soorajchandran

11 ms·

31.
Show HN: HerJobs-Diversify remote teams with female talent from emerging country(herjobs.co)
56 points by soorajchandran 6y ago|28 comments
32.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
A few months ago, the company I co-founded Carrom, was acquired by Oyster. I joined Oyster to build the employment platform. It was officially my first time in a product role. Although I have been creating products for a good part of my lif
33.
I compiled all blog posts I read in past six months to learn product management(sooraj.io)
21 points by soorajchandran 6y ago|1 comments
34.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Oyster makes it easy to hire, pay, and give great benefits to your globally-distributed team.
35.
Show HN: Hire, pay, and give great benefits to your remote team(oysterhr.com)
6 points by soorajchandran 6y ago|2 comments
36.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Glad it helped. If you have a co-founder whom you trust can do sales for the company you need not worry about it. Nevertheless, a bit of soft skill can go a long way.
37.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
At least before covid, companies had to move to Bay Area. But I don't think everyone sleeps on the floor. YC funds you enough (120k then, 150k now) to afford decent housing. We were just a bit too concerned about the runway since we d
38.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Correct. There are a lot of people who considers 24x7 hustling as the only way to build a startup. Worse, many founders and VCs expect that from you. This is mostly the case in US centric startups. The work culture in Europe is much differe
39.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Totally agree. That's why I mentioned we should have spend more on improving quality of life. Having moved from India, our brains also did this Dollar to INR conversion, that made it hard for us to spend money.
40.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Bad examples set by people who have been there previously? We have always romaniticised hard work - especially in the "American Dream" culture. It has changed a lot these days. We can see a lot of sane startups vouching for work
41.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
YC doesn't intervene in your day to day operations. They are there to give any guidance if necessary - But they have no role in running your startup. That would be impossible and unnecessary. YC is as good as what you can make out of i
42.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Company got funded by YC - we moved temporarily with Business visas. Company was setup via Stripe Atlas.
43.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Agreed that selling is the hardest part. But it is hard to do 1 without the others.
44.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
I kind of disagree with this. I started building my previous startup while working full time in another job. It is easier than one might think
45.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
What you intent to do can also change over time. We got started as a Shopify plugin - but wanted to go big later and this is when things went south.
46.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
My other two cofounders are building an open source tool - https://www.chatwoot.com/ . I'm sure they have used a lot of wisdom from this experience too.
47.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Selling is much easier if the product solves a painful problem for the user. Much harder to sell if you are just trying to sell cool features.
48.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Correct - marketing space is one of the most saturated. But it is amazing to see new niche spinning out of it.
49.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Most companies were very early stage - Not investing too much into marketing.
50.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
I remember BicycleAI too! :) Thanks - Hope all is good.
51.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Agree. One can have very unhealthy lifestyle and still make shit loads of revenue. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
52.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Wow! Thanks for sharing this. We all have had our lows. I think anything that is not sustainable over a period of time is not a good idea. It is ok to try and do things that don't scale in the beginning. But it shouldn't come at t
53.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Correct! We always try a bit too hard to do great things - in fact avoiding mistakes itself will give you a significant advantage.
54.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
It was called Carrom ( https://money.yahoo.com/oyster-acquires-carrom-accelerate-gl... ) I have not repeated any of those mistakes I mentioned in the post. I think that itself was enough to take us to a good place. Apart fro
55.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Happy that it helped. Hopefully it helps someone to not make those mistakes.
56.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Re: Freshworks - Yes we had a ton of learning from there and the plan was to execute something similar. Had lot of advantages in terms of cost. This was also a serious part of the business plan. Re: Selling to customers: This was not easy a
57.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
We started out as a Shopify plugin for marketing and had some users. But before expanding the product we didn't really talk to any potential users. Again, another stupid mistake. Once we started building we got the opportunity to talk
58.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Totally agree. I think over time, we will learn to let it go and think sensibly.
59.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
Meeting smart people was always great. We learned a lot of things. It was life changing - Still I feel like we didn't make the best out of it due to several reason. One of them was our self doubt when it came to communication - This wa
60.
by soorajchandran 6y ago
1: Correct, we had "assumed" who the ideal users would be. Because the market was already huge, and we "assumed" people who used our competitors would use our product too. And when we were not able to sell, we thought I

More ›