Beginnings are hard

The -1 to 0 journey of NextLeap

Hello! 👋 I’m Arindam, co-founder of NextLeap and welcome to this edition of the NextLeap Newsletter! Each week I aim to share learnings around building products, driving product growth and accelerating your career.

---

After almost 7 years on the rocket ship called Flipkart, building products and teams, I had decided to move on. This was September, 2020 when we were all spending our days locked up in our apartments.

But the question on my mind was: What Next?

Fast forward to April, 2021 and we had incorporated Elemento Learning Technologies Private Limited and had a team of 5 in place. I say “we” because Yasir and I had teamed up once again as co-founders of this newly incorporated entity.

Fast forward to one month later and we had launched NextLeap.

What happened in these 7 months is best tagged as the -1 to 0 journey of building a startup. Less talked about but perhaps the most important.

Here’s how it unfolded.

Yasir and I have been partners in crime for quite a few years now. We met at Flipkart and worked together for almost 5 years with him leading the engineering efforts and me the product (and design/user research) side of things for anything that was consumer facing. We have always enjoyed each other’s company and during one of our conversations, we had decided that if the other one were to think about starting up, he would reach out to the other to partner up. Kind of a pinky promise, you see!

So, the co-founder equation was easily put in place. We have been fortunate in this regard that this did not take up much of our bandwidth.

But the next part was quite time consuming. From all the things we COULD do, what WILL we do?

We had late night conversations. We read and shared research reports. We analysed the market landscape for different sectors. And we would at times be distracted by news of companies drawing in millions of dollars of funding. Remember 2021?

The truth is that Beginnings are Hard.

Both of us had more than a decade of work experience. So, I wouldn’t be lying if I say that the opportunity cost was also weighing on our minds. The opportunity cost of taking up a leadership role in another company.

I wish there was some method to navigate through this chaotic phase. But the best way, as we would learn over time, is to ask the question

Are you willing to devote atleast the next 5 years of your life to solving this problem?

This was the question which helped us narrow down from what we COULD DO to what we WOULD DO.

We both could relate to the following as we had faced similar problems:

1. Hiring is difficult and the signal to noise ratio is not desirable. For a growing economy of India’s size and potential, the impact of solving for skilling in the technology sector is quite significant.

2. As we grew in our careers, our own learning was very unstructured. Unlike school/college, there is no “syllabus” equivalent.

But, why did we care about this problem?

Both Yasir and I had noticed first hand, the growth challenges in a company like Flipkart. As a company grows, the business complexity increases and unless the talent density increases at the same or higher rate, you enter into a phase of chaos which in turn impacts the growth potential. Now, think about this phenomenon at the scale of a country like India.

The skills of a country’s workforce determine it’s potential. As India adopts technology across all industries, levels and ages, up-skilling and re-skilling in different areas of technology are core pillars to drive growth of the economy. A similar thing happened with e-commerce almost a decade ago. Infact, both of us had joined Flipkart back in the day because we didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity to be a part of the growth story. And we could see a similar narrative shaping up in higher education.

And as we dug deep, what fascinated us was that there are so many “edtech” companies but most of them are known for everything except education and technology. You would rarely find people raving about their online learning experience.

This got us intrigued and we started analysing the market more deeply. We started speaking to others in the industry to understand the nuances. We read books (Grasp by Sanjay Sarma is a great read) and articles to understand the different points of view. I joined the Transcend Network as a fellow (they have an amazing Fellowship and community for early stage edtech founders). And we started surveying users to collect responses that would point to specific directions.

A basic thesis started to form. The problem was gradually getting validated and we knew we cared about this problem.

But, I would still say that both of us felt (..and we still feel it at times today) that we didn’t understand the problem well. One of our shared beliefs is that “you can’t fix a problem if you don’t understand it well”.

What followed was almost 50-60 hours of 1:1 conversations with potential users. I used a simple hack for this. I opened up 120 slots of 45 mins each (spread across a month) on my calendar and put up a post on LinkedIn : happy to help anyone looking to break into or grow in their product management careers. To my surprise, all the slots got booked in less than 1 hour! The expectation I set with the respondents was “30 mins belong to you, the last 15 minutes belong to me for asking questions”.

We chose to focus on product management as the vertical for a few reasons:

1. Starting small allows us to go deep

2. We had built our own careers building software products for a decade and the familiarity helped

3. Product Management is a growing function

4. We knew if we could “crack” this vertical, we can translate our learnings to other verticals too.

I spoke to college students, working professionals looking to transition to product management and existing product managers struggling to grow in their careers. A few clear patterns emerged:

1. They wanted faster outcomes (similar to us wanting faster deliveries)

2. Their mental model was evaluating the RoI not just in terms of outcomes but also the time required

3. They were confused with so much content out there and were seeking a structure to their learning

4. They wanted to learn from those who they looked up to

5. They were looking to learn on a continuous basis and hence affordability was a big pain point in the available solutions

These interviews helped us build conviction around the problem space.

And that’s what the -1 to 0 journey is all about. Building Conviction.

We took the insights gathered from our research to build NextLeap. We started with a 2 week course on Product Decision Making where I was the instructor. Ran it for 5 months straight, iterating with each cohort based on feedback. We were iterating on the curriculum, the learning experience design, the cohort size, the price and more. Infact here’s a secret: when we first launched this course, we just had the course outline. We built the course only when we got sold out in a week! More on this and how to think about MVPs in another edition of the newsletter.

As I started setting up this Newsletter, Substack’s first post prompt started off with “Beginnings are hard…” and I think that’s aptly put. Not just for building companies or products but also building new habits. The NextLeap Fellows community (which is now almost 15000+ across our Fellowships in product, design and software engineering) has always asked us why we don’t have a newsletter and we have never had an answer to that question. Now we do. We took some time to build the conviction but as they say, better late than never.

In this newsletter, I will aim to share learnings from our NextLeap journey, from my experience of building software products for more than a decade and from my interactions with other like minded folks in the ecosystem. You will occasionally get a curation of top reads, too.

So, here’s to new beginnings!

---

What to expect next week

One of the most common questions in interviews is “Tell Me about Yourself” and having conducted thousands of interviews, I can safely say that most of the candidates provide an answer that is at best “meh”. We will decode this question and try to come up with a framework that is guided by storytelling — a skill that most of us want to have but very few do.

Arindam is the co-founder of NextLeap. Previously led consumer experience & growth at Flipkart for ~7 years and prior to that worked with Tripadvisor. He is an alum of Harvard Business School and IIT, Kharagpur.