Founder | YC alumni | Forbes 30U30 Asia
šš¼ Hi there! Let's learn from our journeys and grow together š Here's my journey so far: š Graduated in 2018. š Founded Able (now acquired by Instawork) with 2 co-founders. š¼ Bootstrapped for around 1 year. š° Raised pre-seed funding from Y Combinator. š Student placements started growing to 100+ per month during the batch. š· Covid hit, but luckily, we raised $1.5 million+ post-demo day. š² Crossed 2.5 million+ installs. š Have placed 25K+ students so far. š Got featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia. š„ The team scaled from 3 founders to 50+ team members. š Stepped down and took a life break in 2023 š” Guess I enjoy building more than breaks, building again. I'm happy to connect and learn about your journey, as well as offer assistance where I can. My areas of expertise include: āļø Startups āļø Solving 0-1 problems āļø Growth Hacks āļø Fundraising āļø Product-Market Fit āļø Product & Business Strategy āļø Tech Infrastructure āļø Tech Leadership āļø Leadership & Management
We bootstrapped Able as an HR Tech company for one year before securing our first pre-seed investment from YCombinator. I strongly believe that revenue can often be the best North Star Metric for most companies, helping them discover product-market fit faster.
We started with 3 founders working from our flat in Bengaluru and scaled to a team of 50+ individuals in 3 years. Along this journey, we made a lot of mistakes, and after conducting 1k+ hiring interviews, I can assure you that hiring can never be perfect. Building a team involves creating a culture that attracts and retains talent, and a hiring process that, just like a startup, improves itself based on data after each hire.
Marketing automation is vital for growth and retention, especially as the user base expands. Initially, we wasted time building our own notifications and email systems. Adopting tools like Customer.io and Clevertap, we conducted successful experiments and crafted exceptional user journeys. Numerous A/B tests with notifications and emails helped us learn user preferences and shape effective campaigns.
I have personally conducted at least 1500 user interviews in the last four years. Here are some pointers from my learnings: Listen more, speak less. Questions like 'How do you do this?' are always better than questions like 'What do you think we should do?' Don't attempt to sell your product during user research calls.
We began using Amplitude when we reached around 50k+ Monthly Active Users (MAU) at my startup. I personally utilized it for various projects. One notable project involved testing different offerings for a referral program within our app. We conducted funnel analysis on several offerings over a few weeks and ultimately identified a strategy that resulted in up to 3k+ installs per month
Python and the frameworks built upon it are my weapons of choice. My experience spans a wide range, from scraping thousands of webpages with Scrapy to developing highly scalable web applications using Django. Equally powerful are the tools available in deep learning, such as PyTorch and Scikit-learn, for your machine learning projects. I also contributed to the Django source code during my college days.
I employed SEMrush to boost our website's SEO. I regularly scheduled calls with my relationship manager, presenting a fresh set of questions each week, as SEMrush had become our primary tool for driving SEO growth. The most frequently used features were competitor analysis and keyword research, which enabled us to achieve over 500k+ organic installations through SEO.
Able is an ed-tech app that helps you upskill for non-tech job roles like sales, operations, finance, etc., and apply to companies hiring for these roles. We have 2.5 million+ users and have helped more than 25k+ students get a job.