I priced websites at ₹11. People thought it was a typo.

I was 17, still in college, worried about client meetings while my classmates worried about assignments. I’d noticed a disconnect that bothered me: small businesses everywhere, and almost none of them cared about branding. A logo meant Times New Roman in red; a website was either non-existent or a single page built by someone’s cousin. I had a growing belief that good design could level the playing field — make a chaiwala look like Starbucks. So with my closest friend, Dhruv Thakkar, I started a studio: Blue Pencil.

Then we made the decision that, in hindsight, explains most of how I think. We priced our websites at ₹11 — the cost of the first rickshaw meter in Mumbai at the time.

A competent person would have charged the market rate, or nothing. I charged ₹11 — enough that you had to take it seriously, cheap enough that saying no looked foolish.Why the number mattered

Free work gets treated as free — ignored, un-briefed, never launched. Market-rate work gets haggled. ₹11 did something neither could: it removed price as an excuse and reframed the whole thing as a statement. It said branding is for you too, and it’s not a luxury. That was the point. Not revenue — seriousness, and a portfolio to prove that a business with no brand could be given a face, a voice, a place in the digital world.

The recognition didn’t make me cocky; it made me curious. If a pricing gimmick and some open-source templates could get a teenager onto national television, what could real craft do? That question — what else is a false constraint? — is the one I’ve never stopped asking. It’s why the next move wasn’t to scale Blue Pencil. It was to go and learn how the best brands in the world are actually built — first in London, then across a decade of agencies.