Hello Nandita, Nikunj, Alan and the Listed team! 👋
I’m Hrithik Kaul, one among the many applicants who’ve applied to your company’s internship position “Founder's Office Internship - WFO”
Getting to know about Listed was by chance.
On digging just a lil more, Listed didn’t feel that unfamiliar at all.
After all, its product OpenInApp is consumed by us all.
Here’s my Loom video presentation if you don't remember me at all!
What is this post about though?
By the way, this is the first post written on Stensil - A SaaS blogging platform that I'm building on the side. Please understand if you face any bugs or issues 😇
Table of Contents
- My entrepreneurial journey so far 📈
- How I can contribute to Listed 🙌
- Why me ✔️
1. My entrepreneurial journey so far
I was born in a Kashmiri pandit family & as a community, we’re known to have stayed away from businesses as far as possible.
Ever since I turned 14, I started to become very curious and excited about how businesses are run. Every business related question or idea that was put forth to my family by me would be turned down with the commentary -
“Yeh biznis viznis ke baare mai baad mai soncho, abhi padhai par dhyaan do” (Don’t waste your time thinking about businesses, focus on your studies instead.)
Dissatisfied, I decided to follow my heart. After plenty of struggles, I was able to persuade an online friend (We ran a Facebook page together) to invest some money into my idea & be a sleeping partner.
With his investment of 10k, & other help (Card details, KYC on payment gateways etc - which was impossible to obtain by a 16YO back in 2016) CoverLane was born 👶
(Pic) CoverLane's best selling product
Running it part time along with academics, around 3000 pieces were sold creating a turnover of around 9 lakhs before we shut shop in 2019.
It was only after we made 1+ lakhs in revenue that I disclosed the business to my parents which induced delight in them.
Biznis 2
With some web design skills I learnt while running CoverLane, and with a decent amount of freelancing experience, I started Wpify in 2019.
Initially, being open to all tasks that arrived- complex and simple, minor and major, made me realise like product companies, agencies needed a product-market-fit too.
We then focused priority on helping homegrown & D2C brands of India increase and grow their web presence.
We’ve since helped 30+ brands make around 5+ crores in revenue with our managed eCommerce solutions 💸
(Pic) People behind Pabiben invited to Kaun Banega Crorepati
Soon then, we were lucky enough to bag deals with an Australian logistics company, and an MNC - Affine.ai with whom I worked closely to grow traffic & reduce bounce rates along with other key aspects of conducting marketing activities.
Growing a little day by day and making an impact in the growth of other businesses, a total of 30+ lakhs in revenue was made for ourselves.
About a side project we invested 2 lakhs into, from the revenue we made.
As most of our customer base at Wpify were eCommerce businesses, we tried entering into the product & Saas space for eCommerce businesses and got a bit of traction.
At Growmmerce, we created a platform where Instagram sellers could create their own eCommerce websites from their phones, in a span of minutes.
Unable to expand further because of technical issues, we sold our startup to an American company via MicroAcquire.
Also see: Growmmerce pitch Deck for which we were able to reach until the 3rd round of discussions with the core team of 100x.vc (We weren't able to bag the funding though)
2. Ways I can contribute to Listed
If I am able to work with Listed, working on the following will excite me the most
1) Finding new customer segments, increasing product virality among them and creating recurring revenue sources from them.
Here’s 1 segment I would like to tap & how i’d use them as the brand ambassadors of OpenInApp -
A lot of indie startups / agency owners & other entrepreneurs build in public & distribute their Twitter / LinkedIn content on other channels such as Reddit, Quora, Medium etc.
As content consumers, it’s trouble free to view content on an app than on an in-app browser which is currently the case.
(Pic) An Indiehackers link on Reddit opens on the web-app instead of the Twitter app.
My plan:
Step 1: Have a premium plan for OpenInApp with 1 core feature - Custom short URL’s (eg: mystrtp.io instead of oia.bio)
Step 2: Launch a LTD (Lifetime Deal) on Appsumo
Step 3: Promote the LTD where our target customers are (Facebook groups, Reddit, Discord etc)
Step 4: Create an affiliate program for the monthly / yearly subscription plans and get LTD subscribers share it with their network (Most of them already have a great audience base who are keen on trying products like these)
2) Owning the product roadmap, and building the product based on customer feedback
It has taken me a long time to understand that what we want to build isn’t always what customers want. And that’s why I would want to leverage the power of user communities and build based on customer feedback - https://frill.co/ is a great tool for this.
3) Work on new initiatives along with the product, tech, marketing & support teams
Get the team along & gain insights from each department of the org. I’d love to interact the most with support teams (Or even handle it myself)
4) Do whatever else is required which would help in the growth of the company
3. Why Me
Unlike taking up engineering, it wasn't imposed upon me to try & experiment how businesses are created, run & grown.
I’ve been doing the things I do solely out of sheer interest all along and for the ❤️ of creating better services / products for the future.
Over the years, i’ve learnt these basic fundamentals of businesses -
✔️ What you want to build may not be what your customers want
✔️ Features don’t bring customers
✔️ Whatever you build should be monetizable, & at the earliest if possible
✔️ Get your PMF right and asap
✔️ Get unbiased validation for every feature you want to build before starting to build it
✔️ Do things that don’t scale to build the initial traction of your product
✔️ Bad product + good distribution has a better chance to survive than a good product + no distribution
Along with the above, I really want to use this opportunity to learn & see how hyper growth startups function.
This internship would not be another experience piling up/ to flex on my resume, but I would want to make the best use of this internship to gain skills, wear multiple hats and have better experience before creating something (startup) of my own, at some point in the near future.
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