Product Geek, kicked up about building & scaling products from scratch. Been building products ~ possibly first mobile product manager and among the earliest PMs in India (2006). Mechanical Engineer turned HR Professional turned Product Manager turned Entrepreneur. Love to build products I have not built it before., starting from mobile, ecommerce, advertising, social, payments, service and investing. Its fun to start from scratch every time!
Founder, CEO & Managing Director – Paytm Money
Built from zero to become India’s largest investment platform with 7 million users in just 18 months post launch. Team from 0 to 300+, 1 Mn monthly actives, largest SIP contributor to industry wt 45% marketshare of direct investments and 15% overall market share. Startup valued at ~ $400mn in journey of 3 years.
Chief of Product & Growth – Servify.
Driving product, growth, investments and many other things. Another story where I try to build this from scratch, full stack approach to device management (mobiles, electronics and home appliances, anything that can be ‘powered on’). Large OEMs like Apple, Mi, Samsung, Nokia, OnePlus and many more manage after sales service via Servify platform.
Head of Growth – Freecharge (acquired by Snapdeal for $400 Mn).
Driving all core business & growth metrics like MAUs, Transactions, User Acquisition, Growth, Retention and GMV; led the Product, Growth, Analytics & Customer Success teams. Scaled from 30K to 1 Million transactions / day. 10X growth in 12 months; 25X Growth in 24 Months. Scaled up Freecharge wallet to 40 Mn within a year. Scaled to GMV run rate of $1 Bn+ per year and managed marketing spends of $25+ Mn per year for acquisition, retention and growth.
Founder & CEO – Wishberg (acquired by Freecharge)
Wishberg lets users build, manage and track their one wish list for life. Users can put everything that they want to buy or own in one beautiful wishlist, its their shopping cart for life! Wishberg was voted among the top 10 early stage startups in India, ranked at #3.
Some stuff I used to do many years back (shamless plug)…
- Built the mobile version of rediffmail in 2006/7. this was the first email service in India available on all versions of mobile – wap, sms, stk and mobile client including text notifications for important emails.
- Built (i assume first in india) vertical search engines on mobile 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 all web services for BSNL – one of the largest telco operators in India, btw also integrated IRCTC apis back in 2006.
- Led Product Management for Rediff Ecommerce (yes did ecommerce back in 2008), built and revamped the commerce platform for both – consumer facing (product, design, experience, search, conversions) and back-end operations (integration on logistics, customer support, payment gateways and more).
- Joined friends at Ohana to lead product, we did much cool stuff there – integrated marketing platform that learned everything about consumers and allow cross channel marketing (email, sms), paid search optimization tools, display marketing across multiple advt networks, behavioral re-targeting. This is in 2010.
- Among the earliest players 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).
my biggest experience is about 20 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!).
i love interactions with startups and entrepreneurs. i don’t advice, just happy to share thoughts with startups on product & growth or talk on domains i have worked – over a tea typically on weekends. feel free to drop me a line. 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.
being practical is an my attempt to blog about technology, trends and my predictions & analysis of products, platforms, startups in connected world. life is 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: Follow @BeingPractical
note: all views, opinions expressed here are strictly personal. not endorsed or owned by my company (current & ex), associations, groups that I am a part of in any capacity.