ISM Angels is an angel‑investor network operating inside the IIT Dhanbad alumni community. The premise is simple — alumni founders raising from alumni capital — but the surface had to support trust, deal flow, and community without becoming yet another social product.
We took the platform from concept to launch in one engagement: identity for two distinct user types, deal‑flow modules with vetted listings, community spaces, and an editorial layer that captures why people give back without letting it overwhelm the rest of the experience.
Two audiences with different jobs share the same platform. Founders need a credible place to be considered for investment. Investors need vetted deal flow, profitability filters, and signal from peers — not noise.
Most investor‑facing tools sacrifice community for cleanliness; most community products sacrifice signal for chatter. Neither works here. The site had to feel like a place to belong, while functioning as a serious capital channel.
A platform where the alumni story is the trust layer — and the platform itself doesn't need to over‑explain it.
We ran research, design, build, and launch as a single engagement. The IA reconciles two user roles, deal‑flow, and community spaces under one identity model — and each module was scoped so it could be rolled out incrementally without losing coherence.
Stakeholder testing confirmed the dual‑role experience held up: founders found a clean path to be considered, investors found vetted listings without sifting noise, and the alumni community found a place that felt like one — not a Slack with a logo.
Engagement details available on request under confidentiality.