I’m a startup operator based out of Bangalore, India with 9+ years of experience across varying consumer and B2B startups. I was previously founder at Loco, currently SVP, marketing at MPL and have worked across Unacademy, Freshworks and Crowdfire. I’m originally from Delhi, have lived across all the major cities of India and love Manchester United, Formula 1 and Bollywood in no particular order.

☎️ Contact information

📧 [email protected]

🐦 Twitter

🔗 LinkedIn

👀 Instagram

👩🏻‍💻 Work experience

<aside> ✅ Product Manager, Crowdfire app, Mumbai – (Jan 2015-May 2016)

I started my career at Crowdfire (social media marketing app with over 20 million users globally) when it was a paltry crew of less than 20 folks. I handled a mix of marketing, product, customer support and social media and got my first taste of the crazy energy that is a small startup scaling globally rapidly.

My colleagues from crowdfire still remain some of my closest friends to date and the founders of Crowdfire: Nischal Shetty and Sid Menon would go on to start Wazirx, India’s argest crypto exchange.

</aside>

<aside> ✅ Marketing lead, Freshchat, Freshworks (June 2016-August 2017)

• I joined Freshdesk (Now publicly listed on Nasdaq after rebranding to Freshworks) as the first marketing hire for Freshchat, Freshdesk’s mobile chat product for customer support. Chat on mobile was gaining momentum and users wanted to move to chat even for customer support rather than phone-calls as was the norm back in 2016.
• My learnings from Freshworks were great, and the chance to work directly with Girish was defining. Many of my ex-colleagues from Freshworks have now started their own Saas companies as Chennai has now become the Saas capital of India. </aside>

<aside> ✅ Writer for India, (Wired Magazine) (2016-2018)

I still am the only Indian to ever write for Wired magazine where some of my posts were read and shared by folks from A16Z, Benchmark Capital, Social capital, Sequoia and various operators from the west who were keen to understand what was happening in India.

</aside>

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/how-netflix-lost-big-to-amazon-in-india/

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/why-distribution-still-matters-in-the-internet-age/

<aside> ✅ Lead marketing, Unacademy (Aug 2017-Nov 2017)

• Unfortunately I led marketing at Unacademy for barely 3 months as right after I joined UA, me and a couple of friends/colleagues hit upon the idea for Loco - India’s first live video gameshow app. </aside>

<aside> ✅ Founder, Loco app (Nov 2017)

• Loco was India’s first live quiz gameshow app! We set ourselves a target of getting to 10,000 odd users and as luck would have it, we scaled up to 10 million odd users in under 6 months from launch. At our peak, we had close to half a million users concurrently playing on the app at 8 pm every single night as Loco became a cultural, viral phenomenon across India.

https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/loco-an-hq-trivia-inspired-game-asks-ten-multiple-choice-questions-and-offers-real-money-story-n1FCcStG9oZ1QuYKDOS5EN.html

All the hyper-growth wasn’t without it’s own challenges though - we realised building a product is entirely different from building a business as we struggled with scaling the tech, customer support, hiring, monetisation and various other challenges while similar copycats soon flooded the market. We later took the hard call to sell off Loco to Sequoia backed Pocket Aces.

Loco is still around, albeit in a different avatar - as a live streaming app for streamers.

</aside>