prodgeeksconf18

“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes” – Warren Buffett.

If you are a tech founder or you work for a startup and you are sure of getting your salary for this month – well, congratulations!
More than 90% startups are dying and it is time to learn from their mistakes.

And let me tell you one thing.

While founders / companies blame investors, the reality is that most companies die / are dying due to the fact that they ‘never ever’ had a product.

Let me repeat: They ‘never ever’ had a product.
Globally, 42% startups failed because…there was no market need for their product.
In India, the numbers are very very high. In India, most (and I really mean ‘most’) founders / product teams keep themselves (and investors) busy with new features, new launches.

Without talking to customers.
Without building things which customers actually need.
Building in a silo.

In fact, the assumption is that more features = successful product.
And this is what I call BUILD TRAP.
And not just this mistake, there are many such mistakes founders / product teams often commit – and by the time they realize the mistake, the game is already over.
High time you learn from other’s mistakes and fix the foundation.
Ladies and Gentleman:
Presenting to you, my talk on “The Trap Called Build..Build..Build..and Build…” – these are a collection of learning from various startups / products / my own experience and I will be sharing it all at the upcoming ProductGeeks Conf.
There won’t be any recording / live streaming of this session (expect name calling 🙂 )

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» Attend ProductGeeks Conference: The place to learn growth / scaling from some of the best product minds.

Date: April 14th (Bangalore)
Venue: Hotel Park Plaza, Outer Ring Road, Bangalore.
Contact: team@nextbigwhat.com
(Partial) Speakers/Agenda: http://events.nextbigwhat.com/
Discount Code: Use the discount code “NEXTBIGWHAT”

[rpt name=”202186″] Partial speaker list

How do I understand my customer (MUCH better)?
How do I engineer growth in the product? Prioritize features?

If you aren’t going through these questions, chances are that you are either lying or well..you don’t exist. Most products (including B2B / B2C) fail at identifying the real needs of customers.
Globally, 42% startups failed because they could not figure out customers requirements.
Why is customer development so difficult? How can I get it right? Is there a methodology to it?
Meet Arpit Rai – he is the VP of Product at WebEngage. Prior to WebEngage, Arpit worked in product & growth at BrowserStack and was the first product hire there.

Arpit is speaking at ProductGeeks Conference (April 14th @Bangalore) and his topic is:

Using customer development to build your SAAS business.

In Arpit’s own words:

Using customer development to build your SAAS business (in addition to just building the product, I intend to also talk about how customer development can be used to increase conversion, lower churn, create pricing etc.
These will be all real lessons from BrowserStack and WebEngage. No gyaan.

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ProductGeeks Conf is a 1 day conference that brings India’s product ecosystem together – right from entrepreneurs, to product leaders, product managers, decision makers (CXOs) and investors together.
The conf, scheduled for April 14th (@Hotel Park PLaza, Outer Ring Road, Bangalore) brings in an inspiring lineup of speakers.

ProductGeeks Conf Details

Date: April 14th (Bangalore)
Venue: Hotel Park Plaza, Outer Ring Road, Bangalore.
Contact: team@nextbigwhat.com
Speakers/Agenda: events.nextbigwhat.com
Discount Code: Use the discount code “NEXTBIGWHAT”
[rpt name=”202186″]

42% of startups fail because they were solving a market need that didn’t exist. So, how do you know if the need exists? Do customers really know what they want? Could you not create an amazing solution and then market it so people will use it?

– Our upcoming conference, ProductGeeks Conf totally aims to bring a lot of actionable insights to the ones who aim to who build, launch and scale world-class products.
Today, we are introducing one of the speakers, Deepa Bachu.
Deepa is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pensaar, a Design Strategy and Innovation Consulting firm that uses collaborative and human centered approach of design thinking to create experiences that will be awesome, by design.

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Deepa helped pioneer Design Thinking at Intuit working closely with Intuit Co-Founder, Scott Cook. One of the many projects she led, FASAL, went onto become a HBR Case study & one of their Top 10 Innovation ‘must reads’. Fasal helps farmers gain a competitive edge in the marketplace by providing them with pricing and other agricultural advisory information.

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In her professional career, Deepa has effectively handled a variety of responsibilities and roles across Experience Design, Innovation, Product Management, General Management and Product Development
She is a design and product leader who spent the last 20 years at large multi-nationals and Tech start-ups leading their Design, Innovation and Product Management functions.
Her topic at ProductGeeks conference (she is speaking on the second day) is:

Building successful solutions your customers will love. The process of understanding customers, falling in love with the problem and not the solution.

Expect a lot of such amazing talks at ProductGeeks conf.

ProductGeeks Conf Details

Date: April14th (Bangalore)
Venue: Hotel Park Plaza, Outer Ring Road, Bangalore.
Contact: team@nextbigwhat.com or just use this form
Event site/WIP Agenda: http://events.nextbigwhat.com/prodgeeksconf
Discount Code: 40% off. Has already been applied in the widget below.
[mks_highlight color=”#eeee22″] Price will increase by 10% in 2 days [/mks_highlight]

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[rpt name=”202186″] We are also open for speaker nomination – details here.

NextBigWhat’s upcoming conference, ProductGeeks Conference will bring together India’s most amazing product leaders, founders and geeks together.

We are working hard to bring together a stellar speaker set – the ones who have a LOT of perspective and experience building great products.
Introducing our first speaker : Jonathan Bill.

Jonathan is a Mobile and Internet veteran, having spent over a decade leading Vodafone’s mobile Internet operations, proposition and strategy in developing markets including India, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.
Jonathan is co-founder and CEO of CreditMate, a digital lender providing secured loans on used Motorbikes in India. Before CreditMate, he founded BillBachao.com a mobile tariff and signal strength comparison business based on technology and complex algorithms. BillBachao was sold to one of India’s largest business groups in 2015.
He has amazing insights and perspectives on the Indian market and his topic at ProductGeeks Conference (Day 2) would be on the lines of:

Designing for Bharat market (and why founders/product teams need to get out of their AC office).

Expect a lot of interesting takeaways from his talk.

ProductGeeks Conf Details

Date: April 13th & 14th (Bangalore)
Venue: Hotel Park Plaza, Outer Ring Road, Bangalore.
Contact: team@nextbigwhat.com
Event site/WIP Agenda: nextbigwhat.com/productgeeksconf/
Discount Code: 40% off. Has already been applied in the widget below.
[rpt name=”202186″] PS: Ticket prices will increase on Friday.
We are also open for speaker nomination – details here.

“How do I understand my customer?”
“How do I prioritize features?”
“How do I find the right problems to solve?”
“How do I scale the product team?”

Our upcoming conference, ProductGeeks Conf aims to bring geeks who build, launch and scale world-class products.

By geeks, we just don’t mean the ones who code, but the ones who think deeper – right from the product (management) teams to marketing, founders and customer success teams.

It’s high time that Indian startup/tech ecosystem starts producing global products – we have limited time to do so (before everything gets Chinesed or Silicon Valleyed). And it’s really high time we go waayyy deeeep into topics like product management / marketing / playbooks etc.
Scheduled for April 14th (Bangalore), ProductGeeks Conf is where you will connect, meet and learn with fellow product fellas.
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[mks_icon icon=”fa-search-plus” color=”#0e28ef” type=”fa”] Product Market Fit to Scaling up.

At scale, all product-market fit fails. What’s the right way to go about it, then? How do I find the right problems to solve? How do I understand my customers 10X better? How do I scale?

[mks_icon icon=”fa-check-square-o” color=”#8224e3″ type=”fa”] Feature Prioritization / Roadmap / Pricing?

How do I prioritize features? How do I build a customer development framework that fuels the next growth?

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[mks_icon icon=”fa-play” color=”#8224e3″ type=”fa”] Building for the Bharat market

What design aspects do I need to take care? What can I learn from others? Let’s decode the next billion market opportunity – together.

[mks_icon icon=”fa-road” color=”#f92786″ type=”fa”] 2 DEEEP Workshops

#1 on Advanced digital marketing and the other on SAAS Metrics.

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The agenda is being worked on (here is a sneak preview).

Ticketing / Details

Date: April 14th
Location: Hotel Park Plaza, Outer Ring Road, Bangalore.
Contact: team@nextbigwhat.com
Event site: http://events.nextbigwhat.com
Discount Code: NEXTBIGWHAT

To give you an idea of the quality, watch these videos from the earlier ProductGeeks conference (we used to club ProdGeeks conf with UnPluggd earlier).

#BeAProductGeek!