Welcome back to Feature with Hu9, where we decode the strategies of India’s most innovative founders.
Every startup founder faces a critical but often overlooked challenge: finding the right service partner. Vetting a digital agency, a legal firm, or a specialized consultant can take weeks, often resulting in an opaque, expensive, and ultimately, poor partnership. It’s a massive drain on time and resources.
This is the core pain point that Visey, a platform designed to simplify these connections, aims to solve. We sat down with its multi-talented founders, Ridhima Goel (CXO) and Jhonty (CEO), to understand how they’re tackling this challenge using the power of design thinking.
The Root Problem: Lack of Trust and Transparency
Before Visey, the process of hiring a service partner was deeply flawed. For a founder, it often looked like this: endless cold calls, unverified portfolios, and confusing pricing models. As Ridhima notes, the industry lacked a transparent, founder-first ecosystem—it was designed for the service provider, not the startup trying to build a business.
This is where the unique backgrounds of Visey’s founders provided the strategic solution:
- Ridhima Goel (UX Designer): Focused on optimizing the user journey, ensuring the platform is intuitive and prioritizes founder needs.
- Jhonty (Industrial Designer): Rooted in execution and creativity, driving the platform’s core infrastructure to deliver a tangible, verifiable solution.
The Visey Solution: Design Thinking in Action
Design thinking is a powerful problem-solving methodology that focuses on deeply understanding the human needs involved. Visey applied this directly to the service partner problem:
1. Empathy: Understanding the Founder’s Pain
The founders, being on their third startup journey, didn’t need to guess the pain—they lived it. They understood the founders’ fear of wasting precious seed money on a bad agency or missing a product launch deadline because of a communication breakdown.
2. Definition: The Goal is Trust, Not Just Connection
Visey isn’t just a directory. Its real mission is to curate trusted partners. They defined the problem as a trust deficit, not a discovery problem. This led to features prioritizing verified results, transparent pricing, and genuine founder reviews.
3. Ideation: Simplifying the Vetting Process
Instead of making founders spend weeks vetting, Visey’s design simplifies the crucial “why” and “how” of a potential partnership. By structuring the information—performance metrics, specific expertise, and founder testimonials—the platform acts as a high-speed filter, making the selection process efficient and less risky.
4. Implementation: From Industrial Design to Digital Execution
Jhonty, an industrial designer, emphasizes execution. His background means Visey’s solution isn’t theoretical; it’s a robust digital infrastructure. Every element of the platform is built to execute the goal of simplifying the connection, ensuring that the user experience (Ridhima’s focus) is supported by a stable and verifiable system (Jhonty’s focus).
The Actionable Takeaway for Every Founder
The biggest lesson from the Visey journey is that you should apply design thinking to every single operational challenge—not just your product development.
- Don’t Settle for “Good Enough”: If a foundational process (like hiring partners, managing finances, or onboarding talent) is causing you repeated pain, stop treating it as a necessary evil.
- Empathize with Your Own Pain: Identify the true cause of the friction. Is it a lack of information? A lack of time? The answer will guide your solution.
- Design for Transparency: Whether you’re building a product or managing your internal operations, build systems that prioritize clarity and honesty. This is the fastest way to build credibility with your team, your partners, and your customers.
Visey is proving that when you apply creative problem-solving and focus on building a transparent ecosystem, you can solve some of the most critical, silent pain points that plague the startup world.
