Projects

The startup I co-founded

Sumrise

As co-founder and product manager, I built the first prototype, did much of the design and ran the user research.

Sumrise makes email readable for people with dyslexia and ADHD: deadlines and actions highlighted in colour, a thread summarised in one click, and the typeface, spacing and background set to whatever the reader can actually read.

Skills:

  • Product discovery
  • Web accessibility
  • Minimum viable product
  • Product management
Sumrise product demo Play the demo
Watch the demo on YouTube

What I did

  • I ran over 100 user interviews before we built anything, and launched a no-code MVP to test the idea cheaply.
  • We grew it from one user to more than a hundred, at a five-star rating.
  • I used PostHog analytics to find where users dropped out, and cut onboarding drop-off by 10x through iterative fixes.

What it taught me

How to build for real users: start lean, then let their feedback and the data decide what comes next, instead of building big up front.

What it looked like

Illustration of two emails with coloured highlight bars, beside an Auto highlights panel with switches for Name, Actions and Dates, all switched on.
Auto highlights: names, actions and dates picked out in colour, each with its own switch.
Screenshot of a demo email open in Gmail, shown in the OpenDyslexic font with wide line spacing. The greeting is highlighted and the sentence under the cursor is highlighted in yellow. A side panel has settings for font, line spacing and cursor highlight colour.
Sumrise in Gmail: highlights on, the OpenDyslexic font, wider line spacing and a colour that follows the cursor.
Illustration of an email beside a Text customiser panel with a font list (Default, Inter, Open Dyslexic, Arial, Comic Sans) and sliders for font size and line spacing.
The text customiser: choose a font, then set the font size and line spacing.
Illustration of an email on a peach background, beside a panel with the Background switch on and a grid of twelve colours to choose from.
Background colour: the email sits on a colour the reader picks.

Talking about it

Dileepa speaking at the University of Warwick, in front of his slide about removing barriers

Talk · University of Warwick

How AI can remove barriers at work

How AI can change the interface of work and make products and services more accessible.

Post · Sumrise

Read email faster by changing the background colour

A full inbox is stressful with dyslexia or ADHD. One easy way to help, March 2023.
Play the episode

This loads Spotify's player. Listen on Spotify

Podcast · Talamo Thoughts

Technology for neurodiversity

A talk with Jamie Wace, CEO of Talamo: how my experience shaped Sumrise's design, and building for neurodivergent users.

Get in touch

Interested in working together? Tell me what you'd like to build or achieve, and let's chat.

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