Stuff that didn’t work
About a year ago, I quit my job at a kickass computer vision startup in Palo Alto to build my own venture. I have, since, worked on 6 projects that I believed should exist and then decided not to pursue, and I continue to get pinged by folks who are exploring or working on those same ideas to understand what I saw and why I didn’t continue. Here’s a summary of two of the concepts I worked on and what I learned:
- Chowk — Started with a subject close to my heart, a platform to let home-makers in India find an audience for their skills that largely go unappreciated outside their family. Broadly a combination of Etsy and Reddit for home-makers aged 25–45, non-English natives, <Rs. 15L Household Income.
>> Hypothesis going in: (i) you can open up the ‘creator’ base if you create a safe space for women to connect with and learn from each other. Think women who bake well can sell their goods or learning guides online, women who write poetry can build a following, women who can educate other women about managing their finances themselves, etc. (ii) women are under-served when it comes to finding content and community online
>> Market potential: Women drive 70–80% of consumer purchasing by various estimates, and so eventual monetization here was less of a concern if we could crack the community piece.
>> Validation approach: My MVP was a Whatsapp broadcast list where we shared 5 content pieces every day on subjects our ~500-odd audience most wanted to hear about.
As I spoke to ~200 women in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, 2 things became clear:
- Working from home and earning a few hundred/thousand bucks as pocket money for discretionary expenses is fun but being financially independent isn’t a priority. Their lives revolve around their children, and most of the free time they have (very little if you don’t have household help) is invested in activities around raising their kids better — towing them to and from coaching, helping them with homework.
Anecdotes that stuck: A Bangalore woman who’d only browsed YouTube 2–3 times in her life, to look up how to “improve” her kid’s complexion. A woman in Ahmedabad who has given away her mobile phone for the years her son is in class 9–12 so that she sets a good example and “saves him from distractions”.
- Women are less entertained by short-form content online, most time on the internet is spent on more utilitarian needs — “How do I make X?” “Stories/homework help for kids” “Home remedies for Y”. YouTube and Google are the primary sources of information. Mom-only WhatsApp and Facebook groups also solve for crowdsourcing answers to these queries as well as a need to be heard and empathized with (“kids with injuries/skin issues”, “unsympathetic mothers-in-law”, “dealing with teenage angst”).
By the end of 2 months, it seemed apparent that their current needs are being met by existing platforms, and I didn’t have a particularly differentiated creator or consumer proposition. What stays of this is a few city-specific Whatsapp groups that continue to see debates and discourse on everything from parenting to politics to environmental sustainability. A personal lesson was, it’s always easier to get/prove supply than demand for aggregation plays — doesn’t do much to validate your business.
2. HQ2 — “Remote office in a box” for Valley startups looking to hire engineers in developing countries. As an Indian kid who grew up on the internet and was always starry-eyed about The Valley, the labour pool mismatch between the “3 million Indian developers” and the engineer-starved American startup ecosystem (80K new tech jobs in the Bay Area in the last 5 years, only 6000 new tech graduates) seemed like an opportunity that was both commercially large and appealed to my sense of fairness and symmetry.
>> Hypothesis going in: (i) Cross-border recruitment can be solved in a productized manner (ii) HR-IT-Payroll is a pain point for remote offices/employees in emerging markets
>> Market potential: The success of TopTal, Gigster (both ~$100M in revenue) implied that a good strong business can be built here. The question was whether it is possible to scale what is a fairly services-oriented business.
>> Validation approach: My MVP was to work with a couple of startups in the US as a recruiter+ops consultant / “India head” and look for “productizable” gaps.
What I learned:
- Series A-C stage enterprise startups are the early adopter clients here. Unlike B2C startups, their tech-product iteration cycle is typically slower and hence they are more okay having their engineering team remote. Also more common for them to have at least 1 Indian engineer in the founding team and hence they are already sold on the quality proposition. “Faster hiring” and “deeper talent pool” is a better sell versus “cheap engineers” since the cost is really not what most high-quality startups are optimizing for, and compared to $150k+ salaries in the Bay Area, even an $80k cheque for a similarly experienced engineer in India is a sweet deal. The 12-hour time difference is definitely a deterrent and I met some founders who preferred to work with folks in LatAm and Eastern Europe over India for this reason.
- The demand risk — common among most companies whose target group is startups — is your customers either die or become so big they churn out. Once a company is Series D+ and has a >50 member India office, it’s always in their best interests to manage everything in-house. You can continue being a recruiter long term, but that’s a smaller, less-scaleable market (look at the number of startups that have tried to solve this and stagnated/died) and you’re mostly reduced to one of many recruiting channels.
- The rate-limiting factor here, unlike most startup ideas, is the supply. If you add up the number of engineers in (loosely defined) high-quality startups and big tech companies in India, the number across experience levels is under 30,000 — all of whom are much harder to poach given the triple whammy of (i) fat paychecks, (ii) satisfying work and work-life balance, (iii) prestigious employers. Good technology companies hiring remote engineers in India need this experience of having meaningfully worked on high-quality, scaled products. Not to imply that good engineers don’t exist outside these companies — but the interview-to-offer conversion rate drops materially for the “non-elite” segment.
- Our biggest gap as a country remains skill development, and that is the more critical problem to solve here. Which is why my answer here is that an InterviewBit or Pesto like company is best poised to win this market, irrespective of income sharing agreements. Just as IIT has built a brand around great placements (in spite of a primitive and largely isolated education system), as these learning companies crack skilling and by extension, placement, their revenue is not limited by the volume of remote jobs but by the number of students they can sustain in a batch.
- An angle I considered was HR-IT-Payroll as a service (Gusto, Rippling) for the top 20 remote destinations. This thesis breaks for the same reason SaaS has historically been a capped play in emerging markets: companies won’t pay a dollar above what it’d cost them to hire a guy to do it (also, this guy is more customizable than your software and that’s why he wins even at price parity). Sidenote: a Chinese investor pointed out this very interesting fact last year — the Chinese consumer internet market is in the trillions whereas their cumulative Saas revenue is < $5B.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that these ideas won’t work. Getting feedback on a product concept from folks who don’t belong to the target segment is basically inviting reasons as to why it won’t work UNTIL the point you show them that you’ve somehow made it work. In one word: useless. The objective here is to help folks looking at similar markets quickly access the information I spent months collecting.
Complete list of projects here:
a. Chowk — women-only community for Indian home-makers to enable Etsy+Reddit
b. HQ2 — ‘remote office in a box’ for Valley startups looking to hire engineers/sales folks in developing countries.
c. WithPockets — fashion brand for women looking for functional + comfortable clothing
d. Uno Coaching — leadership and communication coaching for young millennials in the US
e. [redacted] — social recommendation-based e-commerce
f. Honest Education — education loans/credit cards for immigrant students in the US
