Watchlyst Hero Stats — 50K downloads, $40K raised, 2.5min sessions, 8K community
Watchlyst Hero Stats — 50K downloads, $40K raised, 2.5min sessions, 8K community
🎨 Open full artefact set in Figma →
I solved the "what should I watch tonight" problem for 50,000 people — built an entire product, a CMS, and a content operation from scratch — secured $40K from Facebook, achieved 2.5-minute average sessions in an industry where 30 seconds is standard. Then we shut it down. Here's what really happened.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| 📲 App Downloads | 50,000+ |
| 💸 Paid Marketing | ₹80-100K |
| ⏱️ Avg Session Time | 2.5 min (10× industry avg) |
| 🚀 Funding | $40K — Facebook Accelerator 2016 |
| 📸 Instagram Community | 8,000+ engaged followers |
| 🗓️ Timeline | Mar 2016 – Aug 2018 |
| 👤 Role | Founder & Chief Product Designer |
The honest headline: We were ahead of our time, underfunded, and we made the classic founder mistake — we fell in love with the product before we fell in love with the business.
All good startups begin the same way: a conversation that won't leave you alone.
It was 2015. India's startup ecosystem was buzzing. OTT platforms were multiplying. A friend — who would become my co-founder — and I were doing what we always did: debating what to watch.
The conversation was unremarkable on its surface. "What are you watching these days?" But as we mapped it out, we realized the question was harder than it should be. We had Netflix. Hotstar. YouTube. Star World. BookMyShow. A dozen fragmented sources, each with its own app, its own login, its own recommendation logic — and none of them talking to each other.
We started asking friends. Then friends of friends. The pattern was consistent: people spent 20–25 minutes deciding what to watch — longer, in many cases, than the content itself. Decision fatigue wasn't a theory. It was the lived reality of entertainment in India in 2015.
That conversation became a hypothesis. The hypothesis became a startup. The startup became two and a half years of the most educating, humbling, exhilarating, and ultimately painful work of my design career.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQ2X9BOYmRdqrKYoOYctWDy_WVoZjQgUK31Iu6hVyKoRtJthgEV-OWWjXyFC6OkSutm3ZyNOtpxJRG9/pub?start=true&loop=true&delayms=3000