December 2024. I got a WhatsApp at 11:47 PM from a fintech founder I’d never met: “Our users are abandoning the app in 8 minutes. Can you help?”
Most design agencies would have responded with a discovery timeline 4-6 weeks minimum, maybe 8-12 if they’re being “thorough.” They’d schedule stakeholder interviews, conduct lengthy user research, build elaborate presentations, and charge ₹15-25 lakh before a single pixel moved.
I sent back: “We can have insights by Friday and prototypes testing by Monday.”
He thought I was joking. Until we actually did it.
That’s when I realized something most of the design industry hasn’t figured out yet: speed isn’t the enemy of quality. Bureaucracy is.
The Onboarding Crisis Killing Indian Startups
Here’s what nobody talks about: the average design agency takes 6-8 weeks just to onboard a new client. By the time they’ve scheduled kickoff meetings, aligned stakeholders, conducted discovery workshops, and finally started actual design work, most Indian startups have already burned through a significant portion of their runway.
Meanwhile, 68% of Indian fintech users abandon apps during onboarding not because the products are bad, but because the experiences feel like government paperwork. The irony? The agencies hired to fix this problem mirror the same friction in their own processes.
When I founded Rock Paper Scissors Design Studio in 2020 during lockdown, I didn’t set out to revolutionize onboarding. I just couldn’t afford the traditional agency bloat. No fancy office in Bandra. No endless internal meetings. No discovery phases that stretched longer than the actual design work.
What I discovered instead was this: when you remove unnecessary friction from your own operations, you become exceptional at removing it for your clients.
The 1/60th Breakthrough Nobody Expected
The math is simple but shocking. Traditional design agencies typically take 8-12 weeks from contract signing to delivering initial concepts. That’s roughly 60 business days.
Rock Paper Scissors Studio delivers strategic insights, initial prototypes, and actionable design directions in 1 day.
One day versus sixty days. That’s the 1/60th onboarding time advantage.
But here’s the critical part: this isn’t about cutting corners or rushing quality. It’s about eliminating the organizational theater that masquerades as “process.”
What We Eliminated (And What We Kept)
Most agencies drown in ceremony:
- Week 1-2: Kickoff meetings and stakeholder alignment
- Week 3-4: User research and competitive analysis
- Week 5-6: Workshops and ideation sessions
- Week 7-8: Internal reviews and presentation prep
- Week 9-12: Finally, some actual design work
We flipped the script entirely.
Day 1: Deep-dive strategy call. We extract every critical insight about their business, users, pain points, and goals in 60-90 minutes. No fluff. No corporate small talk. Just strategic questions that matter.
Day 2-3: AI-powered research and competitive analysis. While traditional agencies schedule research meetings, we’re already analyzing user behavior patterns, mapping friction points, and identifying opportunities.
Day 4-5: Initial concepts and prototypes. Not polished presentations working prototypes that clients can actually interact with and test.
By the time traditional agencies are still scheduling their second stakeholder alignment meeting, we’ve already delivered testable solutions.
The Secret Nobody Talks About
The real breakthrough isn’t speed. It’s intelligent automation married to human expertise.
At Rock Paper Scissors Studio, we use AI to handle the 40% of design work that’s repetitive: research aggregation, pattern analysis, competitive benchmarking, asset preparation. That frees our designers to focus entirely on what actually requires human intelligence: understanding psychology, removing friction, and crafting experiences that feel effortless.
This is what Shivendra Singh, our CEO, calls “design-systems thinking” building frameworks that scale efficiently without sacrificing craft.
From Mumbai to Bangalore: The Distributed Advantage
Operating across four cities Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi gives us another unfair advantage. While traditional agencies waste 2-3 hours daily in commutes and office politics, our distributed team operates 35% more efficiently.
No meetings for the sake of meetings. No office drama. Just focused execution.
This model also cuts our operational costs significantly, which means we can deliver the same quality as ₹20-30 lakh agency projects for half the cost and in a fraction of the time.
Real Client, Real Results
October 2025. Qualtech Edge, a BFSI platform that had been innovating for two decades, approached us with a rebrand challenge. They were launching Qualtech 2.0 at Global Fintech Fest 2025 and needed a complete identity transformation, new logo, new website, marketing collaterals, and boardroom presentations. Traditional agencies quoted 12-16 week timelines. We delivered a launch-ready brand in a timeline that felt like fintech speed, not agency speed, applying the same 1/60th onboarding time principles that reduce client friction across everything we build.
The Formula That Changed Everything
Here’s what makes the 1/60th onboarding time methodology work:
Smart Research at Scale: We analyze thousands of user sessions using AI, understanding behavioral patterns across different states, languages, and demographics insights that would take traditional agencies weeks to compile.
Rapid Prototyping Without the Theater: We test 10 design variations in the time traditional agencies produce one polished presentation. We’re optimizing for learning speed, not presentation aesthetics.
Predictive UX Powered by Data: Machine learning trained on Indian fintech patterns helps us design for Bharat, not just metro India. We’re solving problems before clients even articulate them.
Compliance Automation: AI handles Aadhaar verification, PAN validation, and GST compliance checks while keeping the frontend beautifully simple.
The Results Speak Louder Than Process Documents
Across Fortune 500 brands, fintech unicorns, and bootstrapped SaaS companies, the pattern repeats itself:
- Mumbai insurance platform: Onboarding reduced from 45 minutes to 8 minutes
- Lending apps: Completion rates increased 340%
- Pune wealth platforms: Customer Acquisition Cost cut by 45%
One breakthrough project involved a lending platform targeting tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Traditional agencies quoted ₹18 lakh and 10 weeks. Using AI-powered behavior analysis, Rock Paper Scissors Studio mapped drop-off points in 48 hours and rebuilt the entire experience.
Results after 30 days:
- Bounce rate: 87% → 12%
- Conversion rate: 2.3% → 23.7%
- Loan approval time: 3 weeks → 2 hours
- CAC: ₹847 → ₹127
That’s ₹60,000 saved per 100 customers, the difference between startup survival and shutdown.
Why This Matters Beyond Speed
Indian startups don’t have the luxury of slow design. Funding cycles are tightening. Competition is intensifying. User expectations are rising.
When we deliver 1/60th onboarding time, we’re not just saving weeks on a calendar. We’re preserving the runway. We’re accelerating time-to-market. We’re giving founders the velocity they need to test, learn, and iterate before their competitors catch up.
Shivendra Singh puts it simply: “Indian startups don’t have the luxury of slow design. Markets move fast. Funding dries up fast. You either deliver speed with intelligence, or you become irrelevant.”
The Philosophy That Drives Everything
At Rock Paper Scissors Design Studio, we believe design should never be the bottleneck. It should be the accelerator.
That means:
- No politics, no micromanagement, no egos just space where creativity thrives
- Remote-first culture that prioritizes output over office attendance
- Design with purpose: solving real problems, creating real change
- Velocity married to intelligence, never one at the expense of the other
The Future Is Already Here
The 1/60th onboarding revolution isn’t approaching; it’s already disrupting how forward-thinking companies build digital products.
The question for founders, CTOs, and product leaders: Will they adapt to this new velocity? Or will they continue scheduling discovery calls while competitors launch, test, and iterate?
At Rock Paper Scissors Studio, we’ve already made our choice. We’re building faster, smarter, and more efficiently than the industry thought possible.
And we’re just getting started.
