Replacing 2 years of MBA with 4 years of battle practice in early stage startups
4 lessons in 4 years
I started my career at Akosha in 2014, after graduating with a B.Tech from Delhi College of Engineering.
I was part of OneDirect, a new Enterprise software spin-off from the B2C business of Akosha. When I joined, OneDirect had 5 mid-sized companies (market cap INR 5000–20000 crores) as clients and more were being added every month. I was given the job of managing these accounts for the time being, working directly with the cofounder. At the same time, we were trying to hire senior account management folks who could take that relationship forward and I was supposed to interview a huge list of applicants. I must have taken more than 100 first round interviews over 3 months.
In November, I was given the opportunity to setup operations for Akosha in Mumbai along with the AVP of Sales. He was supposed to bring in the clients and I was supposed to nurture the relation.
That was the big break.
However I got an offer from Zostel to join their core team, that was launching ZO Rooms, around the same time and I decided to join them instead. I have already written about it here — Early career guidebook: When you don’t know what you want
This is my brief journey between July 2014 and Sept 2018:
OneDirect by Akosha (Enterprise software) >> ZO Rooms by Zostel (Tech-enabled Ops business) >> Trustio (FinTech) >> SlicePay (FinTech)
At the time I was in Akosha, I had no idea what I would do with my career.
I just kept taking the next best opportunity. I was frequently asked if I had any “MBA plans”, and honestly speaking I too thought about it many times. But I was fascinated with tech startups and I postponed MBA every single time thinking that there was so much more to learn from practical experience.
In this post I am trying to consolidate the major highlights of my learning in the last 4 years, working for funded early stage companies in India. If you have even a slight interest in working for tech startups or starting one on your own, this post might give you a stadium like view of what goes inside the field. This post helped me immensely in consolidating my thoughts about what worked and what didn’t in the last 4 years.
Lesson 1: Getting a 360 degree view of all departments that are part of modern day tech companies
While I was at Akosha, I got some exposure in account management and hiring, as mentioned above.
On my first day at Zostel, I remember there were some 15–17 people crammed up in a small office in Patel Nagar, New Delhi. I waited for the whole day for someone to assign me some work. At roughly 9pm, 3–4 of the new team members were assembled in a room to decide who will do what. Someone asked if I knew what ZO Rooms was trying to do. I think it was a Yes or No question maybe.
However, I went into a 15 min monologue explaining everything on the whiteboard. At the end of it, I was asked to wait for a bit by the guy who was taking the orientation (a fellow core team member who had joined before me). He discussed with other members and said that not only should I be assigned to Acquisitions team (aka Business Development; getting hotel owners to give room inventory to ZO Rooms), but also my explanation should be recorded and given to all new hires as a refresher about what is ZO Rooms.
I guess doing research about the company you are joining helps. It helps even more if you have introspected yourself about the market positioning and added your own thoughts. However, the bad thing here was that I never got a chance to choose what I wanted to do.
So I started with BD at ZO Rooms.
I was doing what I was supposed to do. I onboarded a total of 4 hotels in South and East Delhi. It was not easy for an engineering fresher like me. Moreover, I was not enjoying it. It felt like I had to work extra hard just to perform at an average level, and then too, my peers in BD were outperforming me in terms of hotels signed. I felt like a right-handed batsman forced to play with left-hand. I didn’t feel at ease doing BD. Getting up every morning was an effort thinking about all the cold calling and meetings. Just because I am good at explaining that doesn’t mean I enjoy talking to strangers everyday!
360 degrees at Zostel
When ZO Rooms had 20+ hotel partners in Delhi (roughly 2 months after my joining date), I went to the CEO and requested to be given some other task as I felt BD was not the best use of my skillset.
Initially, there were no teams to move into as I didn’t have any prior experience. So I waited.
For almost 1 month, I went to office and just sat with other teams, observing what they were doing. For example, I sat with -
- designers trying to understand how they were making assets for marketing on OTAs and social media,
- sales team trying to understand how they were dealing with travel agents to bring room bookings,
- operations team trying to understand how they were mapping out the entire process into smaller steps that can be mapped to Salesforce CRM,
- product team trying to understand what ZO Rooms was building next and why,
- the cofounders trying to understand what they thought was the future.
Since I was probably the only “free” person in the company at that time, I was given a variety of tasks:
- Implement tablets across all partner hotels so that they can inform us about real time inventory (plus some other benefits; think Uber app for drivers). I was supposed to handle everything from sourcing the tablet (quality, quantity, price, delivery) to actual installation in all hotels across India where ZO operated, and then handover of the process to city managers across India.
- Move tech team to a new office. Renovation of office, including number, size and colour of desks and chairs to setting up internet lines, water coolers and relaxing area.
- Improve content and design of all emails and sms going to customers
So on and so forth. I worked in almost all departments on some project.
After 2 months of project-based work, I was finally assigned something concrete by the CEO. It was more like a business challenge — Can any random person become an agent of ZO, supplying room nights? For example — Ola and Uber drivers can earn side income by dropping their pickups directly to ZO Room and booking rooms on their behalf. A chai wala on a railway station could become an agent selling hotel rooms to arriving passengers. A security guard in a society can book hotels for residents of the society as a side hustle.
It was like a startup within a startup because we had to test the very concept. We named it Ozonet and I will discuss it in detail in next point.
Other experiences that helped consolidate the overall 360 degree view:
- I started Trustio in 2016 after leaving Zostel. Working on your own startup makes you realise even more how everything fits together.
- Later, while working for SlicePay, as a PM, my job was to interact with all departments to understand their problems and solve them as much as possible through product. Also, for each product launch, I had to think about how other departs will have to prepare to launch or support the product post feature release.
So in summary, I learnt how all the pieces fit together. Without any doubt, a good advantage for a product manager as well as entrepreneur.
Lesson 2: Experimenting with Product Market Fit
First with Ozonet at Zostel
Ozonet felt like my own startup where Zostel was the VC.
The whole thing was pre-product-market-fit and we had to test if:
a) these people would be willing to book rooms for commission from ZO;
b) these people had enough customers who would be willing to let these agents book on their behalf.
Business case: We had sufficient hotel room inventory at that time, but we wanted to sell more of those rooms. The more rooms we sold, the more faith the hotel owners would have in us. At the end of the day, whoever sold more rooms (between Oyo Rooms and Zo Rooms, plus the other competitors) would be known as a more dependable partner in the ecosystem and hence will not only get more rooms to list but would also have more negotiation power. Hence, sales was highly important to build a sustainable company.
I hired some interns (as it was summer break in colleges) and started testing these hypothesis with cab drivers and small travel agents near railway stations and bus stations. I used to organise meetups across Delhi where we invited cab drivers and introduced them to the idea of booking rooms via ZO for a commission. We gave our phone numbers to them for booking.
After getting some initial signs of success from cab drivers and small travel agents, I was assigned 2 devs and 1 designer, along with some budget to hire full-time team members to promote this. I was also joined by another member from Sales team to manage the whole thing. I had PnL responsibilities for this small outfit. I have written about it in Connecting the dots to Product Management.
Obviously I had no experience of doing anything like this before.
In the next 3 months, I took a team of 7 freshers across India to 9 states and 30+ cities, onboarding small travel agents who would be willing to sell ZO Rooms to their own clients for a markup.
We managed to earn more than 5 lakhs (I guess) through Ozonet. Not a big sum, but it was a model that could have been built into something big later. However, there were funding issues and some backroom deals between Tiger, Softbank, Oyo and ZO, and it was decided that ZO will be acquired by Oyo. I don’t think I am the right person to give any more details here as the acquisition was one of the most notorious in the history of India startup acquisitions and was a common issue in media.
I had to fire the entire team myself that I had hired within just 4 months. It was painful because it was neither my nor their fault. After that, we tried to place as many employees as possible in other companies. I quit in December 2015 when most of it was wrapped up.
Starting Trustio
After quitting Zostel, I was clueless about what to do next. Given my experience with Ozonet at Zostel, the most obvious thing to do was to start something of my own.
I chose Fintech space as the next frontier to disrupt things in India. After exploring a few ideas for 3 months, I started Trustio in March 2016.
I think I jumped the gun here. I should have thought more deeply about “why this?” and “why me?”. Although, I was at least clear about “why now?” for starting a fintech company in 2016 in India when so many interesting things were happening with UPI, eNACH, Aadhaar, etc.
At Trustio, we experimented with a trusted alumni network for borrowing and investing. As a MVP, we managed to give loans to 5–7 people. Borrowers were final year college students or recent graduates and lenders were their college alumni. Average ticket size was INR 60000 and average loan tenure 6 months.
On the back of this early success, we got into Axilor accelarator in 2016 winter batch and also got selected as top 10 startups in the 2016 fintech cohort of Village Capital India. Obviously I had to hustle a lot, but our MVP helped seal the deal.
Eventually, we realised that the total market size of what we were doing was too small (ie needs were not frequent). There were some disagreements between cofounding team members about what to do next (everybody has their own constraints/expectations and I respect that). The whole story of lessons from Trustio probably deserves another post, however, things were not looking good in December 2016.
I could have pivoted. But due to multiple reasons, I made 3 decisions:
- To not think of growing Trustio any longer
- To stick with fintech and look for more opportunities
- To learn product management so that next time I reduce my total risk of starting up
That led to the role of Product Manager at SlicePay. Although Trustio didn’t scale, I learnt a lot about the process of finding product-market fit. What to do and what not to do.
Finally, when I joined SlicePay, for the first 3–5 months I was trying new products for them like undergraduate education loan in India, loan for masters in US, loan for coaching classes etc. That too helped in getting a better understanding of running lean tests to check product market fit.
Lesson 3: Losing my virginity around starting up
This is beyond the “actual work” that cofounders need to do — that is hustling to get product market fit. These are the other things that only the CEO/Founder can understand.
It includes registering a company (later on legally closing the company as well), getting cofounders to quit their jobs and commit, getting into an accelerator, getting first angel investor, managing cash flow, hiring and managing interns, getting mentors, etc.
You can not learn these things if you have not been a founder. However, you shouldn’t become a founder just to learn these things. It can be learnt on-the-go when you are serious about a startup.
Although I was not able to get Trustio to PMF before both cash and cofounder’s patience ran out, I think these lessons would help me next time I decide to start up again as I will try to not make the same mistakes.
There are multiple lessons here, like -
- Splitting equity and risk with cofounder,
- Thinking deeply about who should be 1st hire and who should be cofounder,
- bad money management before PMF is reached,
- testing market size, user problem, differentiation with competitors, etc before going all gung-ho about “launching” the product,
and many more. This deserves a separate post altogether. I will plug one here later.
Lesson 4: Managing a post product-market fit product in scaling phase
This one is related to my time at SlicePay. When I entered SP in Jan 2017, I obviously had 0 professional experience of managing product. In fact, I think I really understood product management in Mar 2018 when my first major feature was released, becoming the flagship product of SlicePay — SlicePay card. Then I released another major feature enabling on-demand micro loans transferred to bank account directly in Oct 2018 and that was when things solidified in my head finally. You can read about these in Building product at SlicePay.
Summary
- Getting a 360 degree view of all departments that are part of modern day tech companies
- Experimenting with Product Market Fit
- Losing my virginity around starting up
- Managing a post product-market fit product in scaling phase
Next time when I start something, I would be at a much better position to do a great job.
Just like a struggling artist takes time to hone his art, I too am taking my time.
I have spent 2014–2018 clearing my basics. And I will keep clearing them even further.
There are a few exciting things happening under the surface. Let’s see how they turn out to be. I will keep you all updated.
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