It began with an email.
Anupam had been watching the edtech space with the quiet disinterest of someone who used to care. He saw promotional videos that screamed of utopic success, courses that moved fast but left nothing behind, and learning platforms that sounded like gym apps. Pretending to be Efficient & Soulless.
But something about her startup was different.
It wasn’t the design. It wasn’t even the product. It was her writing, a blog post buried on their site to be precise. Measured, exact, no performance; Just presence.
He read it twice. Then once more, just to confirm she hadn’t overwritten it. She hadn’t.
That evening, he drafted a mail.
Not a pitch.
Not a portfolio.
Just a thought, folded carefully into a proposition.
Subject: You’re Building EdTech. I Build What Students Remember. Let’s Talk.
Dear Anukriti,
I’ve spent the last five years in a strange corner of the internet, answering questions students didn’t know how to ask in class, breaking down Economics into human language, and slowly, steadily turning confusion into clarity.
Through my YouTube channel and writing, I’ve helped hundreds of MSQE aspirants (and curious minds beyond them) navigate not just what to learn, but how to feel less alone while learning it.
You’re building EdTech.
I'm building educational intimacy - the kind that sticks after the tab is closed.
And I think there's a space where our worlds overlap.
From deep-dive explainer scripts to adaptive learning paths, I can help shape the voice of your product and not just what it teaches, but how it feels to be taught by it.
I’m not here to sell videos. I’m here to help you build something students come back to—not because they have to, but because they want to.
Let’s talk. No rush, no pitch-deck posturing. Just a conversation.
Warmly,
Anupam
Writer. Educator. Pattern-seeker.
---------------------------------------
He didn’t expect a reply. He never really did.
But she wrote back.
Hi Anupam,
I don’t usually reply to cold emails.
But I read yours twice. Once as a founder, once as a former student.You’ve got something. A tone. A clarity. A kind of… gentleness that we’re missing in our product right now.
Let’s set up a time next week? No decks, just thoughts.
Cheers,
Anukriti
Co-founder, Pathsala
Thursday, 11:04 AM.
The Google Meet window opens. Split screen: she’s framed by a white wall and a rubber plant. He’s backlit, notebooks stacked behind him, headphones slightly lopsided.
There’s a beat of silence. Not awkward, just observant.
Her (lightly smiling):
“So. You do sound like your email.”
Anupam (half-grin):
“That’s a relief. I was worried I’d come off more composed than I actually am.”
She:
“You weren’t pitching. You were… narrating.”
Anupam:
“Most people pitch to be heard. I write to be felt. You responded, so I guess it worked.”
She:
“You said something about building ‘educational intimacy.’ What does that mean, to you?”
Anupam:
“It’s when a learner forgets they’re being taught. They’re not watching a video, they’re in dialogue—with their own curiosity. And they trust the voice guiding them. Not because it's flashy, but because it listens. Even when it speaks.”
She leans back, processing. Not the usual growth-metric chatter she’s used to.
She:
“And how do you scale that voice? That intimacy? We’re an EdTech startup—we think in thousands. Eventually millions.”
Anupam:
“You don’t scale the ‘feel.’ You distill it. Then you build content, design, even tech flows that preserve that emotional thread. People can binge glossy courses and remember nothing. But if a sentence hits them at the right time? That stays.”
Pause. She tilts her head slightly. He's not selling deliverables. He’s offering depth.
She:
“You think students care about tone?”
Anupam (without blinking):
“Tone is trust.”
She lets that hang.
She:
“So what would working with us look like? Hypothetically.”
Anupam:
“I’d spend two weeks just absorbing your platform. Watching how you speak to your users. Where you lose them. What you're afraid to say. Then I’d help you rebuild the emotional architecture—script, language, structure. From the inside.”
She (softly):
“You speak like you’re writing while you’re talking.”
Anupam (smiling):
“That’s because I am. I write for people I haven’t met yet. Sometimes, they show up on Zoom.”
Subject: Still Thinking About That Call
Hi Anupam,
I don’t usually sit with a conversation after it ends. But this one lingers. Not because it was loud or persuasive—quite the opposite. It was... quiet. Focused. Like someone tuning an instrument, not trying to start a band.
You said something about distilling the feel rather than scaling the voice. I’ve been chewing on that. We’ve built tech. We’ve built traction. But what you described—educational intimacy, emotional architecture—those are the things we haven’t been able to prototype, let alone productize.
I don’t want to rush this. Let’s take one small step.
We’re working on a new module—a deceptively “dry” topic that needs a pulse.
I’d like you to reimagine it. Not redesign. Not rebrand. Just… breathe into it.
Let’s see what happens.
Let me know your bandwidth this week. And thank you—for not pitching, but showing.
Warmly,
Anukriti
Co-founder, Pathsala
...
[Phone rings]
Anupam (picking up):
Hello?
Her:
You don’t say “Hi, this is Anupam speaking”?
Anupam (grinning invisibly):
No, I assume I’m the only Anupam you’d call voluntarily on a weekday evening.
Her:
Touché. You write like that too—subtle arrogance camouflaged as charm.
Anupam:
I prefer “well-placed confidence soaked in restraint.”
But yes, I see your point.
Her (laughs softly):
Anyway, I was reading that learning module we spoke about. It’s clinical. Functional. Dead, to be honest.
Anupam:
So, you’re giving me a corpse?
Her:
With a heartbeat somewhere underneath. I’m hoping you find it.
Anupam:
I’ll bring a stethoscope and a matcha.
Her (pauses):
Wait, do you actually drink matcha?
Anupam:
I pretend to. It makes my thoughts feel greener.
Her:
And here I was thinking you were all black coffee and existential dread.
Anupam:
Matcha pairs surprisingly well with mild dread.
Her (smiling through the line):
Okay. I give up. Let’s meet. I want to see if you talk like this in person, or if you type with a ghostwriter.
Anupam:
Deal. One condition—I get to sit with my back to the wall. Keeps my metaphors aligned.
Her:
Fine. But I choose the place. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere with—
(beat)
—texture.
Anupam:
Now who’s ghostwriting?
Anupam had always known how to exit a moment too early. In conversations, in cities, in almost-love. So when the call with her ended, fourteen minutes ... he felt the exact shape of something unfinished tighten in his chest. Not regret. Something softer. The ache of potential.
She had laughed like she meant it. Not to flatter him. Not to fill the air. And he had let himself answer her without armor, without metaphor. That was the danger. When someone saw past the metaphors.
He didn’t text her that night. Or the next morning. The matcha meeting hung there, a possibility paused mid-sentence.
The first week passed with no message.
He read the module she sent. Scribbled some notes. Made three different rewrites. None of them were for her. They were for him, to prove he could still write with care, even when no one was watching.
She, on the other side, said nothing. She was not the chasing kind.
He tweeted at 1:39 AM:
“The problem with being seen too quickly is you haven’t built the walls yet.”
She read it. She knew.
The second week, Anupam spent mostly in silence. The apartment, once shared, now sounded different. No double toothbrush. No second pair of keys. His soon-to-be-ex wife had moved out, but the air still carried her stillness.
The divorce papers sat unopened on his shelf—next to a dying lily and a framed photo he refused to put away.
Meanwhile, she was pitching to a new fund. Clean deck. Tight narrative. A slide titled: “Emotional UX: Designing for Trust.”
One of the VCs interrupted: "But do users really feel when they learn? Or do they just want to pass?"
She smiled politely. “Tone is trust.”
And just like that, she remembered his voice.
Week three folded into itself. He wrote a full reply to her email. Poised. Honest. Slightly self-effacing. He deleted it.
She read his tweet:
"There’s a version of me that replies immediately. He’s still married. Still composed. Still lying."
She didn’t like it. Didn’t share it. But she read it twice.
On the twenty-second day, her message landed like a hand reaching across a dark room:
“Is three weeks long enough for a silent retreat? Or should I wait for mercury to exit retrograde?” “Matcha still on the table?”
His reply came forty-two minutes later.
“The silence needed to ferment. I’ve emerged less polished, more honest.” “Matcha. Let’s meet. Before I vanish into another playlist.”
They met on a day when the city smelled of damp concrete and unfinished promises. The café was quiet, almost curated for confessions. Two cups of matcha sat like green punctuation marks between them.
She wore a charcoal dress, minimal like her emails. He showed up in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, hair trying to look unbothered but failing in deliberate disarray.
They talked about everything except the silence that had stretched between them. Startups, content, the illusion of scale, Kadri Gopalnath, and why both hated buzzwords but loved late-night jazz.
And when the cups were empty, she said softly, “Hungry?”
He smiled. “Always.”
Dinner was not planned. It happened like good lines do: unexpected, inevitable!
A dimly lit bistro.
A table by the window.
Menus they barely read
because the real appetite was elsewhere,
in the edges of sentences,
in the pauses that hummed louder than words.
She ordered pasta. He ordered a drink he couldn’t pronounce without sounding like he was auditioning for pretension. They laughed about that for five minutes too long.
Somewhere between the first bite and the last pour, the conversation stopped performing. They spoke about the things people hide in parentheses—her father’s obsession with minimalism, his unfinished novel that wasn’t really unfinished, just afraid of endings.
When the bill came, neither reached for it immediately. It wasn’t about the credit card. It was about not wanting the night to clock out.
Outside, the city’s air had that 11 PM hush—a soft permission to keep walking.
And as they did, side by side, their shadows aligned on the pavement like two sentences that didn’t need conjunctions.
Matcha had been the excuse. This...this was the beginning!
PS : Did you realise, that this fictional work is a result of a collaboration. That's AI!
