🦄 Thank you for joining us in the eChai Ventures gathering on 'Building Startup Teams and Company Culture' at Urban Vault HSR, Bengaluru! 🚀
Sharing glimpses -
🌸 Ankita Shree is the Managing Director at Mamacoco Hospitality and runs the restaurant Moglu on St. Mark's Road, Bengaluru with her husband Kiran Narayanan, PhD. "My heart was not in bureaucracy and my partner needed a co-founder. So I moved out of my role as an IRS Officer and moved in to the startup world as a co-founder at a deep tech startup", she says. She strongly believes that Kiran has a gift for food and flavours. Moglu is Kiran's nickname! Their golden rule to hiring is to have people with an attitude to learn and grow. She loves the word 'nurture' because it captures everything she does beautifully. Some of the hardest decisions have included shutting down a Quick Service Restaurant - Matka Junction, and moving from a veg only offering to one that will serves veg and non veg, starting mid-September. People aren't willing to pay a premium for good vegetarian food, as yet. "Food and flavours have no boundaries. We create them', she sums up. She highly recommends reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
🌸 Jaitee Wazalwar 🐉 is the co-founder at Credfino which enables transformational growth for accounting/tax firms through remote staffing and consulting. She believes her highs and lows. revolve around the people she works with, in their victories and setbacks. While building the startup, a lot of disruption happens when moving from one stage to another. They recently let go of a big client that contributed to 45% of their business, while retaining all the people who worked on it. This was hard but needed for the company's growth. Having worked in the manufacturing industry in a previous avatar, she recalls how people would want to talk a man instead of her. One of her female founder mentor shared the hack she used by 'hiring a guy for 15K monthly' so that the suppliers could talk to a guy. Her book recommendations include Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow, and Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman.
🌸 Nida Sahar is the founder Nife Labs which is Interconnecting Cloud & Edge Infrastructure to help customers deploy, manage and scale applications anytime anywhere. Her brand name has a backstory that's as beautiful as her poetry. Nickel and Ferris form the core of the earth and they'd like to be the core of your cloud, hence Ni + Fe is Nife! She has been a fan of checklist and games ever since she was a teenager. As she gamifies and plans the next set of moves for herself and her startup, she continues to remain inspired by the poem 'On his blindness' by John Milton. She strongly believes in independence and creating a way to achieve what people would like to do and grow. She recommends reading The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf.
Currently, he is leading as the Director of Product Management at Paytm , where he heads merchant experience and fulfillment of offline payment devices.
At Paytm, Ashish Singh focuses on enhancing the merchant experience and ensuring the seamless fulfillment of offline payment devices.
At Swiggy, Ashish prioritized enhancing customer satisfaction, especially for high-priority customers. He focused on three key metrics:
✅Customer Lifetime Value: Ensuring long-term value and loyalty. ✅Egregious Issues: Identifying and addressing severe problems quickly. ✅Churn Score: Analyzing past customer experiences to reduce churn.
He has improved the customer experience by reducing cancellations, minimizing order delays, and building solutions for fulfillment exception management. This includes addressing rare but significant issues like delivery executive fraud, such as false delivery cases.
He also worked on improving the retention of the high value customers by creating a differential customer support experience.
At instamart, Ashish played a pivotal role in designing products to boost customer repeat in the nascent quick commerce market, including adoption of Fruits and Vegetables category and initiated personalization of the journeys on the Instamart app.
Personal Insights and Recommendations: Beyond his professional expertise, Ashish is also certified to climb Mount Everest—a testament to his adventurous spirit and perseverance.
His go-to book recommendations: 1. 'The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact' by Chip Heath
2. 'Principles: Life and Work' by Ray Dalio, both of which have shaped his approach to leadership and problem-solving.
Ashish's journey is a testament to the power of tackling ambiguity head-on, identifying the right problems, and delivering impactful solutions.
🦄 Thank you for joining us in the eChai Ventures Product Growth meetup at Urban Vault Headquarters in HSR, Bengaluru! 🚀
Glimpses -
Aditya Agrawal is a product leader at Cuemath. He left no stone unturned to remind all of us in the room about our math marks and tuition classes from school days! There are over 4,000 tutors on the platform, largely women who consider Cuemath to be a source of income and identity. He believes that the two most important deliverables for a product manager are the value to the customer and the viability to the business. He recommends reading 'Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value' by Melissa Perri. Shout out to Amal Mishra for the warm welcome extended to his college senior 😊
Ashish Singh is not just a product leader at Paytm, he is also certified to climb the Mount Everest! He shared titbits from his days at Swiggy sprinkled with buzzwords like customer lifetime value, churn score, priority support and the icing on the cake - customer satisfaction score which witnessed a massive jump during his tenure. He believes that 70% of product management is identifying the right problem and knowing when to solve it. His go-to book recommendations include 'The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact' by Chip Heath, and 'Principles: Life and Work' by Ray Dalio.
Madhurita M. is a product leader at Meesho, a board games enthusiast, F1 fan and a globe trotter who has been to 35+ countries! She shared insights from building her favourite products and activating people on return. She believes it's important to understand your customer really well at the n-th level. The skill to ask the right questions to know what they truly want is critical. This will ensure that the need for iterations and pivots drastically reduces. Whether you are looking to break in to product or get better at it, what gets you anywhere is curiosity! Go through apps from start to finish. Think through why someone would add these features and how that impacts your experience.
Sameer Mandge is a product leader at GoKwik. Recalling his days from Amazon, he says when Amazon launched in India, the default check out option was COD. They went through a journey of introducing changes for the new users and the existing users to eventually reduce COD. While Cash On Delivery is a growth lever, they aimed at reducing it owing to higher return to origin, frequency of purchase and more reasons. Return To Origin is an important step as it adds to merchant cost and operations to bring the undelivered orders back. He believes that customer keeps evolving and so do their needs. It's important to do your customer research well and put a clear persona to your user. He recommends reading 'The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business' by Charles Duhigg and 'The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you' by Rob Fitzpatrick.
Had a fantastic time at the Product Social hosted by eChai Ventures last weekend! It was enlightening to engage with fellow product enthusiasts and exchange insights.
We were thrilled to host the exclusive eChai Ventures Social. Engaging in small group candid conversations with innovative hardware founders about designing cutting-edge hardware products was truly inspiring.
Addressing a diverse group of product managers was a joy, reaffirming the excitement of solving customer problems through effective product management.
🦄 Thank you for joining us in the eChai Ventures Product Growth meetup at Urban Vault 1515, HSR, Bengaluru! 🚀
Recapping a few highlights:
Aditya Vikram believes nothing succeeds like success. People want to be on the winning team. ➤ Helping people in the hour of need (start of Covid) by working on contactless deliveries at Amazon was gratifying. Though it also meant cutting short paternity leave. ➤ If India eCommerce market is growing by 100, Meesho is growing by 65. ➤ Co-signs what his mentor would say, "You become a seasoned product professional - not by building products but by shutting them down" ➤ If there was a product he may have liked to work upon, it'd be eSports FIFA ⚽ ➤ Hiring at Meesho for his team 📢
Alok Agrawal says he joined Microsoft because of his wife. He may have been a Chef or a Cricketer in a parallel world 🌎 ➤ Loved working on a product that helped people in the refugee camps. Contributing to the social impact it had felt fulfilling. ➤Eye popping numbers - MS Teams grew from 18 mn to 200 mn users during Covid. This growth was massively fuelled by Android phone users in the emerging markets. ➤ Being a PM is not as sexy as it sounds. Go for it if you like it while knowing that it's just a role. ➤ Hiring alert: His team at Mailmodo is hiring talent.
Sumit Malpani shares a hack from his work at Porter. "Follow Your User" and think of your user occupying a chair in every meeting that you sit in. ➤ During Covid, worked on the Ola Emergency product for people in essential services. Contributing to the impact it had was gratifying. ➤ Worked on Moj for Creators and built various Gamification modules for Creators at ShareChat, acquiring ~200k high quality creators, improving creator retention by 8pp. Reference reading: https://lnkd.in/gveZWpfw ➤ If there was a product he may have liked to work upon, it'd be Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Ltd. because it is a complex product with a great user experience. It is accessible, reliable and frictionless. From its colour coding to safety-related nudges, visual cues to clear instructions, everything adds to user delight.
It's a wrap! Do share resources - books, podcasts, newsletters, courses, platforms and communities that are helping you with your journey as a product professional. ✨
Para as autoridades chinesas, os cristãos são considerados um perigo para a nação. Chineses protestam contra o “Livro Branco”. (Captura de t...
Thrilled to share that I had the incredible opportunity to participate as a panelist at the meetup delving into the dynamic world of Product Management!
It was a pleasure to join fellow industry experts Sanjeet Kathuria, Harneet Kaur Chhabra and Sanket Bhatt in a riveting discussion on key practices and strategies shaping the field. The turnout was nothing short of amazing with 50+ product and growth folks and even founders showing up for an engaging evening!
Key Highlights from the discussion:
🎯 Being an advocate for customer empathy is fundamental for translating business needs into actionable insights to drive product growth. 🎯 GTM and product development should go hand in hand with a key focus on adopting early design partners and finding distribution channels that work for your startup. 🎯 Experimentation with product features, pricing and positioning can help unfold unforeseen avenues leading to higher customer engagement and business expansion
🙌 Huge shoutout to the organizers and host Jatin Chaudhary and Darshan Suthar for extending the invitation and for orchestrating such a successful event for the community.
for being early adopters and helping us in shaping the platform 🙏
AICamp allows your entire team to work together in a shared and collaborative workspace, utilizing all premium AI models(GPT3/4, Claude and many other ). Empower your entire organization with role-based access and detailed AI usage analytics.
Key features:
* Multiple LLMs in Single Interface * Bring your own API key for any LLMs (Pay as you go!) * Unlimited Chat History * Share Chat/Prompt with Team Members * Single API for entire organization / Easy to manage and light on pocket!
Currently it's for individual use and team version will be release on 10th feb.
Where I am seeking help:
* Feedback and improvement idea from folks who use AI in their day to day life. * Any team specific feature that you might think to must have.
Where I can help you:
* Building products * GTM * Opensource growth
PS: please connect your paid openAI keys to see how it works (aicamp.so)
After pouring heart and soul into this, I'm thrilled to share Asnap, my latest venture in the world of #MicroSaaS
Much like Thanos' iconic finger snap transformed the Marvel universe, Asnap is poised to shake up how Saas companies approach support documentation.
Why take on this challenge? 👀
Having personally felt the pains of manual content creation and relying on outdated tools in past roles, I knew there had to be a better way🤔
Existing tools like Scribe & Tango missed the mark, not tailored for SaaS companies.
Spotting this gap in the market, I decided to take the reins 😇
Leveraging my experience launching Clipboard Archive, I set out to create a solution for those, like me, seeking efficiency in crafting product guides🚀
To ensure Asnap met real user needs, I engaged with over 50 Technical Content Writers, Product Managers, and Marketers, digging deep into their pain points.
This wasn't just about building a product; it was about crafting a comprehensive solution 🤩
Excitingly, Asnap is now available in Alpha, ready to be put through its paces by real customers for testing and feedback.
If you've ever grappled with creating guides in a market where existing solutions fall short, Asnap is here to bridge the gap.
Let me show you how Asnap can transform your approach to support documentation. 🚀
eChai Startup Demo Days are held every last Saturday of the month across cities.
It is a platform for promising startups from the community to present their ventures, get early feedback and engage with investors, enablers & the community.
eChai Ventures partners with select brands as their growth partner, helping them expand market reach, drive revenue growth, amplify brand visibility, and strengthen hiring efforts.
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eChai Ventures is a global startup network connecting entrepreneurs through local meetups in 20+ cities worldwide, enabling cross-border collaborations via startup panels, demo days, cricket, and pickleball leagues.
Mehul Fanawala
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