Leadoff (now Precize)
Democratizing Indian
Private Market

Context & Objectives

In India, shares of private companies (companies that haven't gone public yet) can technically be bought and sold. But the process is almost entirely offline, opaque, and gated to wealthy investors. Think of it as a pre-IPO secondary market with almost zero infrastructure. The handful of platforms operating in this space mostly ran on WhatsApp groups, phone calls, and manual paperwork. Trust was low, ticket sizes were high, and the average retail investor had no way in.

The Gap

We uncovered a major gap in India's Private Equity / Unlisted (pre-IPO) Market space, highlighted by:

Low trust in existing platforms among retail investors

Manual and offline investment processes

High ticket sizes preventing retail investor entry

A general lack of awareness about the space

The Approach

We aimed to create the best platform for investing in private growth companies in India by:

Building trust in a low-trust market

Digitizing the entire investment experience

Lowering ticket sizes to enable retail investment

Educating the average investor about the asset class

The Launch

We launched Leadoff with an invite-only waitlist. Part of this was branding. We wanted the platform to feel exclusive, in line with how we were positioning the product. Part of it was practical: Gaurav figured that if people had to tweet about us to skip the queue, we'd get organic reach without spending on marketing. This kind of social-proof-to-skip-queue loop is everywhere now. In late 2021, it wasn't. I designed the sign-up flow and the waitlist modal.

It worked better than any of us expected. We hit somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 sign-ups in the first few weeks, all organic, zero marketing budget. Just people on Twitter telling other people about Leadoff.

But the numbers also told us something uncomfortable. People were signing up and then not making it through. The onboarding flow was losing a huge chunk of users. Within days of the surge, it was clear we had a conversion problem, and finding out why became my immediate focus.

Onboarding Drop-offs

The original onboarding asked for a lot: Demat account details (India's equivalent of a brokerage account), bank account details, PAN (India's tax ID, similar to a Social Security Number). All before the user had seen what they could even invest in. The logic was that we only wanted serious investors in the door.

The problem wasn't just that we were asking for sensitive data. It was the sheer friction of getting it. Most people don't know their BO ID (the unique identifier for a Demat account) off the top of their head. If you asked me right now, I'd have to Google how to find it on my broker, log in, dig through settings, and pull it up. Every broker stores it differently. And a lot of our users didn't even know what a BO ID was. So before we could even ask for it, we had to explain what it is and how to get it.

So the drop-off wasn't one thing. It was layers: an education gap, a friction gap, and a trust gap, all hitting at the very first step.

Mapping where users were dropping off in the original onboarding flow

To address the education gap, we wrote guides and blog posts explaining what BO IDs are and how to find them on different brokers.

Educational guides explaining what a BO ID is and how to find it

For the trust gap, I added short explainers on why Demat details, bank details, and PAN are needed, and added a nudge to remind the user that their data is safe with us.

Trust nudges and explainers added to sensitive form fields

For the friction gap, I moved the three steps to just before the investment phase instead of during onboarding. This way, investors could actually see what was available before we asked for their details, and by that point they had more reason to follow through. It also made the onboarding shorter and simpler.

The revised onboarding flow with reduced upfront friction

The change had an immediate effect on onboarding completion.

We ended up with validation too :)

Payment Friction

We started seeing significant drop-offs at the payment step, especially from first-time users trying to place larger orders. UPI (India's instant payment system, similar to Venmo/Zelle) worked fine for investments under ₹1 lakh (~$1,200), but anything above that required a bank transfer. That meant the user had to manually enter our account details, switch to their banking app, and initiate the transfer.

For first-time users, it was worse. Indian banks have a cooling period for new beneficiaries. Most banks cap transfers to ₹25,000-₹50,000 (~$300-$600) in the first 24 hours after you add a new payee. So someone trying to invest ₹1.5 lakh (~$1,800) on their first order literally could not send the full amount that day. They had to come back tomorrow. A lot of them didn't.

The original payment flow that forced bank transfers for larger investments

This was the kind of friction that only shows up once. After the first transfer, things were smoother. But for converting new investors, it was a real wall.

The answer was a wallet system. Leadoff Balance let users top up a virtual account with funds before placing an order. By the time they hit "invest," the money was already there. We couldn't have built this on day one. The scope would've blown our timeline. But once payment became the bottleneck, it was the obvious next move.

Leadoff Balance: pre-funded wallet that eliminated payment-time friction

The Mobile Version

A few weeks after the launch of the web app, we started receiving a lot of requests for a mobile version.

While a mobile app would have been more reliable, stayed on users' devices, made push notifications easier, and offered many other advantages, we lacked both the time and resources to build it. So, we did the next best thing: we built an adaptive version of the web app.

The adaptive web app on mobile

Within a few months, mobile overtook desktop as the primary channel for investments. Shipping responsive web instead of waiting to build native had paid off.

The Sell Feature

Liquidity is the biggest problem in private markets. Selling shares isn't like the public stock market where you hit a button and you're out. There's no exchange, no instant settlement, no standardized process. Most platforms wouldn't even buy back your shares unless your portfolio crossed ₹50 lakh (~$60K). The general expectation was: hold until the company IPOs.

But our users wanted a way out. Some needed liquidity, some wanted to lock in gains, some were just wary of investments they couldn't exit. We decided to try and build something for them.

The DIS Process

To sell unlisted shares in India, you need a physical document called a Delivery Instruction Slip (DIS), a cheque-book-style booklet issued by your broker. Getting one is a process in itself.

On Zerodha, one of India's largest and most tech-forward retail brokerages, here's what it looked like: download a PDF request form from their website, print it, fill it out by hand, mail it to Zerodha's office in Bengaluru along with a self-attested ID proof, and wait for them to courier the DIS booklet back. This alone took over a week.

Once you had the booklet, you'd fill in the transfer details (which company, how many shares, who the receiver is) and mail the completed slip back to your broker. Then came an OTP confirmation, a processing email from the broker that you had to forward to us as proof, and finally a waiting period until the shares actually transferred. Once we received them, we'd send the money.

The whole process could take weeks. And at the end, the user had to trust us to actually pay them. There was no escrow, no third-party intermediary holding funds. It was built entirely on trust.

What I Designed

I designed the sell flow as a guided step-by-step process that lived entirely inside Leadoff. Not a support page, not a help article. The full thing was in the product, structured like an e-commerce order flow. Each step had instructions, acknowledgements, and confirmations.

We built how-to guides for each major broker, with annotated screenshots walking through the DIS process. We set up dedicated support channels for users who needed help. The whole instructional layer was designed so that someone who had never heard of a DIS could get through it.

But the harder design challenge was managing trust and anxiety. These users were sending us shares worth lakhs (hundreds of thousands of rupees) with no verification that they'd get paid until the very end. I built an order tracking system, a digital trail where we manually updated the status at every stage: DIS received, shares in transit, shares confirmed, funds initiated, funds sent. No user should have to wonder where their order stood.

The entire flow was loaded with plain-language disclaimers at every step: what's going to happen next, how long it'll take, what to do if something seems off. No surprises. That was the bar.

Again, to avoid breaching the NDA, I am not delving deeper into the processes and am intentionally obscuring certain details.

Brand & Genesis

Audience & Branding

Our target audience was individuals in their late 20s to late 40s. We assumed anyone younger than that would mostly neither have the expertise nor the funds to invest in alternative assets, while anyone older than that typically seeks lower-risk investments.

As our goal was to build trust from the outset, one of the few things we had control over as a brand-new startup was clean design; so that's where I started.

For the accent colors, I went with blue to signal trust and confidence (which we desperately needed), and purple for the premium, exclusive feel we were going for.

For the headings, I chose Minerva Modern, a clean paid font blending serif and sans serif styles. For the body text, I selected Tablet Gothic, another clean yet distinctive font that complemented Minerva Modern.

Positioning

Democratizing private equity and exclusivity might sound contradictory, and it kind of is. But we leaned into it: the brand looked premium and curated, while the product itself lowered every barrier to entry. We wanted to deliver a premium experience and the brand needed to match.

Concierge service to handle all investment-related inquiries

Exclusive, hand-picked investment opportunities

The Logo

The initial logo was simple: just the name Leadoff in Minerva Modern.

In late 2022, we renamed the product to Precize, and I worked with Subhalaxmi, our graphic designer, to create a new logo for it. The new logo symbolizes portfolio diversification. The circular motif also reinforces the concepts of protection and stability.

Other Features

Leadoff Coins

I designed a gamification system called Leadoff Coins to incentivize referrals, profile completion, and first investments. The core design decision was to keep the coins detached from any direct monetary value. The reasoning: once users can calculate that X coins = ₹Y, they start evaluating every perk in rupee terms. We offered a 30-minute call with an investment advisor for a certain number of coins. If users could figure out that the call was "worth" ₹200 (~$2.50), they'd judge whether that's a good deal. For a free perk, that's the wrong framing entirely. CRED, a popular Indian fintech app, does something similar with their points. I have lakhs (hundreds of thousands) worth of CRED coins and genuinely cannot tell you what they're worth in rupees. That's exactly why they work.

The coins drove engagement, but maintaining the perks catalogue became an operational burden for a team our size. A few months in, we simplified: coins became direct discounts on transaction fees. Clearer for investors, easier for us to sustain.

The Leadoff Coins rewards system

Company Reports

To address the lack of transparency in the space, we started creating yearly reports for the companies we curated. I proposed designing them like pitch decks: overviews with key financials and growth signals. These reports lived inside the platform but were also designed to be shared on social media. They doubled as social proof and a way to pull in new sign-ups.

Yearly company reports designed as shareable pitch decks

Golden Tickets

I designed invites inspired by Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets. These tickets were meant to make the recipients feel special, just like Charlie in the story, creating a sense of excitement and making invitees feel like they were part of something unique. We had to simplify it to a shareable link with no personalization due to scope limitations, but the visual identity of the tickets stuck.

Golden Ticket invites inspired by Willy Wonka

Impact & Learnings

Impact

Within a year of launch, the numbers looked like this:

The case study above walks through how we got there, but in short: we built trust in a market that had none, made investing accessible to retail investors for the first time, and kept shipping fast enough to stay ahead of the problems.

Visual Showcase

Interactive transitions and micro-animations across the platform

The investment flow in action, from browsing to order placement

The Leadoff platform at a glance