From 4–5 days to instant: fixing eKYC drop-off
Students were signing up and staying active, but very few applied for jobs. I traced the gap to a manual KYC step and replaced it with instant DigiLocker verification — live within a week, with a cheaper long-term build running in parallel.
01The signal
Timbuckdo connects college students with part-time gigs. Looking at the analytics dashboard, the top of the funnel looked healthy: students were downloading the app, signing up, and coming back daily. But the number of job applications was very low compared with those numbers.
Active users who don't apply for jobs means the platform isn't delivering its core value — and employers don't get applicants. So the question was: where between "active" and "applied" are students getting stuck?
02Finding the leak
Breaking the journey into steps on the analytics dashboard showed one clear break. Students had to pass KYC verification before they could apply, and that is where they were dropping off.
Root cause
KYC was manual. After a student submitted documents, someone from the Timbuckdo team had to check them by hand, which took 4–5 days. During that wait, students couldn't apply for anything. Many lost interest or moved on, and never came back to apply.
Insight: this wasn't a motivation problem or a UI problem. Students wanted to apply — the process made them wait days for permission.
03Options I considered
There were two directions: make manual verification faster by adding people, or remove the manual step by automating it. For automation, DigiLocker allows instant, government-backed verification — and there were two ways to use it.
| Option | Time to go live | Cost | Verification time | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add more people to manual verification | — | Recurring; grows with every new student | Faster, but still manual | Rejected — doesn't scale and is never instant |
| DigiLocker via Decentro's ready-made API | Within a week | ₹3–4 per verification | Instant | Chosen to launch immediately |
| Direct DigiLocker integration | ~1 month to build | One-time build effort; no per-verification fee | Instant | Built in parallel as the long-term solution |
The trade-off
Direct integration was cheaper in the long run, but waiting a month meant another month of students dropping off. Decentro cost money per verification but could go live within a week. Instead of choosing one, I chose both, in sequence: buy speed now, build the cheaper option in the background, then switch.
04The solution
Rollout
Launch with Decentro
Integrated Decentro's DigiLocker API so students could verify instantly within a week.
Build direct DigiLocker integration
Asked the tech team to build the direct integration alongside (~1 month). Once it's built and working reliably, switch over and stop Decentro's pay-per-verification service.
Manual fallback
DigiLocker can fail — server errors and other issues happen. Students who can't complete it can still upload documents for manual review, so nobody is blocked.
05Results
- KYC-stage drop-off fell from 42% to 18%.
- Verified users grew 35% in one quarter.
- Verification went from 4–5 days to instant for students using DigiLocker.
- Manual review shrank to fallback cases only, instead of every student.
06What I learned
- Healthy top-of-funnel numbers can hide a broken core action. Downloads and daily actives looked good; job applications told the real story.
- Buy, then build. Paying per verification for a short time was cheaper than another month of lost students.
- Always design the failure path. An automated flow with no fallback just moves the drop-off somewhere else.
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