It seems surreal but we’re almost five months into 2020 already. Feels like the world, in a hurry, decided to borrow chapters from a dystopian novel. I’ve been worried about several things including the Covid19 pandemic. But I’ve also tried keeping busy during the lockdown. The book that I signed up with Harper Collins is almost complete. I’ve sent in the first draft. But I’m not celebrating yet. As Kevin Kelly says: When you are 90% done any large project the rest of the myriad details...

The art of building big brands in an Indian context We’re here with yet another episode of the Use Case podcast. And this time we have with us Meeta Malhotra, the founder of The Hard Copy, a magazine that focuses on design, growth, and innovation in India. Meeta started her career with Infosys and was one of the partners at the famous brand design consultancy, Ray and Keshavan. Over the years, she's played a huge role in shaping several brands that you see today like Airtel, Kotak Bank,...

What would have happened if Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Sairee Chahal had decided to get the license for starting Facebook in India back when it was just a college network? We wouldn’t have had two of India’s most successful startups - Paytm and Sheroes. Sairee Chahal is one of the kindest, most accomplished and successful founders who has managed to build a women’s only social network in India, Sheroes which boasts of over 15 million users. In this episode, she lays out the principles of...

I’m super thrilled to finally release this podcast with Nir Eyal on how you can become indistractable and reclaim your life. I read his first book Hooked: How to build habit-forming products, a couple of years ago. And ever since then I’ve followed his work. Nir’s second book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life deals with a topic that is very close to my heart. If you’ve followed this newsletter, you know that I’ve struggled with distractions all my life. This...

I don’t say this lightly - this is, in my opinion, one of the best episodes on the Use Case podcast, and not one to miss! 'Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: call it what you like, money matters' - Niall Ferguson begins the The Ascent of Money, a beast of a book on the world’s financial history, with this sentence. Regardless of who we are or what we do, we are constantly impacted by, IMO the best human invention since fire - money. Gaurav Sharma, has...

Sometime back while travelling in Beijing, I took this picture: The picture is a perfect tool to visualise the experiment that Anindya Ghose, who is the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Director of its Masters of Business Analytics Program, and his team conducted across various cities in China. In the field experiment, they sent out ~14k mobile coupons across to ~10k users. They then tested if commuters were more likely to respond to those...

We’re here with another episode of the Use Case podcast and I’m excited to welcome leadership coach Deepak Jayaraman to the show. Deepak has trained several CEOs in navigating difficult times, and given the current crisis, it’s only fair we pause and think about how we can all ‘play to potential’. Deepak is an alumnus of IIM-A and London Business School and was previously a consultant with McKinsey & Company and Egon Zehnder. In this episode, we talk about leadership in the time of...

A writer, a game designer and a product manager walked into a bar. Twist - all of the three is the same person! Say hello to Anshumani Ruddra, who is presently the VP of Products at Hotstar. He’s worn the hat of a writer, a game designer and a PM, which gives him the unique ability of looking at products in a way that most of us skip. Come to think of it, just as a well written article takes you through a journey while gradually stacking layers of information, a good game design or a...

Late last year, Mihir Dalal created waves with his reporting when he launched his first book, Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story, sharing behind the scenes of India’s most successful unicorn story. In this episode we caught up with Mihir to dive deep into how the company was born, the scandals that happened and the ups and downs in creating a company that would change the face of retail in India. Timestamps: 00:50: Amazon’s influence on early Flipkart, Two Pizza team...

Dan Ariely in his book, Predictably Irrational, starts off with this example. If you were to choose one of The Economist’s subscription plans, which would you choose? 1) Digital only for $59, 2) Print only for $125 or 3) Print + Digital for $125? Most people go for the third option, even if they came in to buy just the Digital subscription! Such examples, where product managers utilise consumer psychology to push/pull the consumer abound the world of technology. This particular strategy is...

I was on a long flight and on this flight there was a gentleman in the aisle seat across from me sleeping - very clearly knocked out. A flight attendant was coming through the aisle, she stops at our row and she turns to him and says "Sir?" He’s clearly asleep, so she calls out louder “Sir!” He's got his blanket up to his chin and he's got a big pillow - he's definitely passed out. And so she says it a third time. She says, "Sir!" He wakes up and says, "What is it? What is it?" And she...

Sanjay Ramakrishnan was the Senior Director for Product Marketing at Flipkart and has led various leadership positions at literally every one of the cool places that an aspiring marketer would desire, including Google, Myntra and Ogilvy and Mather. In his current avatar, he is the co-founder of Multiply Ventures, a newly launched early-stage investment fund based out of Bangalore.  We discuss some interesting stories from the early days of Flipkart, Myntra and Orkut, where Sanjay led their...

In the past on the Use Case podcast we’ve discussed and debated how several Indian startups have been commanding incredibly high valuations to their business. One practical way how they do so is by creating extremely strong brands - and this is especially true for consumer internet companies. In fact there is an interesting research report by Forbes which shows, how over the last few decades “intangible assets” make up over 80% of the S&P 500 market value. And then, as the graph by...

On a recent trip to Beijing, I was travelling in the subway during peak hours. I looked to my left - almost everyone I saw was on their phones. Looked to my right - same thing. Like a typical waiguoren (“foreigner”) I was fascinated. China has grown exponentially in mobile growth, creating new industries like livestreaming along the way. In this episode of the Use Case podcast (you can listen to it on the audio file above or find it on Spotify/ Apple or Google podcast apps), I caught up...

In today’s episode we are joined by Sanjay Nath, who is the Managing Partner of Blume Ventures, one of India’s leading early stage VC firm. From his early career when he was as a management consultant in Silicon Valley to the days when he helped his father scale a tech company (which went on to then be acquired by a global tech giant), to being one of the first angel investors to put his own money in deep tech startups before AI was a thing, Sanjay is a force to reckon with when it comes to...

India is the world’s fastest-growing app market but it is also a competitive and fragmented market. Only a few companies have been able to scale and achieve repeated consumer engagement while solving a problem. Companies spent nearly $1.14 billion on mobile advertising to drive app installs in 2019. But nearly 77% of users uninstall the apps they installed within the first day and only 2.6% of users stick to the app even after 30 days, according to data from AppsFlyer. Image: Retention...

Every product manager has a unique story. The multi-dimensional nature of the role implies that there is no one fixed path to becoming a great product owner. Our first guest as part of the Product Management series, Sidu Ponappa, shares one such journey, which sounds like a 90s love story - only here, his love is computers 💻 BY THE WAY, if you haven’t signed up for the series, you can still subscribe here! Sidu served on the Board of Directors of Gojek and was Head of Gojek India from...

In today’s Use Case podcast, we try to understand how the media industry has changed in the recent past, what sort of business models are working and how founders of new media startups should think about monetisation. Check out the timestamps for more. Joining us to dive deep into these trends is Miten Sampat, the Chief Strategy Officer of Times Internet, the internet company owned by the Times Group. He and his team have led ~15 acquisitions and 10+ minority investments, making them one of...

Some six months ago, after shutting down Factordaily, I joined Freshworks, a fast-growing software as a service company built out of Chennai. If you’ve followed this newsletter, you know that I’ve made some seemingly random career choices and it has worked out well for me. When I joined Freshworks, I didn’t quite realize how big the Indian Software as a Service industry was going to be. But then, I started learning about it. Turns out, it could potentially be a trillion-dollar industry in a...

Payal Arora, digital anthropologist and author of  the book, ‘The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West’ talks to Jayadevan on the sidelines of the Design Up conference in Bangalore on designing products for the Next Billion Users or NBUs. She is presently Professor & Chair in Tech, Values & Global Media Cultures at Erasmus University and has been researching digital behaviours in different economies for over ten years. Note: If you are listening to this episode on Apple...

Seasoned Indian business journalist and author of ‘Big Billion Startup- The untold Flipkart story’, Mihir Dalal shares the ups and downs in Flipkart’s growth story and the journey of the people who built it. He and Ravish unpack some stories from the book that have never been told in the media before. Lots of lessons to learn from the big Indian unicorn! Listen in to this episode on your browser window (if you’re listening on your phone, the audio should continue playing even if you minimise...

One of the rising stars of the Indian fin-tech space, Nikhil, co-founder of Setu, shares with us his experience building the BHIM app, how the Fintech space is changing, his tips and tricks for building a successful SaaS startup in India, starting a business in the age of Big-Tech competition and more. We also have some fun moments discussing productivity hacks, favorite books, podcasts and more. Timestamp: 1:30= Nikhil’s background and journey; 4:30= Thinking big; 8:00= Building BHIM app;...

It was 2012. I'd just started working at Pluggd.in, the startup and tech site run by Ashish Sinha. Yourstory also covered startups those days. Mainstream media was still covering quarterly results at IT services companies and listening to the same "management commentary," every three months. A new fund had launched a few months ago. They called themselves a micro VC and they were writing cheques faster than you could get from Silkboard to M G Road in Bangalore. I exaggerate, but you get the...

In this episode we meet up with Ankush Gera, the CEO of Junglee Games to learn more on the start-up and gaming industry in India. We learn what the state of the nascent but fast expanding gaming industry in India is like, what it takes to build a product based business that grow at a 100% YOY, the hustle of an entrepreneur, the right way to acquire customers, and much more.  Check out our newsletter, Turnaround on Substack at https://turnaround.substack.com/about For sharing feedback or if...