Abhinav Asthana

Converting PoCs to Contracts - A Lesson in Difficult Conversations Like going from dating to co-habitating, moving your first customer from pilot to contract is a Big Leap moment for early stage startups. Waiting too long to have the conversation is the most common mistake. You are afraid of rejection, so you never learn if your product is making life easier for your customer, let alone how much they will pay. The truth is, once your pilot is launched, you can't be too early in discussing what it will take to move to a contract. I just got off the phone with a startup CEO who told of countless meetings, waiving integration fees, hiring a dedicated employee and more all to get their first customer live. After several revised timelines and a reorg, the engagement was going sideways until he said "We can't do this for free anymore. We need to move to contract or we are done here." At first, the customer balked. But once they assessed the situation and realized how crucial the software was, they changed their mind. The startup is now on track to sign their first big deal. That wouldn't have happened without a difficult conversation. Early stage startups are fragile. Moving from pilot to contract is the first real test of so many things - your product value, your customer success, and the real competition. Unless you test your relationship by taking the leap, you'll never figure out if you've got something real.

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Is Protobuf the future default for everything? Timothy Chen & I chatted with Buf CTO Akshay Shah about the future of Protobuf, their new Kafka-compatible streaming layer, and everything he learned scaling Uber that led him to build Buf. This episode covered a pain point I've repeatedly experienced while working at Snyk & see at many other companies: managing cross-team migrations and building a productive internal API ecosystem. Here's a great example: You have two services (A and B), and A depends on B. How do you modify an API or Event in A without requiring B to do a complicated lock-step migration? These are the challenges in any at-scale organization where a project that should take 30-60 days turns into months as you try to navigate alignment and delivery. They're mundane papercuts that turn into hundreds of hours of lost productivity. I love what Buf are doing to help make this a problem of the past.

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PRDs are not important. I would much rather have a one pager Press Release that highlights the journey than a detailed PRD document that lists out every spec and solution detail to the T. The detail which Engineering teams have started expecting in PRDs has gone bonkers. Yes, Engineering is one of the main stakeholders for PRDs, but a PRD should stop short of solutioning for Enggineering. The purpose(s) of a PRD or any other document that leads to a finished product should be to highlight: 1. What we're building 2. Why we're building it 3. Who are we building this for 4. How will they use it 5. Why we think this is an important problem to solve 6. Who are the key people involved in delivering it 7. What is the GTM strategy 8. What does success look like and maybe a few more things depending on org structures. Now, I am not saying we should no go into details in a PRD. Details are important- mandatory, if you will. But we should shy away from going into solutioning details, unless we're building an API/Platform product in which case, the solution is the feature. Think of PRDs as the first surface of your product/idea for the world (customers and stakeholders) to touch, see, feel and wrap their heads around. They don't want to know whether you'll be using an XGBoost model or a simple rule to predict outcomes. They don't care about the tech stack or whether you will be leveraging your latest data sources for rendering the data on their screen. They care about the problems you're solving for the customers. They care about revenue, cost savings, optimization or strategic wins. #productmanagement #PRD #PM

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Just finished a weeklong masterclass on improving your product sense with Shreyas Doshi. Highly recommended to any early stage founders looking to get an edge on building world class products. Check out the next cohorts here -

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Join us for a conversation with Peggy Rayzis on building a "Developer Intent led" GTM motion! We explore the key drivers that led to the wild success of Apollo Graph QL... followed by an AMA Link to register in comments. Feel free to share any questions

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V2MOM, SMART, LRP. PCT. Behind those acronyms are actionable concepts that helped Manu Gurudatha, Engineering Leader at PagerDuty skyrocket engineering productivity. And he shared his exact process in an in-depth article where you’ll learn: ◾ How to implement V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures) and plan better. ◾ Why setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals can bring you clarity and success in eng projects. ◾ Tips for effective Long-Range Planning (LRP) that aligns daily operations with your long-term business goals. ◾ How to reduce Process Cycle Time (PCT) to accelerate project delivery. Click on the link below to go from slipping to shipping, with real life examples at PagerDuty 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eHUAc6qJ

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Lior Solomon and the team at Drata thought if their Amplitude experiment produced at least 500 customer adoptions, that would be a success. So, when the experiment actually drove 2,000 customer adoptions, let’s just say they were excited about that. Learn how Lior and the team at Drata use Amplitude!

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It has been a while since I posted about GLIA Ecosystems I spent 30 years as a lead producer at a bunch of investment banks and boutiques. Successful at times (a couple of exits). Failure at others (a couple of closures). I was a first generation gamer and loved technology. I was an early adopter of Bloomberg back in the days when knowing more fast codes and what the latest product roll outs where made you smarter than the mass. This was back in the days when information was slow, prices were OTC for size, when risk capital was dominated by a handful of banks and when research had price impact. That has all gone away. The game has changed but still retail carries on thinking Trading Views and their ilk (25 mln users looking at charts and back tested technical strategies) can help. Charts, prices, news aggregation and price back testers are nowhere near to a competitive tool kit but it is all most platform users, and market participants, have access to! This at a time when Citadel, Renaissance and their cohort are using weapons of mass destruction to scalp the markets. Guess where all the money is being made? As Robinhood get paid for their “odd lot” order flow and Citadel ride roughshod over it. 90% of trading accounts lose money. 25% of US market flows are retail. 70% of the Western world is financially illiterate. Einstein, or someone close, said “Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome”. That is every data platform user in the markets today, it is the vast bulk of institutional brokers (minus their flow); it is the market at large. We are making leap into the future - a place of differentiation - occupying a space intended to close the gap on the winners; light years (well a good 30 years) ahead of the mass utility offerings. A space where we hope financial success can live. A fund management game with a twist and $1 a day financial intelligence for the mass market. We look forward to sharing much more soon it has been a journey. At long last there is a realisation that mediocre systems breed mediocre outcomes. The future is intelligent; knowledge is curated, content is relevant, and users are at the centre of their digital universe. #learntoearn #joiningthedots #knowingtheknowable #knowledgetoact Peter Bentley Peter O' Toole Adam Toms Matt Barrett Mike Hammond Jon Chase Matthew Fletcher Aba Schubert Ricardo Santos Silva Alf Long Matthew Steiner Mark Gamble Noah Liot Marco Merighi Ameet Patel

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Pain point doesn’t mean leverage point. You need to look at both in platforms and infrastructure. As you stack leverage points (by building good abstractions) the ability to remove pain points quickly compounds. Balance the investments in pain vs leverage fixes. If you don’t you risk tech debt with quick pain point fixes OR losing faith from users by taking too long

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Thanks Joanne Chen and Jaya Gupta from Foundation Capital for the nod! Great to be in the cohort of top notch AI companies. Observability data is untapped goldmine of information, but when the time comes (in the middle of incident), it still requires "expert" skills to find the needle in the haystack. We at Deductive AI are democratizing the expertise to everyone in the organization.

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Thrilled to share an inspiring update from my recent call with Siddhant Goswami, Co-Founder of 100x Engineers! 🚀 Siddhant, a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, is revolutionizing tech education and startup support. 100x Engineers is empowering data scientists, developers, product managers, designers, and marketers to master Generative AI and build innovative companies. Key highlights: ⚡️Two 6-month cohorts completed, with nearly 500 people starting in September ⚡️ Partnership with Meta for education, developing curriculum in 9 languages ⚡️ Success stories emerging, including a founder's content generation tool partnering with LinkedIn! Our discussion centered on collaboration and building new support systems for founders. We both see immense potential in the Venture Studio model. Here's what we're working on: 1️⃣ Global Startup Onboarding: Expanding our reach to India, Middle East, Latin America, and other emerging markets through targeted LinkedIn outreach and ad campaigns. 2️⃣ Flexible Offerings: Providing startups with options for one-time payment, monthly subscription, or equity to align incentives and support their growth and fundraising efforts. 3️⃣ Investor Pool Development: Exploring opportunities to acquire and grow bootstrapped, revenue-generating startups through a curated investor network. 4️⃣ Ecosystem Building: Creating a collaborative environment for founders, engineers, and angel investors to innovate and succeed together. Excited about the future of tech entrepreneurship! If you're interested in learning more about 100x Engineers, check out their website: https://lnkd.in/gJ979kwK Let's connect if you're passionate about building the next generation of tech innovators and companies! 💡🌍

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Really pumped to share a new resource: My quick guide to product-led growth for pre-PMF startups --> Step 1: Don't do it. -- There's always a lot of hype around PLG. There are some exceptions, but here's why PLG is way cooler in theory than in practice for most early-stage B2B startups: 1 - When it doesn't work, it's really hard to know WHY it doesn't work. "How do we know if it's not working because the wrong kinds of people are coming in, we have the wrong message, we're targeting the wrong kind of person, our onboarding flow is bad, or one of 3,000 other variables?" Hint: the answer ain't in the data. It's in users' heads, and they don't want to talk to you. AKA: takes a ton of volume & money to learn anything, vs. just having a few sales calls. Your idea is always wrong in some way you can't know ex-ante -- the best way to debug it fast is to try to sell. 2 - PLG is often an excuse to avoid selling. I get it, selling "doesn't scale as efficiently." You don't want to be sales-led. You can make a TON of logical arguments against selling, but most of the time we're ACTUALLY trying to do PLG because deep down, we don't like how uncomfortable selling can feel. Even if you want to do PLG eventually, it's still worth selling in the early stage to figure out what buyers really want, in THEIR words... and this only emerges when you ask them to pay for stuff. (Sales, not "discovery" interviews.) 3 - PLG is a motion that makes sense for a very particular kind of product & buyer. And that's probably not you. Is your value prop most salient for directors or VPs? Cool, PLG's probably not for you. Does it require change management to get value out of it? Great, go sell & deliver. Your horizontal AI workflow tool? Yeah no. When it works, PLG is generally: 1) a surprise to the founders (see the stories of Loom, Segment, etc.) 2) a very narrow tool where the individual contributor is both the user and buyer Of course there are exceptions. But there's a very big, very full graveyard of non-exceptions. - PS - nothing against free trials, ungating the product, etc. I actually might be launching a PLG company. But PLG will unfold as the GTM approach if it is the right thing for the shape of the market & product opportunity, and I'm only figuring that out through 1:1 sales. PPS - I have a BIG problem with influencers shouting that the "new way to build a startup" is PLG or bust. It's hard enough to start a company when you're not getting steered into the iceberg.

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As a product builder, one of my favorite concepts is Balaji Srinivasan's Idea maze (attached below). End users of a product only see the final decisions made. They don’t see every tradeoff the builders agonize over and the alternative universes that could’ve been. Great product are designed by builders that put an incredible amount of thought behind each decision. Steve jobs talks about a similar feeling in building the Mac. IMO this is the essence of finding product <> market fit, and makes a world of a difference in outcomes. For example, “video on the Internet” in the early 2000’s was an obvious emergent trend. But Youtube and Vimeo are very different products, and company outcomes. I think about this concept often for the market of “GTM signals” and "AI for Sales." It’s hot right now, many GTM teams are talking about using signals and AI, and there’s a wide diversity of products to choose from. Some tenured GTM operators gripe about how this is nothing new and it’s a renaming of age-old concepts like ABM, intent, B2B marketing, etc. There’s some truth to that and as a builder I’m always curious about the history of our space, but I also believe that AI (specifically LLMs) are unlocking new use cases that were previously not possible. So next time you see a new product in a confusing market, keep an open mind and see if it helps you accomplish something radically new. You could be looking at the next Youtube.

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[New Pod Drop] I had the pleasure of sitting down with senior product consultant Nishant Kumar to talk product dev, team building, and so much more. Watch here: https://lnkd.in/d5tRMCUU Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/dBpWB7JB Spotify: https://lnkd.in/d2bsn8mx Talking points: 👉 The challenge of achieving product-market fit in SaaS companies 👉 Understanding the balance between software development and business needs 👉 Differences in product management strategies for B2B vs. B2C companies 👉 Effective techniques for gathering and utilising customer feedback 👉 Building and managing successful product teams 👉 Exploring the future of product management with generative AI 👉 Insights on the strategic relationship between CPOs and CEOs #unsoldpodcast #contentmarketing #ProductManagement #SaaS #B2B #B2C #CustomerFeedback #TeamBuilding #GenerativeAI #Leadership #Podcast #ProductLeadership #TechTrends #Innovation

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AI explainability is not just one of the most critical product features when deploying AI for mission-critical use cases like banking, insurance, FS, healthcare, autonomous cars, defence, etc., regulations also need it. Let the model builders like OpenAI, Mistral, Anthropic, and Google, and internal teams focus on building models; we at AryaXAI ensure all these models are explainable, monitored, and safe to use for mission-critical AI. #AryaXAI #EnterpriseAI Kudos to all our team at AryaXAI Chintan Chitroda Amey Balekundri Vaibhav G. Yashwardhan Rathore Pratinav Seth Neeraj Kumar Singh Siddhant Mishra Tushar Gharge https://lnkd.in/gg4kwvfB

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