Indian VCs: Rebrand, Website and Launch Film Case Study

Indian VCs is an information platform founders use to research VC funds. Its founder calls it the Wikipedia of VC funds.

It began as a list shared in WhatsApp groups. By the time it came to us it had become something else entirely: a partner at SuperReturns, a host to Khosla and David Clark, a name carrying the whole Indian venture market. India's venture space is roughly the size of the entire EU's.

The brand had not caught up. It was still, in the founder's own words, the friendly neighbourhood VC community.

The brief was a change of register

"Indian VCs, you cannot be any more like a playful community. When you are going into these global forums, you have to bring a tone change."

That was the real brief. The name is a big one for anybody to carry, and the brand had to earn it.

There was a structural problem underneath it too. The platform had grown by accretion and it showed. "It was getting a little bit chaotic. It was not very clear. People were confused what it is." Everything needed to come into one place, one brand, one website.

The uncomfortable middle

This is the part most case studies leave out, and it is the part worth reading.

"Initially I was not sure about the whole brand thing. I was not sure this is the direction I want to take. When people are doing something very creative and something out of your zone, you always have that kind of discomfort."

He was not being difficult. He was describing what it actually feels like to be shown something distinctive for the first time. Distinctive and agreeable pull in opposite directions, and the first honest reaction to distinctive is rarely delight.

The turn did not happen in a presentation. It happened in use.

"I started using the brand colour and typography in some internal communications. After a few times, maybe a week, I was using a regular font or a regular colour and I thought, no, this is not making me feel like what it is. That is the moment I felt okay, they have done a good job."

His analogy was better than ours: you get used to working in the dark, and then somebody puts the light on.

What we made

A full rebrand, the website, and the launch film.

The website brief was unusually clear. "We need a very functional website. It has to be super top notch, clean, straight value add." That is what it had to be, and the constraint was useful.

The film went through in a single pass. "They shared a script and a concept. It was one shot. We had literally not any correction at all."

What changed after launch

Session time

"Usually the session time is around one to one and a half minutes. On our website it is around two to two and a half minutes."

People stay roughly twice as long. On an information platform, that is the metric that matters.

People reach the data that actually matters

Each fund listing carries ten to fifteen data points. Three or four of those are the ones a founder genuinely needs. On the previous site they were presented in a format that buried them.

The heat maps now show people interacting with those three or four. "People are getting the information much faster, easier and more productively in the newer version."

That is not a design flourish. That is placement doing its job.

Inbound partnership requests, with the variable isolated

This is the result worth pausing on. After launch, people began approaching Indian VCs unprompted to co-create: events, content, joint initiatives.

What makes it unusual is that the founder ruled out the other explanations himself, without being asked.

"There has not been a lot changed. Our content remained the same from our previous version. The tone has also not changed. The only thing which has changed is the branding. With the change in brand, the perspective changes."

Same content. Same tone. New brand. New inbound.

That is about as close to a controlled experiment as brand work ever gets, and the client ran it, not us.

The reaction

"So many people messaged me asking, the branding is just crazy, how much did you spend?"

And the compliment he still remembers giving us: "This is too good. I had to tell my investors, because they would worry I spent a bomb."

What he said about working with us

On why he chose us in the first place: "Craft is my number one priority. Very rarely do you find people who do amazing craft and take pride in it. I could see Everything Design would deliver on what I expect."

On scope, which is where most agency relationships quietly sour: "They are not scope-hunters. When scope changes, they never say that is not part of our scope. They just do it, warmly. That is why I am going to work only with them again."

He also pointed at the brand workshop as the moment trust was established. "It intrigued a lot of questions where I had to think deeply about how I feel about certain things, organise my thoughts and connect the dots."

What we would do differently

We asked him what did not sit right. Two things, and both are ours to own.

The project had a long gap in the middle. He had been pushing to finish before SuperReturns Singapore. That did not happen, and the work resumed only after he got back. In his words, an opportunity cost.

And the tooling. We run projects in Basecamp. He would have preferred WhatsApp, ran into login friction, and it added drag to something that should have been frictionless. Small thing, real cost.

Neither of those is a design problem. Both of them are the kind of thing that decides whether a good project feels good, which is why we publish them.

Related work

See the full Indian VCs project page, our Stellaris Venture Partners case study, and the wider design agency for venture capital and VC website design and development practices.

If you are weighing up a rebrand and expecting it to be comfortable, it helps to read why these projects are hard first.