i’m a product geek, kicked up about building a global internet consumer product from India (i’ve been told multiple times that I may fail at this, for me not trying would be a disaster!). so in current mode, I am an entrepreneur building our product - wishberg.

i’m a mechanical engineer turned hr professional turned product manager turned entrepreneur. building a social product cause I have not built it before., have built mobile, ecommerce and advertising products earlier. now with all those learnings, building product in a new vertical – social.

i’m supposed to write nice things here that would let others believe I’m that damn good!., please skip this para, this is shamless plug -

• led product management for mobile at rediff back in 2006 (may be one of the first mobile product managers in India)
• built the mobile version of rediffmail. this was the first email service in India to be available on all versions of mobile –  wap, sms, stk and mobile client including sms text notification for important emails. 
• built (i assume first in india) vertical search engines for mobile – job, airfare, train, stocks that were distributed through all major telcos. 
• first mobile content (ringtone, wallpapers, games, etc) search engines (remember mobile VAS was big then) also the first cross-operator caller tunes search engine. 
• managed services for one of the largest telco operators in India, btw also integrated IRCTC apis back in 2006. 
• later headed product management for rediff ecommerce (yes did ecommerce back in 2008), built and revamped the commerce platform for both – consumer facing (design, search, funnel management) and back-end operations (integration on logistics, customer support, payment gateways and more). 
• Yup, yup and that SEO, SEM, Social and all that too. 
• Joined friends at Ohana to lead product and marketing for its flagship product - Ohana QB we did much cool stuff there – an integrated marketing platform that learned everything about consumers and allow cross channel marketing – SEO, paid search optimization tools, display marketing across multiple advt networks, behavioral re-targeting. 
• I bet you didn’t knew that we were among the earliest players (and may be first in India) to get access to FB advertising apis – built an FB advt optimizer in early 2011. 
• these are products that scaled., read between the lines – there were many failures too. we can talk about them when you buy me a drink!
  
• After all this something seriously went wrong with me to consider entrepreneurship (still not out of the madness). some crazy experiences about that are mentioned here.

key interests for building products are – consumer products & platforms, social discovery, payment systems, behavioral & audience marketing, demand side platforms, advertising networks & yield optimization, convergence of offline-online models, search engine stuff, ecommerce, mobile apps, etc. so I have worked on all these verticals, but claim no expertise in these domains cause all of them continue to evolve and I continue to learn.

my biggest experience is about 15 yrs of exp of being internet user., since days of text browsing, irc chats (in 1997) & 9.6 kbps dial up modems that disconnected on an incoming call. I had a 6-digit ICQ number starting with 2 (oooh!), hold a provisional patent, more details on this some day later.

i love interactions with startups and entrepreneurs. i don’t advice, just happy to share thoughts with startups on product / platform (development, management and marketing) and building product strategy / roadmap in domains i have worked – over a tea / coffee typically on weekends. feel free to drop me a line or get validations for products you are building. don’t connect with me for – fund raising advice, connections to investors, making projections and business plan (i suck with that!). all projections are good on paper (or excel sheet) not in reality. i believe if your product is good, everything else will fall in place. good product creates good value (and money), not the other way.

being practical is an my attempt to blog about technology, trends and my predictions & analysis of products, platforms, startups in connected world.

wishberg keeps me very busy. Instead of writing lengthier posts, I plan to write shorter ones. My 140 character posts are in plenty if you follow me on Twitter.

cheers,pj

On Email:  pj [at] beingpractical [dot] com
On Twitter: @beingpractical

note: all views, opinions expressed here are strictly personal. they are not endorsed or owned by my company (current & ex), associations, groups that I am a part of in any capacity.