Sanjay Chauhan

Sooo… We’ve made history! ‘Why Zero’ won ‘Site of the Month’ at Awwwards. The only indian creative team to have ever won it. Someone asked if there’s a repeatable framework to it, that can be turned into a claude skill. Lemme think… As a storyteller, you sketch out a vision. A fellow designer takes it into a storyboard and makes you see how much more it could become. The illustrator finds a feeling in the light and shadows that you hadn’t imagined. The 3D artist sees possibilities you couldn’t have pictured, and the animator brings their own visualisation to how it all moves. Then a developer takes bit these people have imagined & put together and cares enough to do it justice. When something can’t work the way it was pictured, they find another way without letting the idea lose what made it beautiful. At every step, someone takes a piece of idea that began in another person’s head and starts caring for it like it’s their own. You get to watch your vision come back to you, again and again, better than you knew it could ever be. That feeling is worth chasing. This synergy is beautifully human, maybe us at our best. So sorry, It’s something too unique, chaotic, irrational to be deciphered into a claude skill, yet. This project took a lot from all of us. It also gave us so much. To everyone who put a part of themselves into it, thank you. There’s so much of each one of you in what we made. PS: holding back on the designer instinct to start a creative studio. :)

If you’ve got 2 mins, join me here. For the longest time, @awwwards was where we went for inspiration. Winning one ourselves always felt a little far-fetched. Then ‘Why Zero’ became the only Indian creative team to win Awwwards Business & Services Honors, then We also won #SOTD apart from more than 30 international awards at this point. I think this website is some of the finest work I’ve lead, made with such a small, tight team. Seeing it sit alongside work we’ve admired for so long already means a lot. And now we’re nominated for Site of the Month. We could be the first Indian creative team to win it. I’m already grateful we’ve come this far but I’m still ambitious Okay. That took less than a minute. If you can spare one more, go vote for Why Zero. It would be amazing to have you be a part of this. link in the comments 👇

We did it 🏆

From going to Awwwards for inspiration to seeing our own work on it, life really has come full circle. We’ve already won in two categories, and voting is now open for this one. If you like what we’ve created, Do sign in and vote for us, I’d appreciate it. ❤️👇🔗

I remember the first time a PM showed me a prototype. My reaction was, “Dude, why are you even trying?” I’m not proud of it, but it felt foreign. Prototyping was our job. Why was someone else doing it? Then it kept happening. AI wrote the copy, PMs brought ideas already working on screen, and developers built without waiting for us. Every few weeks, another boundary moved. It was a strange phase for designers. We thought our value came from shaping an experience and giving it form with craft. Suddenly, the market cared about speed, scale and intelligence. A PM could prototype the feature. A developer could push out ten more. If everyone could put an interface on a screen, what were we required for? Had the specialist become the bottleneck? Many of us quietly believed that. I definitely did. Then everyone started making everything. We got features nobody needed, interfaces that worked but felt like AI slop, and products held together by code nobody understood. AI made output abundant, exposing the difference between producing something and owning the discipline behind it. A PM can produce ten working features, but product thinking makes those decisions valuable. A designer can push a working interface, but craft is still one of the things defining their role. A developer can bring an idea to life, but knowing why it works and how to fix it when it breaks is why they still have a seat at the table. The lesson is not to retreat to our old corners. What we have unlocked is a genuine upgrade. Designers can think through the product, prototype, test and push a PR. PMs can explore several versions before bringing an idea to design. Developers can shape the product earlier. We have gained more control over how far our thinking can travel. For me, pushing PRs feels like the first time Framer let designers publish a website. We did not suddenly become developers. We could simply carry our intention closer to the thing people would use. Earlier, an interaction or gamification moment that designers cared about remained unresolved because there was not enough dev bandwidth. Now a designer can fix it directly while a developer makes sure nothing else breaks. That is a massive amount of control. Craft is not the only thing design brings to the table. We think about the product, understand behaviour, shape the experience and increasingly help bring it to life. Our role is getting wider. But wider does not have to mean shallower. Tools give everyone access to the work, but not the judgment that comes from doing it deeply. Craft is still your edge to be at the table. The difference now is how much further you can take it once you are there.

A few months ago, while preparing @zero_university for closed beta, we realised we needed a waitlist. There were 6 of us, @whossanjay @VengadaS65199 @Aksh_a1 @Rasheemhamsa @byroydesign , all designers. We understood product, motion and interaction. Marketing was something we had watched teams do from a safe distance. CTR, CAC, Meta Ads and AdWords had always been someone else’s problem. We were starting almost from zero. We had paused social to focus on the product and had no marketing support. Our first target was 2K users. Then the ambition grew. Could 5 people new to this take it past 10K? I remember telling the team, “I know this is uncomfortable, but imagine if we actually crack it.” It sounded ridiculous, but exciting enough to try. Not knowing was a disadvantage, but maybe it could also help. We had no old methods to defend. We could ask stupid questions, experiment without embarrassment and learn marketing while AI was changing half the rules anyway. We began with a great motivational speech & things got chaotic right after. We tried Magnific and Higgsfield AI for AI UGC, where a generation could be 99% right but the broken 1% was all we could see. As a startup, we could not fix every strange hand by setting more credits on fire. We tried Synter, Superscale AI, Pipe, clipping platforms like Whop/ Content Rewards, creator outreach, TikTok accounts in the US and sooo many more tools. We found corners where views could be bought, faked and dressed up as traction. I think I am permanently banned from Reddit. Still not sure why. Whenever someone tweeted that they had “killed marketing,” I was signing up the next minute (btw they haven’t.) I remember being happy about a low cost per view, before CAC arrived and ruined the mood. Plenty of people were watching, but far fewer were signing up. The hook had to stop them, the middle had to hold them, the ending had to make ’em click, and the landing page had to convert. NGL, 10 years as a designer came in handy. We knew how to build anticipation, how a teaser could lead into a trailer and how a launch could feel like an event instead of a link being posted. We were learning marketing while translating what we knew about storytelling, interaction and human behaviour into a new space. Somewhere in all this, our first goal of 2K became a waitlist of more than 10K users, built entirely in-house by a design team that had never marketed a product before. I am proud of the number, but I am more proud of the team. We owned something none of us understood and stayed with it through bad generations, confusing dashboards and failed experiments. If we had to do this again tomorrow, we would do almost everything differently. This time we would know where to begin. I think that is what a first 0-1 journey is supposed to leave you with.

I’ve realized, Every time an idea passes from one set of hands to another, it changes. Sometimes it becomes sharper. Sometimes you lose the very thing that made it worth making. The ‘Why Zero’ website passed through many hands. @whossanjay , @VengadaS65199 , @Rasheemhamsa , @Aksh_a1 , @byroydesign and I shaped its story & visual narrative together. The idea was designed to remain unfiltered, to be slightly unreasonable and polarizing. Then, at a crucial point, it reached @sindhur_dutta . What happened after that is better heard from him. The website has now received 20+ awards, but the awards are probably the least interesting part of its story. Tune in to know how many people had to care deeply, in their own language, without flattening the idea as it travelled. This podcast allowed me to hear that story from the other side of the table. I went in knowing how we designed @zero_university . I came out understanding a world of creative development that is every bit as fascinating. If you have ever wondered how Zero became the experience it did, this is a good place to start. Thank you for having me. Swaraj Attaching link below

Almost a year ago, I asked some very rational people to back what looked like a very irrational idea. They were trying to protect a young company’s time, money, and survival. I was trying to protect its chance to become unmistakable. Both were forms of care, just aimed at different risks. Their questions were fair: Where has this worked before in this category? What assured outcome can we predict? My answer was uncomfortable: nowhere & none. That was precisely the point. Rationality is powerful because it learns from past patterns and makes outcomes more predictable. But what happens when you’re trying to create something the past has no evidence for? Especially when you’re creating for humans, the most unpredictable creatures of all. What we feel, think, say, and do never follows a straight line. But again If rationality alone could solve for the world, most of our hardest problems would already be solved. @zero_university is reconnecting education and employment, two worlds that were always meant to be one pipeline. The founders had spent a decade seeing that fracture up close. We weren’t simply entering a category; we were trying to create one. You cannot borrow the clothes of every successful tech company (the rational brains love cursor, claude, openai), stand beside them, and ask the world to believe you are different. So I made an almost irrational promise: trust me with an unpredictable path, and I will bring back a result we can all recognize. There was no precedent to hide behind. When a predictable idea fails, people question the execution and let you try again. When an unpredictable one fails, they question your judgment. Sometimes, they question you, your reputation becomes the collateral. In this case not everyone agreed. But they committed anyway (Signs of a great team btw). That may be the most beautiful part of this story. Agreement often arrives after proof, trust is what people give you before it. Somewhere between their caution and my team’s conviction, we built the ‘Why Zero’ website. Two weeks into the launch, it has received more than 18 awards/nominations/recognitions (& counting). I’m grateful but the signal I care about most is that the work makes people choose. Most of’em love it. Few don’t. But No one leave indifferent. & Indifference in this era is failure. Because polarization isn’t about provocation. It’s what happens when a piece of work has a point of view strong enough to make you locate your own. We’re aren’t stopping anytime soon. ———— PS: we’re growing the team, link in the comments