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With Portfolio Dapp, in addition to connecting your MetaMask wallet and various accounts, you can also add another account like an offline wallet or hardware wallet using the “watch any wallet” feature and name them to your liking. You can even add a friend’s ENS domain or public address to your list.
The Mercedes-Benz EQS 580 4MATIC has been launched in India at an ex-showroom price of Rs. 1.55 Crore.
The new Mercedes-Benz EQS 580 4MATIC is the brand’s first electric car to take the completely knocked down route and is being locally assembled in India at the German brand’s Chakan plant.
Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel gives his take on how to build products that succeed at Y combinator’s Startup School. In this hour long talk, Michael goes through a number of fundamentals that startup teams and founders usually overlook.
Key Takeaways:
Kickstart your Product Management career with NextBigWhat Academy’s Product Management Course. Featuring 10+ product leaders from across the industry.
Callergy is a simple tool that shows you what allergens are in the air in your city across an entire year.
Callergy’s digital allergy calendars helps keep allergies in check along with monthly forecasts and handpicked products which helps to stay healthy.
About the founding team :
Second time startup Founder David Lowe was inspired to launch Callergy after five miserable years in Austin, Texas. The town rocked but the allergens in the air were brutal! He assumed he was sick and actually thought he might have a life threatening disease. Turns out it was his allergies. He didn’t realize it but the air is filled with so much junk that it basically knocks you out for most of the year.
David wanted to create something simple that would show you what was in the air wherever you are so you could plan ahead with your medication, herbal remedies, neti pot, teas, honey and basically everything you need as an allergy sufferer. Having already collaborated with him on Uberpong, he teamed up with the awesome Hunter Dolan on this project.
NextBigWhat profiles interesting products and startups (India + world). If you are building something interesting, submit the details here.
Ergonomics, product-design flaws, safety-worries, or the good old phantom-limb effect. Researchers are scratching their heads to work out some numbers that came up in a new study.
In ‘The Phone Walkers: A study of human dependence on inactive mobile devices’ Laura Schaposnik and James Unwin from University of Illinois dug in a clear pattern of mobile phones being carried in people’s hands (3000 people on Parisian streets) without the person using it (that is, not looking at it).
So we hold our phones when we aren’t actually using them. Big deal! It is, when we see how as soon as individuals join members of the opposite sex there is a clear tendency to stop holding mobile phones whilst walking (just 18 per cent). Else, 38 per cent of solitary women, and 31 per cent of solitary men touch their phones (via).
Hmm. It’s just a phone. It’s not the ring, Frodo.
I have been through this question and without disclosing the company name, let me tell you the one factor which helped me decide.
To give you a quick context, I was madly in love with the product – worked hard to take it from zero to launch and once we launched, the company raised a huge round of funding.
And with funding came new hires and I ended up reporting to the new Director of PM (I was earlier reporting to the cofounder).
I was still in love with the product, but one day I just quit.
Here is what really happened.
As a PM, you need to own the success and failure of your product.
The day you are taken off it, you should be off it.
Do whatever to make it success (including fighting the internal politics), but do know when product metrics shift from customer happiness to investor/founder’s happiness.
(From my Quora answer).
[Notes from NextBigWhat : Bootstrapping is extremely under rated. We invite bootstrapped startup founders to share their experience.]
This is Raxit, founder @ SmartMumbaikar.com, which runs carpool in Mumbai. Strong believer of bootstrapping since last 4 years – sharing some of my learnings bootstrapping over the last few years.
Either you directly jump start after college, during college or after few years in Job, this is the most important aspect.
I have done job for 7 years before quitting and I was having cash of approx. 15 months. Idea was to enable people sharing their vehicles. After quitting it took me approx. 11 months to build technology and make site up for usage.
Our idea is simple : we enable you to share car/give/take lift, you save on money, you pay us Rs 400/month.
Idea Validation: After 11 month we were seeing slow traction, people were paying or asking for trial. So that was a validation of what we are trying to solve, people want it and ready to pay for it…. But Scary..
Solution: Let me admit, How foolish I was. I was (and still i am ) geek, so we have build system like this. User sign-up with his/her mobile number, home and office location. Instead of pressing button in Uber, you just give a missed call on our number. Same way uber finds you nearby cab, we sms you who all are going on your route. This solution never ever worked. I tried to do a/b test, marketing, advertising but no luck. I lost all my money, I was not even having money to pay for my rent, maid. Those scary days, true friends and roommate were helpful.
I had to tell tata bye-bye to employees without giving them salary (I cleared all dues later and still have a very good relationship with all).
Now within 2 yrs we are doing 2.5 lac seats sharing using carpool every month, It is growing! We are making decent revenue & profit. Also launching android & iphone app soon.
PS: June 2016: Uber was doing Pool ride of 2 lac/month, even you book using UberPool and go solo, they count that as UberPool vs We are counting actual seats.
It tooks 18 months time to realize things are not working, a bit longer time.
Your top priority should not be growth hack but it should be retention hack, unit economy hack and profitability hack.
For standalone product, it may not be difficult but for Network effect / Marketplace app, this is really challenging and thin chance of success if not done with discipline
When things were not working, I was trying to close sales of our solutions to larger enterprise (without realizing product/solution is wrong). There are very good people in Industry like Few VC,Ex-colleagues. Even we were competing with one of his portfolio companies, one VC never hesitated introducing me to Top CEO level people whenever I asked him. Surely, I was able to complete sales quicker, but sold them wrong (Product who has not achieved product market fit)
Same way, asked friends for survival money, credit cards etc… few have supported, Few went silent. In bad time, you will find who is your true friend and who is just so called “Bol bachan”
Shitty products go nowhere.
Test : When they are unable to use your product, it should create itch/frustration to your users.
Tips:
If you are tech founders, try Sales.
Originally published on Reprime blog.
Here’s the scene —
A small team working out of a room; launches an MVP; gets more than 50k people using the product.
What comes next? Feature requests. Lots of them.
We’ve built a couple of products previously and in pursuit to make something people love, we built everything that our early users requested. Need an option to download an invoice as PDF? There you go. Need a feature to manage business expenses along with the incoming cashflow? There you go, sir. Need us to take your son to school? Yes, sir. That taking-son-to-school never happened exactly but you see the point. To have us do something, you just had to tell us once. We were young. We were the makers. We were yet to evolve into people who could say ‘No’ to someone. We were yet to learn the art of building products.
Before we built our first product, we used to do client projects. Unfortunately, we carried the habit of saying ‘Yes’ with us when building products. Eventually, we learned that in the 101 book of building products, the very first rule is to learn to say ‘No’. The sure shot way of killing your product is to make it do everything for everyone.
After learning the lesson, we tried to apply it on our latest experiment — Reprime.
Since the private beta of Reprime, we’ve been getting amazing messages like these.
But along with these, we also started receiving solid constructive feedback to help us build Reprime better.
Among all these constructive feedback that we got, there were three things that we always had in the “ASAP” list in Trello.
In the first glimpse, it seems there are three different problems and therefore there’ll be three different solutions. We thought so, at least, to be honest.
Three problems. Three solutions. All we had to do was work for 80 hours for two weeks and we’d be ready to announce three new things that we built in three different blog posts. I announced to the team — “It’s time we do it.” The whole team nodded. I, too, pulled up my sleeves and sat with a mug of coffee to begin coding.
In the evening, when everyone wrapped up and left for the day, I decided to take a 15-min nap in the office before continuing the work ahead. And like all the good ideas I get in sleep, I got another one.
For half an hour before going to the nap, I read Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent Of Man”. In it, I read how people believed Earth to be at the center of the universe. All the heavenly bodies including the sun and the moon, which humans could see, moved across the sky in no fixed pattern.
To keep track of the movements of these throughout the year, people had developed clocks where Earth was depicted at the center of it and there were arms for each heavenly body — the sun, the moon and the planets that we knew about then.
The catch was that the arms didn’t move in circular motion around the around. Each arm had multiple gears that made it move it weird fashion around the center of the clock. People spent years recording the motion of the heavenly bodies and then perfecting the clock. It was a nightmare.
Then, came Nicolaus Copernicus, who said – “Hey, what if we move Sun at the center of the clock and then everything moves in a fixed circular pattern around it, including the Earth.”
Things weren’t smooth for Copernicus to hold and preach the thought of Earth not being at the center of the universe – not just the solar system, but it gave me enough food for the thought.
With this story in my mind, I went to the nap. And I kept asking myself – “What if the solutions to our problems are not hundred different things but just one simple thing that we need to figure out.”
I woke up from the nap and spent the rest of the whole night wondering of a better way to store and manage events. Until then, I was thinking of “schedules” to be center of the architecture and now I moved my focus to “events” being the center of the architecture and “schedules” being just a mechanism to define a collection of events.
Sometimes you’ve to give up your pride and really think what is it around which everything revolves.
The next day, we came up with a new architecture to think of the events that we are maintaining. Earlier, each of our event belonged to a calendar. Now, each event is defined using a list of labels.
Example: A football match between Team A and Team B is defined using the labels – “sport”, “football”, “team_a” and “team_b”.
And there’s a similar list of labels for each schedule too, i.e. “Schedule for all matches of Team A”. We made a quick script that would produce the potential labels for each of the 100,000 events and 9000 schedules we maintain. Everyone in our team spent a day verifying all those labels and then we imported this labeled data in Algolia.
And we were done. The work that earlier amounted to two 80-work-hour long weeks was reduced down to two days of labeling data. That’s it.
Using Algolia and its powerful open source tools, we were able to ship the Explore page on our website with just a couple of hours of development.
For users, it removed the effort of digging into the sea of sub categories to find something. Having something in mind? Just type in.
Solution to the second problem came bundled in with the first one. In our Algolia dashboard, we started paying special attention to one report – “queries returning zero results”.
This list worked as proxy for suggestions, that too, without explicitly asking users to suggest something. Everyday we compile this list and start working on collecting the required data.
Looks like, people want something for yoga and dance.
Now, because our events are not defined using a schedule but by a list of labels, we have removed all the duplicate events and maintain only a single copy of an event. If you want to know the exact architecture of our labels on schedules and events, highlight this sentence to let me know. I’ll be happy to share in followup blog posts.
This change in the architecture also allowed us to offer a few more things to our users in next few days. We are exploiting this architecture of labels to it fullest – till it breaks.
Scores of excellent articles have been written on building great products: start with the “why”, product equals team, build to solve rather than indulge, the “cupcake strategy”, build-ship-iterate-repeat, reincarnate as Steve Jobs, go on a “feature” diet, and so on and so forth.
And yet, only a very small percentage of products “succeed”.
This got me thinking. In the art & science of it all, is there something else we are missing?
Can mindfulness help the product manager further each of these roles and build great products, with joy? I examine this in a three-part article, drawing upon mindfulness wisdom, psychology concepts, and my own experiences building multiple digital and physical products.
Part I: Countering stress with mindfulness to sustain “flow”, build masterpieces
Part II: Is flow enough? Going beyond, with a Beginner’s Mind, avoiding ego traps
Part III: Yin and Yang. Yang and Yin. Cracking the code with a Balancing Act
Part I: Countering stress with mindfulness to sustain “flow”, build masterpieces
The Agony & The Ecstasy
“This was his most glorious experience in working marble; never had he had such an expanse of figure, such a simplicity of design; never before had he been so possessed by a sense of precision, force, penetration or depth of passion. He could think of nothing else now, could not bring himself to stop for food or change of clothes,” writes Irving Stone of the great Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo, his masterpiece, David, and of a passion and focus so intense that it was sustained for over two years.
This state of complete immersion in an activity, so deep that one loses their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems, has been termed as flow by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly).During flow, a person experiences a great sense of clarity, effortless concentration and focused attention, feelings of ecstasy, serenity and timelessness, a feeling that goals, even if challenging, are attainable. Most importantly, in flow, the state of flow itself is its reward.
Flow, Creative Ideation & the Product Manager: Clearly, flow is crucial for the product manager to “ideate” – to see possibilities where others see none, to presciently visualize a sculpture in all its glory within a block of marble.
Not only does some of the best, most inspired and creative work emerge from these moments but they leave one with a sense of satisfaction, a sense of joy that becomes a motivator for overcoming troughs in the product building journey. Even hard-nosed business publications acknowledge the connection of flow to productivity, like this McKinsey study.
The neat part? The creative genius that emerges from flow may not be the sole dominion of brilliant sculptors, musicians and scientists – it may be accessible to the humble product manager, to all of us.
Lets quickly look at how and when one is in flow. By measuring people’s self scores of the challenge level they were facing and their own skill (real or perceived) in facing those challenges, Mihaly concluded that for people to flow, they need to be in the high challenge, high skill zone.
But here is the catch.Building a product is challenging, to say the least – and most of us are skilled at what we do. So, why aren’t we all in flow – all the time?
Flow, meet your nemesis: “Noise”
Ok, quick question. What’s noisier than a heavy metal band?
A day in the life of the product manager, of course!
There is all the “external noise”: time and cost pressures, meetings, politics, divergent opinions, distractions (read: addicted refresh of email, Facebook, whatsapp). Then there is, perhaps even louder, the “internal noise”: unclear objectives, self-doubt, fear of failure. The result? Anxiety & stress taking the place of joyous flow.
The impact of all this “noise”, can be understood through the “Two System” theory by Daniel Kahneman. In his book, “Thinking Fast & Slow”, he introduces us to two modes of thinking: System 1 (the fast, automatic, creative, intuitive thinking), and System 2 (the slow, more deliberate, analytical thinking). System 1 can lead to biases, impulsiveness, misjudgements (at its worst), or can help create new patterns, help in associative creation, effortless thinking (at its best). Clearly, flow appears to be the intuitive System 1 working at its best.
Here’s how all the “noise” defeats flow:
Whatever be the mechanism, the conditions surrounding the typical product manager are not conducive to flow. Yes, you could lock yourself up in a room, block your calendar, with great resolve close all your browser tabs, shut off your phone too. But even so, what about the “internal noise”?
Product Manager <> The Monk & his Magical Robe
Say hello to mindfulness – your soon to be secret weapon. Wondering how focusing on your breathing can help you battle noise? Several ways, actually.
Calming the amygdala: By mindfully staying in the “present” and learning to “notice” emotions without reacting to them or judging them, we can become calmer, retain focus and attention, and avoid being hijacked by stressors. Here
At UnPluggd, we aim to bring you speakers who can inspire you to think big and push you to go beyond the obvious.
Meet Lalitesh Katragadda, cofounder of Google India and the man behind Google map maker.
As of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped. Lalitesh was the creator of Google Map Maker. Google Map maker empowered people to map what they knew locally and it tripled the world’s digital maps corpus, mapping 2 billion people in 187 countries. The UN and aid agencies have used these user generated maps to assist and rescue millions.
Lalitesh co-founded Google India and was its founding Joint Center Head for two years and retired from Google as Head of India products having invented, led several products including Crowdsourced YouTube Subtitles, Crowdsourced translation corpus, Google Transliteration and Google Finance.
He is now focused on India’s nation building as the founder of Swaja Labs, Indihood, as an architect of Digital India’s Open API and AP Government’s Fiber Grid.
At UnPluggd, Lalitesh will share his insights and experience on building (and importantly, SCALING) products for the Indian market.
Be there. Book Your Tickets Now!
About UnPluggd
Date: Nov 25th & 26th, 2016
Venue: Park Plaza hotel (Marathahalli), Bangalore
URL: http://nextbigwhat.com
Limited Offer: Use Coupon code WE20 to avail 20% off (until 22nd November) or Book more than 3 or more tickets and get 35% off!
Everyone’s talking about this now — being #mobileFirst. It’s a new strategy startups are adopting. Products are being tweaked considering 80% of users are thumb driven. This is a good thing, but the problem is, mobile strategies haven’t gone past “having a mobile app”. They haven’t completely embraced the mobile ecosystem.
A very interesting post on Mobile Product Thinking.
