Testing hypotheses and understanding customer behavior using cohort analysis

by Naman Lahoty | Aug 7, 2020 | Functional Notes

In 2015, I was running my first startup. It was a laundry services business. We were the new age Dhobis – as my parents would call it – where customers could book the service on an app, choose their preferred pickup & delivery time-slots, and pay...

Scaling Mount Organization

by Alok Goyal | Jul 31, 2020 | Functional Notes

Building a large, sustainable company is hard, and the odds are always against the entrepreneur. Often we believe that if we find a meaningful problem to be solved within a large market (hopefully with some tailwinds), achieve product market fit (PMF) and go-to-market...

Navigating your start-up in uncertain times

by Alok Goyal | Mar 20, 2020 | Functional Notes

I lived through two major downturns. The first one led to personal bankruptcy, and I narrowly survived the second one. In 2001, I worked for a boutique strategy firm in the Bay Area focused on growth strategies for hi-tech companies. Despite being one of the best...

So, how do you move upmarket?

by Alok Goyal | Jan 21, 2020 | Functional Notes

You did all the hard work in building your founding team, ideating to a problem to be solved, creating the minimum viable product (MVP), finding product market fit, and creating some version of a go-to-market recipe that can be scaled. All you now need is fuel to be...

Creating Design Centred Product Organizations

by Arpit Maheshwari, Rahul Chowdhri | Jan 13, 2020 | Functional Notes

As a co-founder of VC-backed travel start-up Mygola (acquired by MakeMyTrip), and then Chief Product Officer for MakeMyTrip and GoIbibo (MMT / GI) – India’s largest OTA, Anshuman Bapna knows a thing or two about building digital products for a...

Why moving upmarket is (mostly) important for creating large SaaS companies

by Alok Goyal | Dec 20, 2019 | Functional Notes

Six years back, almost to the date, I drew a graph between CAC (Cost of Acquiring a Customer) and ACV (average Annual Contract Value) for SaaS companies. This was part of a presentation I made to the partnership at Helion to emphasize the point that ACV by itself is...