Founding Product Designer

Our mission is to help people build and sustain friendships in real life.
We believe friendships grow through time spent together. We’re building a social app that makes hanging out IRL easier, more fun and worth showing off. From finding your people to making plans with your friends to sharing memories and building an IRL profile you’re proud of, we’re creating a home for your whole real-world social life. A little corner of your phone that makes you excited to step outside.
What We’ve Done
Over the past two years, we’ve built Misfits into a platform where people join and host hobby clubs and meetups. Over the past two years, Misfits has grown to 150K+ organic downloads, with people joining and hosting 1,200+ hobby meetups every month. Our next product already has 25,000 people on its waitlist.
That means we have a community already showing up in real life, and people we can put new ideas in front of.
We’re founded by four IIT Kanpur alumni and backed by Info Edge Ventures and Better Capital.
Where We’re Going
We’re expanding from hobby clubs into everyday social life:
Make friends hang IRL - Help friends find a moment, start a plan and build recurring rituals, with AI handling the coordination. A hang can be anything - a sutta break in office, a Friday date night, a weekend cricket match or a trip to Europe.
Make room for your next favourite people. Help people discover each other, join a hangout and go from strangers to friends.
Give your IRL life its own identity. The people you keep seeing, places you discover and slightly ridiculous traditions you keep alive should become something you love looking back on and sharing.
We’ll build this through experiments with real users. Every week, we want to learn what makes people start a plan, show up again and pull their friends in.
The Role
We’re looking for a Founding Product Designer with strong product instincts, exceptional visual taste and a love for interaction design and motion.
You'll be a part of a small and versatile team, so be prepared for virtually no routine. This also means you’ll have the freedom, resources, and agility to create top-notch products.
The design questions we have are deeply social. How do you make asking to hang out with someone feel less awkward? How do you make committing to a weekly plan feel exciting and higher stakes than accepting a calendar invite? What makes a profile so good that someone wants to share it with their friends?
What This Looks Like Day-to-Day
Product Thinking & Experimentation
Work closely with founders to turn ideas and hypotheses into small, testable product experiences. Explore different directions, make the tradeoffs clear and help decide what’s worth building.
Talk to users, watch them use what you’ve designed and follow what happens after launch. Use those learnings to improve, rethink or retire features. Our progress should show up in people making plans, meeting again and bringing others along.
Craft & Ownership
Give Misfits a feel people recognise with their eyes closed.
Own the interaction details: gestures, transitions, motion, haptics and the feedback that makes an app feel responsive and alive. Know when a little flourish makes a moment special and when the interaction needs to get out of the way.
Bring the same care to typography, layouts and every loading, empty and error state. Build a flexible design system that carries our personality as we experiment and grow.
Artistic Boldness
Bring your references and your weird little ideas.
A game mechanic, an album cover, a beautifully strange website or something you noticed at a party could inspire the next interaction. We want someone who draws from the world around them and has a point of view.
Your Skills & Experience
Hands-on, and care deeply about your craft.
A portfolio with exceptional visual craft and interactions we can actually see in motion.
Strong product judgment. You can take an ambiguous social problem, explore different directions and explain which is worth testing.
Strong interaction and motion design skills. You understand timing, easing, gesture behaviour and how animation can make an experience clearer and more satisfying.
A feel for Gen Z and Gen Alpha culture. You know what feels fresh, what feels forced and when a brand is trying too hard.
Obsessive about small details and visual finesse; you sweat the 1px difference and care about every transition and haptic.
Clear communication and low ego. You can care deeply about an idea and still let a better one win.
Even Better If You...
Are passionate about social apps and believe the consumer space is broken and ripe for reinvention.
Have designed social mechanics such as invitations, feeds, reactions, messaging or sharing.
Have made or taken an early consumer product to something people use and love.
Can prototype in code or use AI tools to build working interactions quickly.
Bring skills in illustration, 3D, creative coding or sound design.
Have strong opinions about art, culture, fashion and the apps on your home screen.
Are the person who starts the plan, runs a community or keeps the group’s slightly absurd traditions alive.
Not a Fit If
Your portfolio is primarily enterprise, B2B or utility design, with little evidence of consumer product instincts.
Your portfolio stops at static screens, with little attention to how the product moves or responds.
You need a large design team or extensive processes around you to do your best work.
Compensation & Benefits
12-24LPA, depending on talent
Meaningful equity with significant upside.
How to Apply
Send your portfolio and a short introduction to chaitanya.dhawan@misfits.net.in with the subject: [Founding Product Designer - Misfits]
A portfolio is required. Applications without a portfolio link/work links in the email will not be considered. Also, no AI-generated emails, please :)

Work arrangement
No