Designing a Platform to Bridge Students & Scholarships.
Kohort specializes in placing students into top universities via tailored mentoring. Its flagship offering, a free web-based scholarship finder, lets students identify and secure financial aid.
Stanford accelerator select
1000+ Students Helped
Overview
Turning a word-of-mouth-run mentorship program into a holistic, student-centric product
Kohort started as a side-hustle of a passionate entrepreneur with a mission to make global study accessible via one-on-one mentoring. I led the product design and early growth strategies in collaboration with the founder to ship the MVP and raise early seed-funding via multiple accelerator programs.
My Role
Product Designer
Growth Strategist
Interface
Responsive Webapp
Website
Slidedeck
Duration
6 months
Tools
Tasks I Owned
Problem
kohort existed as a proof of concept but lacked an actual go-to-market scalable product…
1/
Wasted Time
Without systems to automate repetitive communication, mentors spent excessive time converting leads instead of mentoring.
2/
High Drop-off
The lack of a clear top-of-funnel user acquisition strategy created high drop-off rates in conversion post product discovery (primarily via Linkedin)
opportunity
How might we make kohort efficient & genuinely useful for aspiring students?
Constraints
goals
We defined 3 primary goals
🎯
Ideate and build a lead capturing product that is genuinely useful for students
🎯
Ensure kohort's mission reflects in a consistent design language across it's product, marketing and business materials
🎯
Create information systems that automate kohort's candidate screening system efficiently to ensure mentors prioritize mentoring over repeated discourses to convince credibility
research process
I employed a diverse set of research methods that included conducting interviews with 10 existing users and 10 potential users, competitor analysis, persona mapping of the target audience, and studying market trends.
Key market trends and user interview database
User personas of target audience along with motivators
Insights
Majority users who were clear about their study paths opted for debt whilst overlooking scholarships, grants due to a lack of knowledge.
90% of competitors focused on data farming and provided generic, outdated information, forcing students to do the heavy lifting to find relevant details.
Almost all the potential users needed additional convincing to justify paying for personal mentorship service.
project scope
One of kohort's key strengths was its global scholarship databank painstakingly hand curated by the founder. This was our USP around which we could hypothesize our student-centric experience.
Our idea was to build a completely free tool for students to discover scholarships across popular & niche subject domains.
Here's the scope we defined for the MVP:
Lead Capture via Scholarship Finder: A simple interface that lets users search and access scholarship information just by signing up with Google or Linkedin. We needed 3 key pages for the only user-flow with kohort mentorship plugs:
Homepage with search bar
Results page with filters
Scholarship detail page
Mentorship Sales Page: One page to drive in-bound traffic with emphasis on why personalised mentoring made a huge difference in bridging the gap between dream and admit.
Marketing & Business Materials: Building a brand-kit to ensure a cohesive design language across social media posts, business materials like pitch-decks, and info brochures.
design process
Vibrant Minimalism for Aspiring Minds
I opted for a visual aesthetic that balanced clean, consistent, and minimalist design with vibrant colors and expressive iconography to evoke energy and optimism. It reflects the dynamic spirit of aspiring students while maintaining clarity and focus.
Prioritizing Key Information
By prioritizing recognition over recall, I wanted users to intuitively explore deeper layers of information as needed, whilst having enough glanceable information for quick comparison.
Speaking the User’s Language
By using familiar terminology and concepts, the UX copy bridges the gap between user expectations and system functionality. This makes the interface intuitive, relatable, and easy to engage with.
Sales page focused on the exact opposite – winning user's trust
While studying high-performing sales pages, I noticed a key pattern: the best ones didn’t focus on the service or product itself. Instead, they connected with the user’s pain points and frustrations. Applying this shift in narrative dramatically transformed the pitch into a far more impactful and engaging one.
Special emphasis in this phase was placed on finding unique ways to convey the impact of tailored mentorship, both from a price standpoint and through a clear outline of the program’s key milestones. Language and visuals played a central role in shaping the design decisions during this stage.
Story-centric Business Narrative
An important business goal for the project was to secure a runway. Instead of a dry number-driven pitching narrative, the cofounder and I decided to approach this in a story-centric narrative. We created a crisp 14-pager deck focused on tangible student impact via kohort. Our pitch helped us get into 3 accelerators with a 100% score from the Stanford panel.
Outcome
🎓
1000+ students successfully placed and saved over $30M
🧪
2000+ MVP beta testers (currently live)
💰
INR 12L Startup Grant received from Indian Government backed Accelerator
🚀
Got into Stanford Spark Accelerator
📩
230K+ Newsletter Subscribers
❤️
Lots of love via DMs from aspiring students appreciating our student-centric design
final screens
Disclaimer: Please note that not all work presented is currently live, as this project is ongoing and remains under active development.
