The Startup Operator

Meesho is India's largest social commerce platform, on a mission to enable anyone to start their businesses with zero investment. Our entrepreneurs largely comprise housewives (between 25-45) from middle-income households and/or tier 2+ India.

Chetan leads Meesho’s engineering vertical as the Vice President. A Stanford graduate, Chetan has held multiple engineering roles at the likes of Qualcomm Flipkart, and Circle.ai.

In the first episode of The Startup Operator Manager Series, Roshan is joined by Augustus D’Souza, Founder & CEO of Clergo, to have a chat with Chetan on -

02:20 - His journey so far 

04:09 - Engineering at Meesho 

10:54 - Product & Engineering overlaps 

15:45 - Balancing product roadmap in e-commerce  

18:27 - Hiring & onboarding engineers with domain expertise 

23:43 - What makes a good engineer? 

26:24 -  Focusing on quality 

31:06 - Evaluating the right-fit engineer  

35:19 - Transitioning from an engineer to an engineering leader 

40:22 - Biggest challenges 

42:57 - Remote operations

Connect with Chetan -

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetan-kalyan

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LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator

Twitter - https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup

Indus Khaitan is a serial entreprenuer, he founded one of the earliest startup accelerators in India "The Morpheus Gang", he was the head of growth at ChargeBee and is now the Founder-CEO of Quolum, a company that helps optimize software spend. In this episode Roshan and Indus talk about the founding stories, how businesses and startups in the SaaS space have evolved and more!  

Welcome to another episode of The Startup Operator Roundup, where Roshan Cariappa and Gunjan Saha discuss -

Started in 2014, PickYourTrail is India’s biggest online D-I-Y holiday booking platform that empowers users to curate customized holidays. PickYourTrail is also that rare startup whose founders dived into a tech-led venture without any tech background. They even went without a head of engineering for half that time. And yet, the startup has built an enviable technology stack that has helped it scale while remaining profitable.

In this episode of The Startup Operator, Roshan talks to Hari Ganapathy, Co-Founder of PickYourTrail, about thriving in the tourism industry during the pandemic. Prior to starting PickYourTrail, Hari was responsible for building and scaling the EMEA Inside and Online sales Team at InMobi - one of the world's leading Marketing Clouds. He also managed high-volume / low-margin and low-volume / high-margin sales at Britannia and Reckitt Benckiser respectively. 

Tune in for a deep-dive on - 

- Translating passion to a business (04:02)

- The founding story (06:12)

- Building the supply & demand (11:17)

- Building a brand in a fragmented space (14:48)

- Managing the ecosystem (17:30)

- Building consistent & predictable customer experiences (19:41)

- Customer acquisition strategies (23:53)

- Key trends among Indian travelers (27:09)

- The covid impact (31:23)

- Permanent changes in the space going forward (39:29)

Connect with Hari -

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hariganapathy/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/haripyt

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Found this episode informative? Let us know by hitting the like button & subscribing to our channel. You can also Tweet or DM us on -

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator

Twitter - https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup

#startupoperator #Startups #Podcast #Pickyourtrail #travel #travelpodcast #covid #covidtravel #travelstartup #tourism #experiences #brandbuilding #roshancariappa #hariganapathy

Welcome to another episode of The Startup Operator Roundup, where Roshan Cariappa and Gunjan Saha discuss - 

ekincare is a healthcare startup that creates measured and personalized healthcare plans that reduce healthcare costs for employers. The startup also launched a "healthcare marketplace" in 2016, it was also one among 6 startups to be selected by Swiss Re's first Global Accelerator program.   

In this episode, we find out how ekincare is making employees healthier.  

(00:00) Introduction 

(02:23) The founding story 

(10:01) Growing importance of employee wellness programs 

(14:26) Solving for healthcare  

(23:30) Product-Market fit in healthcare 

(28:04) Nudging pre-emptive healthcare 

(31:05) Customer segmentation in the space 

(33:26) Implications of covid  

Connect with Kiran -  

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirankalakuntla

Twitter - https://twitter.com/Kpowerthree 

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Found this episode informative? Let us know by hitting the like button & subscribing to our channel. You can also Tweet or DM us on -  

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup   

Khatabook is a mobile app that facilitates bookkeeping for small businesses or "Kirana" shops. The app was launched in 2018 and has quickly gained more than 10 million businesses and 20 million registered users.  

Ved is a stellar operator having worked in multiple hypergrowth startups. Prior to joining Khatabook as its VP - Growth & Marketing, he was spearheading growth initiatives at Rentomojo, and also led the marketing team at ZO Rooms.  

In this episode, we try to understand how Khatabook achieved this milestone in such a short period. Here's what we spoke about -   

- Getting to 1 crore customers (00:10) 

- Use-cases Khatabook is solving for(02:04) 

- Customer acquisition & onboarding (04:18) 

- Marketing vs. Product-led Growth (06:43) 

- Knowing the customer (09:46) 

- Acquiring the next billion customers via mass media channels 

- (15:56) Measuring effectiveness for TVC campaigns (17:50) 

- Building for the Bharat User (20:40) 

- Business during covid-19 (23:38) 

- Growth plans for 2021 (28:27) 

- Propensity to pay for a service (31:05) 

- Working in hypergrowth startups (39:42)  

Connect with Ved -  

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vedpy/ 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/vedpy9   

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Found this episode informative? Let us know by following the podcast. You can also Tweet or DM us on -  

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup   

Staring as an assistant producer with CNBC TV18, India’s largest business television network, Mihir has over a decade in business journalism focusing on startups. He joined Mint as a Staff Writer in 2012. Currently, he is the Chief of Bureau at Mint's Bangalore Office.  

In 2019, he published the book 'The Untold Flipkart Story'.  

Listen in as Roshan and Mihir engage in a free-flowing conversation around Flipkart's success and how startups & founders have evolved over time.

01:39 - Lesser-known stories of Flipkart's Journey

05:38 - What Flipkart did differently

12:57 - People of Flipkart

14:46 - Three things we can learn from Sachin and Binny

18:38 - Walmart's Acquisition

21:49 - How the nature of startups has changed

34:49 - ESOP buybacks

38:26 - New-age startups & founders

41:46 - Media Coverage for startups

01:02:19 - Things to look forward to in 2021

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Connect with Mihir - 

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihir-dalal-3b602014/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/MihirDTweets

Farmers rely heavily on traditional cropping calendars and their experiences to maximize their yields. But even experienced farmers have not always been able to escape the perils of climate change, losing their crops to unpredictable weather conditions, soil degradation, and unmitigated pest attacks.  

Fasal is an agri-tech platform powered by IoT and A, on the mission to keep the farmers aware of the farm and crop conditions anytime, anywhere on any device.  

Founded by Ananda Verma, its goal is to enable farmers to be proactive instead of reacting to crop diseases, weather conditions, and various other critical situations.  Fasal empowers farmers and Agri institutions by decreasing the input cost, increasing the quality and quantity of the yield, and optimizing resources like fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides, irrigation management, etc.  

In this episode of The Startup Operator Podcast, join Roshan Cariappa in conversation with Ananda, as we understand more about how the agriculture sector in India has evolved, along with -  

- Fasal’s founding story (01:41) 

- Making agriculture viable in India(07:32) 

- Proving ROI case to farmers (18:42) 

- Understanding the business economics (26:07) 

- Making contextual insights available to farmers (30:49) 

- Building farmer-centric solutions (35:32) 

- Making technology economically viable (40:29) 

- Recent agricultural reforms (45:15) 

- Indian agricultural outlook in 2021 (49:22)

Found this episode informative? Let us know by via a  Tweet or DM us on -  

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/startup-operator 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/OperatorStartup