// Designing the Future of Alternative Investing in India

Overview

Scope

Brand Identity • Website • Web App • Mobile App

Role

End-to-end Product Designer (Solo)

Live:

https://www.earnnest.me/

Duration

3 months

The Backstory

When I joined Earnnest, there was no brand, no interface, and no existing user base. Just an idea—and the vision to create India’s most trusted platform for investing in real estate-backed debt securities.

The founders, backed by Certus Capital, were building something bold:

"A simple way for everyday Indians to invest in high-yield, secured real estate loans, an asset class typically reserved for institutions"

My task was to design the entire product experience—from identity to web to mobile—and make it not only usable but deeply trustworthy for both HNIs and new investors alike.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/c563c64b-ed2d-4c13-8fcf-1c2b6400bfeb/brand-name.pdf

Design Goals

We had one shot to get this right. In an investment category this unfamiliar, trust and clarity were everything. I anchored the design process around five core goals:

• Simplify the unfamiliar – turn complex finance into accessible flows.
• Build credibility through design – every interaction needed to feel confident and secure.
• Balance HNI expectations with mass-market UX – elegant, but not elite.
• Design for mobile-first adoption – Indian investors often invest from their phones.
• Make compliance invisible – smooth KYC and legal onboarding without confusion or friction.

Research & Insights

To understand our audience, I conducted:

• 10+ in-depth user interviews (age 28–65) across investor profiles.
• A competitive audit of players like Altifi, Grip Invest, and Strata.
• Workshops with the legal and compliance team to decode SEBI rules.

What I learned:

• Trust > returns. People were more worried about losing money than gaining more.
• Many didn’t understand “senior secured debt,” but resonated with “your investment is backed by real assets.”
• HNIs expected sophistication, while younger users wanted mobile convenience and clarity.

This insight shaped every interaction, screen, and sentence.

information architecture

information architecture

Branding: Trust Over Trend

I built the brand identity from scratch, starting with the logo, color system, type, and language.

Core visual choices:

• Color palette: Greens & blue; fresh, professional and premium.
• Logo: A clean, forward-leaning wordmark with a simple icon - stability meets modernity.
• Typography: A balance of clarity and class, combining serif and sans-serif styles, wherever needed.
• Tone of voice: Informative, calm, and confident—like a wealth manager, not a startup.

This identity scaled consistently across the website, apps, and investor documents.