, what can I expect? Am I going to see pre-recorded videos, part of it, part of it is just like live classes? How does that structure or framework work?
Abhinav: So, it's a cohort-based program which means it opens up a few times a year. It's almost like you're enrolling in spring semester, fall semester, sort of like that. You're with a group of other people. It’s a more diverse crowd now. Initially, it was mostly people who wanted to get into design, transition into design. Now we also have a lot of founders, product managers, VCs who are learning design as an additional skill. So, I think, it is also going in that direction where it’s not really to get a job but it’s to understand design. So, the cohort happens a couple times a year. When you enroll for this, it’s a fresh start. There are no pre-recorded videos initially. For a period of 12 weeks where there are two lessons every single week, there are some pre-recorded videos, things like tutorials or things that are canned views, that’s me giving my thoughts on a certain thing. So, I do add that but every single cohort has fresh live videos. And this happens two times every week, which is for a duration of 60 to 120 minutes each. And then, in between, we have a lot of assignments which are solo assignments as well as team assignments. And these problem statements are the kind of problem statements you would do as an assignment for a job interview. So, it’s taken from the industry like “Design an app that does this” or “Design a landing page for XYZ.” Then one interesting thing that we did was towards the end of the cohort, we actually made this deal. So, we got problem statements from startups, a bunch of startups giving real problem statements that they would typically give to, let’s say, design interns and say “Hey, let your students solve this and we will give you some feedback as well.” So, it is a very dynamic program and it’s not passive at all. This requires 100% full attention.
Jayneil: Yeah, I’m just trying to think about it because this is very hands-on, you have to go live twice a week, talk about things. I mean, you could have just filmed some of these cohorts before live and just have people watching again but I’m trying to think now, if you're charging 999 USD for every student, it’s all depending on you at some point unless you hire other people. So, there's one model you talked about, the Udemy one, where it’s like “I’m going to sell something at 15, 20 bucks” and this is something that I’m trying to figure out for myself too like if I want to sell a course on networking, the traditional thought is “Let me sell this course for 50 or 70 bucks, make it sell and let’s see how many more people can we sell it to” but then you have the complete opposite route which is instead of selling it to thousands, I’m just going to sell it to like 20, 30 people at a time but then, I’m going to charge way more. So, given that you're based in India and, dude, 1000 dollars is a decent amount, was that a concern that would people even pay for this?
Abhinav: It was definitely a concern. I had very similar thoughts while I was thinking about the pricing for this. Some of my benchmarks were on the lower end, it's things like Udemy like “Hey, you can buy a course for 10” dollars and there's no way I want to compete with that because it seems like a race to the bottom with things like that. So, then I was like “Okay. So, it needs to be higher.” In fact, a lot of this was prototyping. So, with the Telegram group, I eventually then moved to a Discord server and I made this a paid Discord server. So, this was one of the first experiments where I was like “There's no course. You pay for a community. You get access to this Discord server.” And it was something like 30 dollars for three months. And in this Discord server, I did a bunch of experiments. So, I did one design challenge which was sort of the prototype for the assignments we're doing today. I did a bunch of live sessions which were prototypes for the live sessions I’m doing with the cohort. And then I used that to get a lot of feedback. After doing it, I was very honest with them. I was like “Hey, listen, we did this design challenge. Most people didn't really attempt it because they're already designers but the people who did attempt it are beginners. And I see that there is a gap there, they're not able to perform but then I, of course, can't give personalized feedback. I can give you some top-level feedback. What would you pay for a design program?” And I put like these four slabs which are this much, this much, this much. And I just ended up picking the highest one that enough people had … So, most people did say a lower amount than what I actually picked but I was like “Let me just go for this” because in my mind, also, I was like “It's a three-month program that requires my full attention. I don't want to do a disservice to the people who sign up” because, firstly, if they pay two less for it, they're less motivated to stick through. It was a very grueling time for the first cohort. They went through a period of transformation. It wasn’t easy to submit things on time and it was fast paced. So, I do need that commitment. On the other hand, I was like “If I don’t charge enough, I don’t want my interest or my motivations to die down.” So, I was like “Okay, 1000 dollars.” People that I've looked up to, people like Neil Patel, SEO people, they always hammered this point home. Neil Patel always says, he’s like “Don’t go below 999 dollars.” He’s like “It’s not worth your time.” So, I was like “Of course, it doesn’t apply to India but let me go for that.” And for the first cohort, I ended up getting about 300 applications.
Jayneil: Damn!!
Abhinav: So, my thought was “Hopefully, I can get at least 10 people. So, that's about 10,000 dollars. On the higher end, I’m going to cap it at 30. I don't want to do any more than this but then the applications will tell me what it looks like for the future.” So, I ended up picking 30 people from these 300. So, it wasn't a clear decision for me but as I went for it and gauged the market.
Jayneil: I remember this code that Matthew Smith, I think we talked about it, he does Shift Nudge, he told me this amazing insight. He said “It takes you the same amount of effort to sell something whether it's a 9-dollar app that you're trying to sell or it's a 999-dollar course. You got to put in the same amount of effort.” So, I think it drives home the point that, in this case, at least you're getting more value, meaning you don't have to worry about trying to go for the number or the scale.
Abhinav: True.
Jayneil: What advice would you have for designers listening to this episode and they want to do their own shit? Maybe they're worried about their parents forcing them to get a job. Even now, I think, when we were recording, my mom was just like “Get a job. Get a real job.” She was shouting from outside and I had to put it on mute. So, what advice do you have for those people listening in, man?
Abhinav: I would say you definitely do need external validation. Let's be honest, it's very difficult to do it without external validation. When you're a self-learner, it seems like there's a ton of paths ahead of you. And every path that you take, you feel like “Oh shit, should I have taken the other path?” or “Is this the right path?” So, there's always this uncertainty with self-learning which is “Am I doing the right thing?” or “Am I doing it too slow? Should I be doing things faster?” or “This thing that I did, it seemed okay but was it the right thing to do?” I would say, try to find these sources of validation. One of them is, of course, making money. Once you start making money, your mind is like “Okay, this works.” With freelancing, my first project ever, I did a logo design for a popcorn company and they paid me 25 dollars and I was like “Oh shit, I could just keep doing this.” Money is definitely one thing. So, I always encourage people to jump into freelancing ASAP because you don't need to be an expert to be a freelancer because clients out there are looking for designers almost at every level.
Another source of this external validation is mentors and feedback. A mentor can't do the learning for you. You would still have to self-learn. In fact, even if you go to a design college, you would still have to sort of put in the hours and do the work yourself but they can definitely help you course correct, which is they can give you this external signal that you can look at and say “Here's one thing I should do better” or “The direction I’m going in, it seems uncertain but the fact that this mentor says it's a good direction, let me at least follow it for a while.” So, I would say, seek that out. Not all mentors need to be a bi-directional relationship. Some of my earliest mentors don't even know I exist. I just consumed their blogs, videos, everything they put out and I was like “Okay, this is good enough for me.” So, it doesn't really need to be this official thing where you sign a paper that says “I am now your mentor” but it's all there on the internet. So, try to form these relationships even if they're one sided and that really helps.
Jayneil: And how can people follow you or get in touch with you?
Abhinav: You can check out my Twitter which is @Abnux or you can reach out to me on Instagram which is AbhinavCh.
Jayneil: Awesome. Thank you everybody for tuning in. It's been freaking amazing chatting with you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Everybody listening in this YouTube stream, this episode will soon come out on designMBA.show. So, check out designMBA.show. Thank you.
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