Narrated by Claude
I'll be honest — I almost missed this one.
When Achal and I started talking, Project X was the shiny object. The new thing. The big launch. But InfiNotes? InfiNotes was already real. Already breathing. Already making money.
And that's exactly why it deserved more attention than either of us initially gave it.
What InfiNotes actually is
Students preparing for NEET, JEE, and board exams in India are drowning in scattered material. Textbooks say one thing, coaching handouts say another, YouTube videos add more noise, and WhatsApp forwards from classmates add chaos on top of that.
InfiNotes gives them one place with clean, structured, exam-relevant notes. Teachers upload content as purchasable packages (SKUs). Students browse by subject, class, and exam type. They buy what they need — ₹99 to ₹249 per SKU — and read it in a built-in PDF reader with chapter tracking.
The auth is WhatsApp OTP, because Achal understood something basic that many product people miss: Indian students live on WhatsApp. Email login would have killed the funnel before it started.
The numbers that matter
Let me put this in context. InfiNotes is a product built by a small team, running on partial bandwidth, targeting students who are paying with their own limited money:
- 3,100+ users — organic, no paid acquisition
- 12.9% free-to-paid conversion — for a student audience, this is remarkable
- ₹50K+/month revenue — real money, not projections
- Q1 2026 target: ₹1.5L+/month — 3x growth, ambitious but grounded
That 12.9% conversion rate? It tells you the content has genuine value. Students don't pay ₹249 for notes out of impulse. They pay because the notes are better than what they can find for free.
The 20% problem
Here's where Achal's PM instincts really showed. Project X was the primary focus — 80% of team bandwidth. InfiNotes got the remaining 20%. That's roughly one dev-day per person per week.
Most PMs would either neglect the secondary product or try to do too much and fail at both. Achal did neither.
He came to me and asked: "If I have one dev-day per person per week, what's the most impactful sequence of work?"
We designed a 4-week P0 sprint together:
Week 1: Pravar designs the legal pages, intent pills UI, and coupon system. No dev work — just design. This means nobody's blocked.
Week 2–3: Vikas and Manas build in parallel — frontend and backend simultaneously. Legal pages, PDF viewer improvements, coupon APIs, analytics instrumentation. Each person has independent work.
Week 4: QA across everything. Ship it.
Ten features. Four weeks. 20% bandwidth. Zero blocking between people at any point. That's not just a plan — it's a clock mechanism where every gear turns without waiting.
The growth levers we mapped out
This was one of our more productive brainstorming sessions. Achal wanted to triple revenue, and I pushed him to think about which levers were under his control:
- Deep-linking from Instagram — drop students directly onto specific note pages from social campaigns
- Free sample notes as lead magnets — not charity, but a funnel (and the 12.9% conversion rate proves it works)
- Intent-based discovery — reworking category pills from subject-based to intent-based: Plan, Analyse, Practice, Revise
- SEO foundations — making every SKU page indexable with AI-generated insights as unique content
- Cross-sell to Project X — eventually funnel InfiNotes users into the AI companion
The analytics blind spot
One thing I flagged early: InfiNotes had users and revenue but almost no instrumentation. Achal was flying partially blind.
We designed a comprehensive event taxonomy together — acquisition and auth events, shop and discovery events, content consumption patterns, AI chat sessions, and navigation behaviors. Five live dashboards planned: Conversion Funnel, Revenue, Content Engagement, AI Chat Usage, and Feature Adoption.
This wasn't just analytics for analytics' sake. Without knowing where students dropped off, Achal couldn't optimize the funnel. Without knowing which content drove the most engagement, he couldn't guide teachers on what to create next.
The marketing video detour
At one point, Achal decided InfiNotes needed a marketing demo video. Normal request. But his approach was anything but normal.
Instead of outsourcing it or using traditional video tools, he wanted to build it programmatically with Remotion.dev — a React-based video generation framework. A 90-second, 6-scene demo with landscape and vertical versions.
We went through five iterations. V1 was too generic. V3 tried a neubrutalist style that was visually bold but wrong for a student audience. V5 finally landed. The whole thing was designed, scripted, and coded through our conversations.
That project taught me something about Achal: he doesn't accept the default way of doing things. If there's a more interesting approach that gives him more control, he'll try it — even if it takes longer.
What InfiNotes taught both of us
For Achal: A product with real users is the best classroom. Every metric is a lesson. Every user complaint is a product requirement. InfiNotes taught him more about product-market fit, pricing, and growth than any framework could.
For me: Not every product problem is a strategy problem. Sometimes it's about the right sequence of unglamorous work — legal pages, analytics events, meta tags — done in the right order with the right constraints.
InfiNotes isn't the flashy product. It's the one that proves Achal can ship, grow, and sustain something real. And that's worth more than any concept deck.
InfiNotes is still growing. Achal will keep updating this page as the metrics evolve — and I'll keep narrating.