The Orbit Shift Podcast

In this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we look at how to position a product or brand in a market. We’re joined by April Dunford, a leader in the field of positioning. April has positioned and launched 16 products across her 25 years in marketing.   

April talks to us about how what we think as positioning is actually what we do after we have identified positioning, how to identify bad positioning, the power of setting context, and how to layer trends on your positioning to supercharge your marketing RoI. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

April Dunford is a consultant and author who helps companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love. She is a globally recognized expert in Positioning, having launched 16 products across her 25-year career running marketing, product, and sales teams at a series of successful startups. She is the author of the best-selling book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning, so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it. 

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

With 25 years of Human Resources and Talent Management experience, Andrew Bartlow is a veteran people officer. In his latest avatar as an author, he attempts to distill his 25 years of experience into his latest book ‘Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High-Growth Organizations’. 

We caught up with the founder to talk about 

🚀Blitz-scaling and its drawbacks

🚀The two types of founders; the mule-drivers and the prophets

🚀Hiring new leaders and how to attract talent to an organization

🚀How to structure an employee equity ownership plan

🚀The need to re-think OKR’s

🚀Building the people function and hitting the ‘Dunbar Number’

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Andrew Bartlow has 25 years of Human Resources and Talent Management experience at organizations across a wide spectrum of sizes, maturity stages, and industries. He is the co-author of “Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High Growth Organizations”. Andrew leads Series B Consulting, which helps businesses articulate their people strategy and accelerate their growth while navigating rapid change. He also founded the People Leader Accelerator, which is the preeminent development program for startup HR leaders. He’s worked with clients like Masterclass and many others to help them overcome obstacles in a hyper-growth phase.

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

More than half a dozen Indian tech companies, including Zomato, Paytm, Flipkart, InMobi, Nykaa, and PolicyBazaar, have said they are likely to go public this year. This is obviously a big milestone for India's tech ecosystem, which has seen very few public offerings in the past. What has changed, and why are Indian companies talking about going for an IPO now? 
In this special, we pick up a hot topic from the world of startups and help you parse it with the help of top experts. In today's episode, we take a look at India's IPO boom with Gopal Jain, the co-founder of private equity firm Gaja Capital; Karthik Reddy, the co-founder of Blume Ventures and Madhav Chanchani, the Editor-in-Chief of TheCaptable. We'll try to answer questions such as why now and how will this play out? 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Several top companies today are product-led companies. This includes the likes of Atlassian, Slack, Zoom, and Freshworks. What does it really mean to be a product-led company? Does product-led growth work for all startups? How do you design your outbound sales motion if you started with a product-led, inbound growth strategy? In today's episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, Stacey Epstein, the Chief Marketing Officer of Freshworks Inc. answers all these questions and more. Stacey joined Freshworks in March to lead the company's marketing organization. She oversees growth marketing, product marketing, branding, corporate marketing, communications, and analyst/ public relations at Freshworks. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Stacey Epstein is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Freshworks Inc. She leads our global marketing organization including Growth Marketing, Product Marketing, Branding, Corporate Marketing,  Communications, and Analyst/Public Relations. Stacey brings more than 25 years of industry experience in growing iconic SaaS brands like SuccessFactors and ServiceMax through hyper-growth, acquisitions, and IPOs. Most recently, she was CMO and Chief Customer Experience Officer at ServiceMax - a position she returned to when Zinc, where she was CEO, was acquired by ServiceMax in 2019.

Before Zinc, Stacey was CMO at ServiceMax, where she joined the founding team and led the marketing function through six years of triple-digit growth. She also was head of marketing at SuccessFactors for six years and was instrumental in the company's IPO in 2007, as well as its acquisition by SAP later. She currently serves on the board for Litmus and CircleCi. She’s also a prolific author and is a fierce advocate for women in the workplace. 

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

On this episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we zoom in on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region with Hasan Haider, Founder and Managing Partner of (Plus)+VC. MENA is a region with one of the fastest-growing startup ecosystems in the world today, and with blockbuster deals like Careem’s exit to Uber, the region is poised for a take-off. We speak to Hasan on the evolution of the startup ecosystem in the region, the sectors lacking in the region today, what he looks for in founders as a VC, and what his funding process looks like.   

Listen In.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Hasan Haider is the Founder and Managing Partner of +VC. An early-stage venture capital firm focused on the MENA region. Hasan was previously Managing Partner, MENA at 500 Startups and led the firms’ growth in the MENA region over the last five years, turning 500 Startups into the most active VC fund in the MENA region, raising and deploying the 500 Falcons fund, building partnerships and running programs in the region to help build the regional ecosystem. Hasan has invested in more than 180 startups in the region over the last ten years.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

With over 500 million registered learners, 40 million active users, and $190 million in revenues (2020), Duolingo is one of the most successful consumer apps out there. 

The app, which helps millions of users learn new languages, did all this in just under 10 years. From being one of the first apps to use gamification, and entering popular culture through its quirky notification copy, Duolingo is an app that has carved a unique voice for itself. 

Gina Gotthilf, who led international growth as well as marketing at the startup has an insider's view on how they pulled it off. In the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we unpack Duolingo’s marketing strategy with Gina. 

The former VP of Marketing at the language learning app talks to us about her journey, the experiments that she’s run as part of Duolingo. Gina also talks to us about how she’s looking to build her latest venture Latitud, which helps founders from Latin America build world-class products. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Gina is the Co-founder and COO of Latitud, a platform created to help 10X the number of successful startups in Latin America over the next decade. Previously, she led growth and marketing at Duolingo, from 3 to 200 million users,  worked on a US presidential campaign, and led Latin America growth at Tumblr. Gina was born in Brazil, studied philosophy and neuroscience at Brandeis University, and had the honor of presenting to former President Obama, at the White House. 

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

In November 2020, PhonePe had about 250 million registered users. In the next six months, the company added 50 million more, taking the total count to 300 million users. With over 125 million monthly active users and transactions worth over $390 billion (May 2021) happening over its platforms, PhonePe is the largest payments company in India. The company has set an ambitious target of getting to 500 million Indians by 2023, which is nearly half the country’s population. 

With such a large user base, every new product and feature needs to be well thought through. How does PhonePe approach product management and prioritize building the right features? How does it balance agility and still get scale right? In this episode, Vishal Gupta, the head of products at PhonePe, dives deep into these questions. 

Tune in.

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Vishal Gupta heads Product at PhonePe. Before PhonePe, Vishal was Director - Product Management at Flipkart, where he led Flipkart money and payments. Before that, he was GM for returns at Flipkart and was also instrumental in delivering the supply chain product. Vishal has built and scaled products at leading organizations such as Pine Labs, AOL & Schlumberger. He has 21 years of industry exposure in telecom, retail, e-commerce, social & payments. Vishal holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pune and is also an alumnus of IIM Bangalore’s Executive General Management Programme.

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The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc, a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Matt Blumberg is the author of Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. Matt led his first startup, Return Path, an email marketing company, to $100 mn in revenue and a successful exit in 2019. He is now building Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace for startups. On the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we caught up with the New York Based entrepreneur to discuss his latest book, Startup CXO. 

We talked about:

🚀Matt’s journey and what he’s looking to solve with Bolster

🚀Considerations when exiting a startup 

🚀The first CXO a founder should hire

🚀When to hire a CFO and what are their functions

🚀Aligning the CMO and CRO teams

🚀Aligning the CPO/CTO and CRO teams

🚀The role of a CHRO in building and scaling culture

🚀What an ideal COO looks like 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Matt Blumberg is the author of Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, a highly influential book embraced by entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders, and board of directors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that was an outgrowth of his blog, StartupCEO.com. In 1999 he founded Return Path, an innovative email marketing company, and helped grow it to $100mm in revenues and a successful exit in a strategic sale to Validity in 2019. Along with a number of his colleagues from Return Path, Matt started Bolster in 2020, a company focused on helping startups and scaleups grow, develop, and scale their leadership teams and boards.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

As the Founder & CEO of Kovai.co Saravana Kumar has bucked every trend that a start-up playbook advises you to do. He is a solo entrepreneur, his company is based out of Coimbatore, a town in Southern India, and his product is sold exclusively to enterprise customers. 

Yet, he has scaled his organization to $10 million in revenue with a total of 0 dollars in funding. In the latest episode of The Orbit Shift Podcast, we caught up with the entrepreneur to learn more about his journey and about how he sells to enterprise customers, builds trust among prospects, moved from a single product to a multi-product company, and how he learns on the job and fixes skill gaps within himself and with the larger team. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

Saravana Kumar, a renowned software entrepreneur and Chief Executive Officer of Kovai.co, founded Kovai.co in 2010 to help enterprises address the challenges in their BizTalk environments. His decade of experience as a BizTalk consultant motivated him to create Kovai. co’s flagship product - BizTalk36o-to, to reach 1000+ enterprise customers worldwide. Before launching Kovai.co, Saravana worked in the U.K. as a Microsoft BizTalk Consultant. In 2007, for his immense contribution, Microsoft awarded him the Most Valuable Professional (MVP), which he continues to hold to date.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian  

Every once in a while, it’s important for us to zoom out a little to see the big picture. So we took a little break from the practical aspects of company building on this episode to talk about the future. 

How is the future changing with AI and the internet? What does this mean for entrepreneurs looking to create lasting companies? 

These are the questions that we look to answer on the latest episode of the podcast with David Weinberger, renowned Harvard Business School researcher, technologist, philosopher, and the author of Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility.

David talks to us about how the way founders build products has fundamentally changed with the Minimum Viable Product. Butterfly effects on the internet, the hidden biases in artificial intelligence, and why we should be concerned about it. 

Get $10,000 free credits to use Freshworks products (including the brand new Freshworks CRM packed with AI-based lead scoring, phone, email, activity capture, and more) by joining the Freshworks for Startups program. Click here to check eligibility.

About the Guest

In books, talks, articles, David Weinberger, Ph.D., explores the effect of technology  — especially the Internet and AI  —  on our lives, businesses, and ideas. He was recently a writer-in-residence for two years at Google AI and has been a long-time affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has been a  philosophy professor, strategic marketing consultant, co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center and the U.S. State Department.

Sign up for regular updates from The Orbit Shift Podcast.

The Orbit Shift Podcast is powered by Freshworks Inc., a global SaaS company headquartered in San Mateo, California. 

If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. 

Host and Producer - Jayadevan PK

Assistant Producer - Shashwath J

Audio Engineer - Rajesh Subramanian