Photo by Tanner Van Dera on Unsplash

One year break

This post is about the 1 year career sabbatical I took between Sep 2018–2019, and the experiments I did to explore opportunities worth building for.

September 30th, 2018, was my last day at SlicePay. On leaving the job, first I went for a 3 weeks trip to Sikkim, India. After a 7 day trek in West Sikkim with friends, I moved on ahead alone to explore East and North Sikkim as a solo backpacker. I spent 10 days there. My reason for leaving a decent product role at SlicePay was that I wanted to explore new avenues where I could build a product on my own, and this backpacking trip was a breather between the switch.

While I was still at SlicePay, I got approached by some ex-colleagues who were trying to build something for the crypto space. Crypto was booming in 2017 and I had seen many new companies come up in front of my eyes and I was excited to join the bandwagon. We were exploring real world use case for bitcoin (other than as storage of value like gold). We tried multiple things.

Here is a list of experiments I did during my 1 year break (and a little bit before that too):

1. Since mid-2018, we were working on mobile wallet + peer 2 peer exchange. At that time, nobody in India had that. Koinex was still using banks and Koinex Loop was still a distant dream. No code was written but we nailed down the design for both products first. Both solutions looked better than available alternatives. But at that time the value prop didn’t look very exciting because cards and netbanking were still allowed to purchase bitcoins in India. Plus, globally there was localbitcoins. So we decided we should work on some usecase for bitcoin payments first.
2. In Sept 2018, we started discussing about an internet TV sort of thing where you could pay per second to stream. Initially the idea was to do live shows only to offer additional value as compared to free alternatives like YouTube. The idea was to have closed shows, only for paying audiences and the platform was designed in a way to make sure that the “live” aspect of the show was captured. We were competing against the alternative to go to smaller live events like a stand up comic show — buy INR 500–2000 ticket and then travel in traffic jam to that place and back. Once again, no code was written but the designs were locked in. After talking to people we decided to not go ahead for 2 reasons: a) We couldn’t answer “Why not use credit card instead?” Streaming payment on the go with bitcoin was anyway too much of a hassle for an ordinary customer; b) The competition from Netflix, Youtube, and many other players who had raised shit ton of money meant that capturing audiences attention was tough and would require a long gestation.
3. By Jan 2019, we were moving towards another experiment — how can we make it extremely easy for someone to purchase bitcoins and put it in a wallet attached to their browser? Developers and creators will create services if there were enough users who had the capacity to pay online for content. The benefit of doing it through bitcoin was that it was global, micro and direct (between payer and payee). Multiple use cases for micro commerce would open up like — games where you pay 1 cent for each new life, or steaming ad-free video content paid per second, or using an API to transform your selfie into one with zombie effects. We were too slow in execution this time. Around the same time govt crackdown on bitcoin and the over bear market for cryptos happened. Suddenly the question of buying bitcoin from credit card became tough. It also became clear that we won’t be able to raise money in India for this project. By this time it was May 2019. We again had the designs ready for everything. After a period of inactivity and brainstorming, we decided to chuck the desktop app and browser extension part because people had already built that in the past 12 months. We decided to focus exclusively on the customer (a developer) so that he could monetise his services better with bitcoin as an alternative for payment.
4. By June 2019, the idea was changed to building a web SDK that helped a creator to monetise content on their web domain for time spent on the domain. Example — A comics creator, a wildlife photographer, a professional providing high quality content (consider Stratechery), a game developer for browser based games, a video game walkthrough maker, and similar indie creators could use Opoch to charge a customer for access to their premium content simply by charging for time spent on a particular URL. This was a unique model. Success would mean becoming an obvious 3rd step for any website creator’s list of essential steps — 1) Buy a domain; 2) Get Wordpress or alternatives; 3) Get Opoch for payment streaming.

Some interesting products who do such things for creators with fiat money:

1. VIPVR — https://vipvrapp.com/
2. https://flattr.com/

Since the space was not picking up pace, I decided to move on. I had already set 12 month aside for exploring other ideas and I was confused between giving another quarter (JAS’19) to explore or joining a full-time job.

I decided to run the 12 month course before moving to a job, and started focussing on other market opportunities. During this time, I stumbled upon a Youtube video about earning money online and it had 1M+ views while the video was pretty recent. I searched for other such videos and realised that this category is getting a lot of attention by the Indian youth. I dug a little bit deeper. The rising unemployment in India and the fact that 50% of population is under 25 means that majority of youth has not many options left for meaningful employment. But more than unemployment, the issue here is of employability. Majority of Indian youth (almost as much as 80%) is not ready to enter the digital workforce.

There are 3 types of solutions pre-dominant in India at the moment -

1. Preparing youth for govt jobs and entrance exams. Players like Unacademy and others
2. Govt and private sector players organising basic upskilling programs to get people employed in low-skill jobs
3. Private players helping people land up a decent job fit for the digital economy

To understand the demands of the youth segment, I started a project called HumYogya. I started offering free career consultancy to people over WhatsApp, depending on their skillset and interests. The idea was not to get them a job immediately, but to guide them in the right direction for upskilling and job application.

At the same time I tried talking to a few contacts who are running their own small agencies. Their problem is that while it is still possible to teach technical skills to someone if their aptitude is decent, the soft skills gap is huge. People in this age group are not serious about doing a job. Once they get a job, they feel entitled to get a salary irrespective of their performance. Also at this age, they are less interested in building a career and more interested in finding a boyfriend/girlfriend. That non-seriousness leads to poor work ethics which is a big concern for company promotors. So small business owners suffering from low employee productivity and high churn could also become a potential customer for paid employee training.

I spent 1 quarter in exploring this space but I couldn’t come up with something that had both revenue potential as well as scaling options. By that time I had run out of time and motivation, and hence I decided to get back to my Product Management career.