Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Bridging Strategy And Execution | Abhinav Chugh @ Peoplebox
347 Plays3 years ago
Tech giant Google uses an approach called OKR to manage its employees which has taken the startup world by storm. Abhinav’s venture is a platform that helps fast-growing companies adopt the OKR methodology. This episode is a masterclass in both OKRs and building a vertical SaaS business.
Know about:-
- First startup and learnings
- Ideation of Peoplebox
- Concept and benefits of 1-on-1
- Features of OKR
-----
If you want to be a podcaster, then check out Zencastr.com which is also the generous sponsor for this episode. Zencastr is like a Shopify for podcasters taking care of all your needs from recording to editing to hosting.
Show your love for this show by using this link to sign up: https://zen.ai/founderthesis
Recommended
Transcript
Importance of People in Startups
00:00:13
Speaker
Any founder of a hypergrowth startup will list people as their biggest asset and challenge. For companies that have achieved product market fit, money is no longer a constraint to growth. Rather, it is people and the best startups are the ones who excel in hiring, retaining and getting great outcomes from their employees.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hi, this is Abhinav. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Peoplebox.ai.
OKRs in Startups and Google Influence
00:00:33
Speaker
Google has long been seen as the pioneer in managing people and Google's practices are widely studied and adopted by other startups. One of them is an approach called OKR or Objectives and Key Results which is taking the startup world by storm. And Abhinav Chag's venture, Peoplebox is a platform that helps fast-growing companies to adopt the OKR methodology.
00:00:55
Speaker
This episode is a masterclass in both OKRs and building a vertical SaaS business. And there's no one better than Abhinav to hear it
Abhinav's Relocation and Business Journey
00:01:03
Speaker
from. Abhinav is an IIT Delhi alumnus and a serial entrepreneur. And here he's telling Akshay about how it all started.
00:01:10
Speaker
So I spent a couple of years in Hamdarks in Fune, went to a lot of places, traveled a lot. I was in Canada, I would be in London. And then I got a couple of opportunities actually to relocate, primarily to two places, London and Dublin. Like any Indian guy, you give them London and Dublin. Of course, London would be the obvious choice and so was it for me as well. I remember my boss, he got another opportunity in Dublin and she said to me, yeah, Abhinav, I want you to move to Dublin.
00:01:37
Speaker
I said, okay, for how long? She said, no, at least a couple of years. And my first question was, it is Dublin. And then she was like, okay, it's the capital of Ireland. She sent me for a couple of weeks and I literally fall in love with that place. My exact plan was I'm going to spend a couple of years, quit my job and start my business.
00:01:53
Speaker
So for us to go and even know a little bit, we need to have some knowledge. So what we did was, what we decided what I did was that let's go to a B-School. While I was doing my B-School, I continued to build code my first startup and launched it while I was in B-School. So one thing I realized was that there is a lot of mistrust. Like everybody wanted to source their products from Eastern Europe or China and wanted to source their services from India.
00:02:19
Speaker
So my first idea was about building this, this pay to be trust portal, where there will be suppliers and they would be able to add their customer references, testimonials and all that. When we talk about trust, that how do I go and trust you, there are different levels and the best level is audio visual. Long story short, pivoted my first startup, which was Wave is into video crisp, which was all about a cloud-based
Exploring Business Ideas and Challenges
00:02:44
Speaker
video. This would be a cloud-based video editing and creation tool.
00:02:48
Speaker
So, in 2014, I moved back to India. And this time, I remember the flight when I was alone. I was there, my wife and my son. In January 2017, I quit Prakto and started. So, once I moved back, I joined Prakto. And Prakto is, I think, one of the most fascinating journey that I had. But yeah, that was my journey eight years in Ireland. So, becoming a founder, tell me about that.
00:03:11
Speaker
So like I said, this was a promise to myself. So I met my co-founder and maybe we'll spend a little bit about him. So my co-founder is Alabu. He's an engineer. Both are mechanical engineers. He's from NIT Trichy. A mechanical engineer who got into Yahoo. In fact, he's only the first mechanical engineer who got placed into Yahoo. Then he was one of the founding engineers with Hacker.
00:03:32
Speaker
And that's where he came to know about YC. So he and two of his other co-founders started a startup called Markham VAD, which was only the third startup in India to get into YC. And so while I was doing my startup in Dublin, he was doing his startup in Bay Area. And this was the startup. There were three front-end guys. So one of the real problems of front-end engineers, they were trying to help the front-end engineers convert their HTML into PhD, which was a big pain there.
00:03:59
Speaker
I don't know if it is still a big pain now but now you have a lot of other tools have come but and I think I'll go from of course my interaction with the same problem that like not realizing
00:04:10
Speaker
who are the people, what segment, the whole GTM plays, where they struggle. And then he joined Practo pretty much at the same time. In fact, we joined within the matter of 30 days. Now, our first startup, like immediately when we moved out of Practo, another, I would say, a good lesson and a mistake. So, we were doing in health, of course, we were in health and we wanted to do something in health, but not something that directly competes with Practo.
00:04:32
Speaker
And the one place where we saw, while we were there, was mental health. That mental health is completely broken. Now, I've come from Dublin and I've seen people going through counseling, people talking about mental health so openly. And then when I came back to India, I was like, dude, people are really scared. There is a huge stigma. And we really believe that technology can solve a lot of this stigma problem. Because one is, it gives you the convenience of finding a counselor. It's so easy to go to your neighbor and say, do you know any pediatrician?
00:05:05
Speaker
who would go to a neighbor and say, do you know any good marriage counselor or do you know any psychiatrist? So, either one was convenient or views can say the discovery part, but the second was this whole aura of anonymity that you can do in technology because you don't really need to go there.
00:05:19
Speaker
Don't really need to go and sit so that is what we started we started a startup last night which was it was into mental health the ability to talk with counselors and there I would again a very big lesson and again this is a lesson I know we haven't talked so many times but you keep on making bad mistakes and and my life is having somewhat about repeating some of the mistakes as well when we did that of course we were
00:05:43
Speaker
We were two, I would say, good pedigree founders, ID, X, Y, C, X, Practo. So, there would not be any VC who would not talk with us. They would, in fact, welcome us with open hands. And, of course, Practo was very hot. So, they would have good references about etc.
00:06:01
Speaker
And almost everybody would raise their eyes on the market size. Yet how big is the market of mental health here, this whole founder, passion and optimism here? Market firm, I think that was the major challenge that we saw. We did it for almost a year. And it was a good business, by the way. There was a company which had got funded by staff just a year ago into the same segment. So it's not that we see funding no more.
00:06:27
Speaker
This is like what BetterHelp does in US. You wanted to do the same thing. Exactly. So there is this, no, actually, yeah, BetterHelp and TalkSpace. I always get confused with BetterHelp and BetterUp. So I always spend a second before I go and say, so BetterHelp and TalkSpace are two companies and we're pretty much trying to go the same. A lot of phone, us and Kurnas. We had a little bit of combination of, you know, phone counseling plus ability to chat.
00:06:52
Speaker
on our platform because a lot of time things happen between sessions. I must say it was a good business. In a way, what Goki did for fitness, Goki was similar. They had an app through which you access a fitness trainer.
00:07:06
Speaker
Absolutely. And then they had programs and all that as well. We realized that for us, I think the first step was to just connecting because in mental health, a lot of it is about just talking. You can share these three things and just self reflect because a lot of times what counselors really do is ask you good questions. They don't really give advice, which is the right way of doing the counseling as well.
00:07:27
Speaker
It goes back to what I was saying. It was a good business. We were growing really good. There was no competition. We were using SEO was working really good for us. Ads were really working good and with very low cost per click, low CPC. So as Dhanda, it was really good. What me and Anubhu was wondering is, is Dhandi is the best?
00:07:49
Speaker
But what is our role? A patient, I think it's so wrong for me to call it a patient, a user was facing some either a marital or some sort of issue or psychological issue. He or she needs a counsellor and they are talking on phone. So we are just, like, there is no technology play. That was the first challenge and very little technology play. And the second was, how do you do that?
00:08:14
Speaker
We can go and do it on that, but we were two decades turned product on and over when it brings some disruption.
Pivoting to Corporate Solutions
00:08:22
Speaker
What happened is there is this light speed cup party and I've spoken about that on my LinkedIn as well. So there's, you know, light speed cup party where they invited, you know, a lot of light speed keep doing that. So, so they will buy juice and then was, you know, everybody. So that's where.
00:08:37
Speaker
I met a guy, one of the nicest founders I met, I met a guy called Sridhar. Now Sridhar is my very close friend, mentor, whatever you call it. So Sridhar, we were just talking about the drinks and Sridhar said, what do you do? And I said, yeah, I'm a co-founder from the company.
00:08:55
Speaker
Well, ask me why we are in mental health, we help individuals connect with the right counselors. And then I asked him, what do you do? And he said, I am a co-founder of a company called Gainsight. And for some reason, I had not heard about Gainsight. And I said, OK, how big is it? And he said, yeah, we have just raised, I don't remember the exact number, we have just raised $80 million. And they were almost $1 billion.
00:09:18
Speaker
And for a few minutes, I could not imagine that I was talking to a unicorn founder. He was so humble. And he was like, you are so good. You are changing the world. You are changing the society. Dhantha changing the society. It's just not, you know. Like, you know that the normal struggle of your, and I was in that period. Yeah, I was in that period. Very unified company. Yeah.
00:09:46
Speaker
And at this moment, we were very clear. At least thus, because again, and nothing, every VC had warned us. Every VC had warned us, yeah, look at you guys. You guys have done so much, you have done. Why are you going about this not so great market?
00:10:08
Speaker
You need to choose your path, right? So anyways, Sridhar then said, why have you thought about moving this to corporates and businesses?
00:10:25
Speaker
We are mainly into relationships and mainly into personal life. He said, yeah, so he was, of course, he was the city of Vinsight. And he said, yeah, I, I have a large engineering team and I, like, like I really care for my employees, you know, and I see a lot of them struggle. We don't know, like, you know, this relationship between employee and employer is, is sort of breaking, you know, that, you know, our parents had seen how they would look at their employer, which usually will be one for the whole product.
00:10:54
Speaker
And I really want to do something. I want to make them feel, give them the sense of belonging. I want to build that better relationship and trust. And that's what you guys do. You help individuals build better relationships. Why can't you help companies build better? Now, this was an amazing conversation. Fully drunk. I went home, slept, and I woke up in the morning. I said, did it really happen? Or was it just some sort of a dream? So I messaged in a row. Now, this is an interesting part because let's go back to practice.
00:11:20
Speaker
Now, this is something we had witnessed, okay? When the company grew from, say, 300 to 3000, we saw a lot of challenges, a lot of challenges. For example, an individual contributor two years ago would now be the manager of manager of manager.
00:11:37
Speaker
And that comes with a lot of responsibility, right? Especially in a country like India, where you consider manager as not just your boss, but like your mentor, your philosopher. You know, at least, my parents, because my dad was a high-ranking government official, I've seen how people used to at least look up to him.
00:12:04
Speaker
At the same, at least young people would go and expect, but people are not trained. Suddenly, at 24, 25, we were managing a team of some 100, 200 people. And this relationship was, I see how badly it got away. And I personally faced it. I mean, I came as an individual contributor. Suddenly, I had eight product managers reporting to me. And then, you know, a large other team. I must say, I struggled a lot now.
00:12:31
Speaker
This actually sort of me and Alabhu we met and we looked at it and we said what is the problem here? What exactly is the problem and whether is this a good business to go in? We had burnt our fingers with the market size so we were quite worried about the whole market size
Challenges in Hypergrowth Startups
00:12:51
Speaker
and all that.
00:12:51
Speaker
Now, one thing we are sure that this is SaaS and this was a time in SaaS, of course, was pretty getting pretty hot as well. You know, the whole fresh desk and charge be coming out and of course, you know, you are seeing some really good innovative companies as well. The likes of Postman and browser stack, which were not like, you know, like we are also there or a cheaper version now. So we spent few.
00:13:12
Speaker
few months into just understanding that what is this market? What is the challenge? And one challenge that we saw was about, you know, building this, every company wants to build this high performing and engaged culture, you know, especially at the time of when they're going into this hyper growth. You know, when you raise funding, you have so many other things you're hiring people that you forget about here. Okay, higher to Karliya, bank account with $2 million, but
00:13:39
Speaker
We have to go and drive two hours, let's say, results and retention. We have to retain our top people. We have to drive 10x results. And that became sort of a challenge point that how can you do that by either building great managers, building that better trust, or providing that clarity, you know, about what the goals are and all of this. So that's where we got the whole
Founding of Peoplebox and Initial Challenges
00:14:03
Speaker
idea. We started in late 2018, a people box, which was earlier, all culture grade.
00:14:08
Speaker
And one of my friend actually who's again he's also found that he gave me an advice, he said he are, who are you gonna target? And at that moment, this was very normal target US. So I said, yeah, mainly US. So he said, if you are thinking of targeting US, then when was the last time you went there?
00:14:25
Speaker
I said i will be days away but then can you be happy is it no you should actually go back and we had no funding i'm in very little we address so we have very little money and i think it's all right let me figure it out. So i went there and we were like.
00:14:41
Speaker
few days old, I would say. You went to the US to sell the idea or to do a market survey, like his product. Yeah. Yeah. So like, you know, because Alabhu had been to YC, there is one thing he kept telling me is PG Mantra, I still call him his PG, all grounds that the three mantras of success for a startup is top to user, top to user, top to user.
00:15:06
Speaker
So my whole idea was to go there and stock the companies. Is this really a challenge? How are you solving it today? If there is a software, will you pay for it? How much will you pay for it? What is that? In this book, Spin Selling, there is this very good notion about perceived value. What is the perceived value? But interestingly, we had a paying customer who had paid for us.
00:15:27
Speaker
So, there was a company we met with a founder and we said, we are building up something and he said, we have this 7th or 8th anniversary coming. We wanted to understand the culture. So, do you have a product where I can capture the pulse of my employees? We did not even have a website. And I said, how do you have a product ready? So, he was like, how do you have a product? I was like, how do you have a product?
00:15:52
Speaker
He was like, okay, you won't believe it. It was so good. He got so impressed that two things happened. One, he recommended us to so many other companies. And then he said that if you're raising funding, you know, please, please count. But obviously we were not raising funding. We were like...
00:16:14
Speaker
If you like to hear stories of founders, then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
00:16:46
Speaker
No idea and in fact not even employee engagement like if you if you put this whole culture right or I would say
00:16:55
Speaker
And even articulating that problem was a bit difficult. Okay. So we were into that sort of a journey. Okay. And one thing, so, so my whole purpose of going to us was talk to the customers to understand what that challenge is. And we knew that we, we had witnessed this thing. We witnessed in practice, when it grew so far, we faced some challenges, whether it is one developing manager.
00:17:17
Speaker
Building a high-performing culture retaining people but we realize it primarily revolves around two things driving better results driving better attention so engagement or measuring engagement are pause sort of we talk about me do not that k banana we got a paid customer as well.
00:17:33
Speaker
which would be like a survey tool, but very specific engagement. So now what happened there was we, by the way, the Lightspeed, Lightspeed had immediately launched something called Lightspeed Extreme Entrepreneurs. And we were, we got selected. But by now, I remember I do the interview in Hong Kong. So I was in Hong Kong for my layover two-way area and Alabhu got a call and I was in Hong Kong and we did this whole interview. And why this? Because we had built a product now, because we had at the
00:18:03
Speaker
At least a total clarity for that is, I mean, this is going to be a part of it. But what will be the larger thing? We were also sort of not sure. And light speed again, we had at least some clarity pedigree. So it's like, okay, answer. So by the time I reach SESF, we were in the extreme monitor.
00:18:19
Speaker
Now, there, when I was talking to users, of course, I met a lot of people who were my friends from IIT, or my B-spool, and many of them were founders. So, they said...
00:18:37
Speaker
So, I mean, not now because of course we... But because I was there for three weeks, the first two weeks were really good. I mean, I remember because we were so...
00:18:51
Speaker
I would say, I was so worried about that year's time. I spent hours and hours in making sure that my calendar is full. I would like every month. So this first two weeks was incredible. I had so many talks, so much clarity that by the middle of next week, I was getting a good clarity. Okay. And which was about that, you know, two things basically came up. One was that diagnosis is very important.
00:19:18
Speaker
any people decision that you make, it has to be based on some analytics and insight. What is the problem? Are your teams worried about goals clarity? Are they worried about manager's contact? Are they worried about vision? Do they even have the clarity of what the company's focus is? But the last thing that you can go and do that is stop at diagnostics because that's where survey tools stop. And we were very sure that we don't want to become a diagnostic tool. We want to become a tool which closes the loop.
00:19:44
Speaker
That was very clear. So close is the loop. How do you go and close the loop is we identify that and build something, so build better managers, provide some tools to give them that clarity. And by the time, because that clarity was there. So one of my friend who's my colleague with connected has been Nexus. We met with Nexus and met with Narayan and Jishun. They were pretty impressed by the vision, by the team as well. And I think I remember by the time I reached back to Bangalore, we almost had a term shift.
00:20:14
Speaker
So that's where we raised our seed funding. We had a few angels as well. So the co-founder of hudan, the co-founder of exotel, they also invested a small fund in New York. So we raised our first seed round. And yeah, that's how people box cut.
00:20:35
Speaker
But I'm still not clear on product catheter. Like what part of product can I understand? The diagnostic part, which is a survey tool. But what is the other part of the product which fixes issues? And that is a really good question because neither did we. And that's a very honest answer. We also did not know that. We had some idea was that it might go through
00:21:00
Speaker
building great managers. And to a large, to be very honest, I always say that peoplebox had two parts of our journey. One is this early 2019 when we started actually building the product till mid 2021 and then mid 2021 too now, which again in the last six months.
00:21:20
Speaker
And this first two and a half years versus this last six months, everything changed. So our entire first two and a half years was about this thing. We have become a good player or a good, I wouldn't say good player, but build a good product into diagnosis. But that's not what we want to do. We do not. And not that there are no unicorns, you know, if you look at Culture Amp, that's a unicorn just in diagnosis.
00:21:45
Speaker
But because we were hell-bent or it was our vision to helping businesses drive better results, we know that we are for attention. Well, it won't come just from diagnostic. So what is that closing the loop was something that we also, I would very candidly say struggled and spent our next two and a half years.
00:22:04
Speaker
Now, what are the things we did? And almost none of it worked very well. So, we realized that for any business to go and grow, the culture is, of course, a very important part. And the managers need to be strengthened. You know the famous saying that people don't leave bad companies, they leave bad
Developing AI Coaching Tools
00:22:21
Speaker
worst. And that's very true. When it was all our surveys or talking to the people, we were realizing manager issues. Now, how would I go and build better managers? I think this was very, very important.
00:22:33
Speaker
Now, because we were selling to the US companies, one common thing that we found there was the culture of one-on-ones. There was a really, really good culture of one-on-ones there. And the second bit that we realized that most of the managers required some support. Now, we were coming from a counseling background. So we said, can we go and replicate into coaching? And we're talking about managers coaching.
00:22:59
Speaker
The only thing that we had was here, we don't want to go back to the whole human element. Because then we'll go back to the same problem that we saw last time. Then there will be coaches and there will be this. And again, better up was another unicorn in making. This time, market size wasn't a problem. But we wanted to build a product now. We were two product guys from practical. We wanted to build something which say, yeah, we have built a good product. So,
00:23:26
Speaker
For us, the very first thing, again, you can call it a fascination, we built our first product, there was an AI coach. An AI coach which helps you connect better with your employees to great one-on-one. So people are already doing one-on-ones. And they are doing mostly people who do in a Google Doc or running Google Doc or the newest tool like Motion, Sunlight, all that. So we said, can we build something which is sort of has a coaching element which helps you do your better one-on-one?
00:23:56
Speaker
And that became our sort of first sort of product. Didn't work. Didn't really work. And this was what, like it was a, so by one-on-one, you mean like, say the routine meetings when I... Yeah, that's a good question. What is a one-on-one? Okay. In fact, we also didn't know what is a one-on-one. Okay.
00:24:20
Speaker
So, if you go back to the philosophy, one-on-one is basically a concept introduced by Andy Grove back in those eight days, and he spoke about it in his very famous book, High Output Pyramid. So, one-on-one basically, at least in the area, now I'm seeing a very good culture of that in India as well. It's nothing but a weekly or a fortnight meeting between a manager and his direct report, where it is driven by the
00:24:49
Speaker
by the direct. It's not given by the manager. So a typical meeting is, I have a feedback for you. This meeting is that opposite. Where are the challenges you are facing? Is there anything I can do with your career growth? Are you happy with the product? Are you happy with me?
00:25:11
Speaker
Are you facing any challenges, how are things at home? It's all about employees. And that company's impactful factor in retaining talent and giving employees, helping them see the best out of them. If you look at the performance reviews, they're always backward looking.
00:25:41
Speaker
last October you didn't do that or last September you did good. But here everything is forward-looked. So, this culture was blooming. There were a lot of tools coming as well. And we said that we wanted to add a poaching element to it.
00:25:54
Speaker
Now, the challenge that we faced here, which we realized was that because the coaching was based on the diagnostics or the survey that we were running, everything was anonymous there. So, imagine that you are a manager with four direct reports, we go and get that your team is struggling with, say, getting clarity.
00:26:18
Speaker
Now, there might be a possibility two or three may not have even answered. So because of the anonymity, we can't share first all the things. Second is who said what? And when you coach people, we need to be very specific. With this guy, this is the issue. So it didn't really match that the input that we needed for an AI coach because it wasn't sufficient. So once we said that, let's focus on the one-on-one.
00:26:49
Speaker
Let's go and build it. And the idea there was, we knew that the one-on-one tool is not going to be our main thing. But if we go into the one-on-one tool, it will help us understand some of the problems. That what it is that people are facing, what people were struggling with. I would say for the next two and a half years, that's what we did. We signed up, so in mid to or in slightly late 2020, we did sort of a
00:27:18
Speaker
hack of we did an offer where we signed up some 450 plus companies, we did some fees, but we said up until this employee, you don't have to go and pay much. And what was the product like? You built a product for one-on-one. This was one-on-one. This was employee engagement surveys. And one of the very important thing that we were seeing in almost every survey was the lack of clarity of goals.
00:27:43
Speaker
So, we also built a goals tracking software or you can say OKR software.
Focus on OKRs and Remote Work Solutions
00:27:48
Speaker
Although that wasn't our most sort of code at that moment. And that is now, that was in future just about to get changed.
00:27:58
Speaker
So what is that one-on-one tool? So like you said, people use maybe a Google Doc where they make notes. So what was your tool like? So what our tool will go and do is the very first thing it will go and do that, it will suggest you what to talk. So we had a long list of suggested talking points. Different for manager, different for direct report. And this becomes our most known or most used feature. Because when you go into Google Doc, it's a very normal phenomenon. Nobody prepares for one-on-one.
00:28:26
Speaker
So the manager will go and ask, hey, do you have anything to talk? The direct will say, no. And then they will start talking about, what is your project? What is your project? And it took us half an hour, which could have been such critical, which would have been so important, God-wasted. You could have talked about feedback. So we would go and tell these are the things you could talk about. Another thing that we had was the ability to rate
00:28:55
Speaker
employees' productivity and performance. So, Covid had hit, okay, and everybody was working from home now. So, people were struggling that the days where an employee can go to a manager by swirling his or her chair around and put a hand onto the shoulder and say, I'm struggling with it, are born.
00:29:11
Speaker
So what we did was we launched this feature where just before a one-on-one, we asked the employee, how is your productivity or how would you rate your productivity since your last one-on-one? So they can now, we are not asking their performance. It's not a self-perform. It's just about productivity. Are you facing any issues? Similarly, we'll ask the manager, how would you rate his or her performance since your past one-on-one? And this is only visible to the manager.
00:29:35
Speaker
The benefit is that if I as a manager can see the productivity and performance before the one-on-one, I will talk about it. And that's what it did.
00:29:44
Speaker
But two surprisingly, it even became quite famous in India. We got a lot of customers, but Danzo became our first big customer who just wanted for one-on-one, even though we had a good suite of products now. We have employee engagement. We have goals. We have one-on-ones. And in one-on-ones, we have this whole continuous performance check-ins. So this was the product, but there were a lot of other things. For example, I'll tell you some of the challenges that people face with Google Doc.
00:30:12
Speaker
Google Doc either can be private or can be shared. It can't be both. So if I am using a shared running Google Doc, I have some private thing. So I'm going to use my Apple Notes or Google Key. Another thing that it has, that it challenges is that action items. A lot of one-on-ones doesn't have action items. So if I put it in somewhere, I don't get a reminder. So we build a feature, if we put an action item, it comes on the top. He last few weeks went to one-on-ones and it also gives you a reminder in Slack and all.
00:30:44
Speaker
Similarly, when you do your one-on-one, can you see your goals or your direct report goals at the center of it so that you don't miss talking about it? Because a lot of times people talk about goals at the performance review time. So these were some of the things about our work.
00:30:57
Speaker
One product is one-on-one. One product is a survey product. What else did you launch? We launched a gold-blocking software, where you can keep your goals for OKRs because obviously we had OKRs introduced in Fractal when we were there. Quite amazing phenomenon. We loved that. Talk to me about OKR. What is OKR? I don't understand OKR. I can spend hours and some time.
00:31:23
Speaker
I probably may want to talk about how did we get into the whole OKRs thing. So OKR is our core and I want to spend a good bit of time into that. But how did it become our core is a sort of a journey that happened. That's why I said we had two and a half years of introspection and exploration and then that sort of a scale or that growth that you look for or at least you who I fought.
00:31:50
Speaker
So when we launched goals, we weren't very specific about OKRs. We were like, because it was consistently coming in surveys that we don't have clarity about goals. And companies were also asking, if you want to go and solve that, we need a goal-structuring software. Now, we can't do that. Our one-on-ones sit at one place, and goals at another place. And we wanted to merge, too, because in one-on-ones, we wanted them to have a clarity about goals. We built this goals feature. But our focus remained the same, that we want to build a high-performing
00:32:17
Speaker
Engage culture for hyper growth startups through building great manager. And it took us some time, but how again, you know, there's a when in trouble, go back to first principle. What is a great manager? How do you go and define a great manager? Okay. And a very good analogy that we got was from a sports person. What is a great sports person?
00:32:42
Speaker
You can say, I mean, what makes Sachin great? Because he's very nice at heart, because he does a lot of PR, because he works at home. Great force version win matches. Simple, that's true. It's a full demo. So, our belief about the good managers, what? Good managers or great managers are one who score high on manager's rating when he asks in the Sunday. What do we ask? We would go and ask,
00:33:12
Speaker
How motivated are you to work under your management? And whoever would rate for their team wants to work and their team wants to work, of course, they would stick with them and if you have a retention. And after working with three companies, we realized that many of these 9.8 and 9.6 managers got fired because they could not deliver results or some other things.
00:33:34
Speaker
It became clear to us that a great manager is somebody who consistently delivers great team results. And when we had that thing, we realized that at the center of it,
00:33:48
Speaker
Whatever culture we want to build, whether it is engaged or high growth, goals are at the center of it. It's not at the periphery, it's not another feature. It is at the center because if you just go and crack that bit,
00:34:07
Speaker
Everything else becomes easy. Your ability to have better manager-employee relationship, your ability to build a culture of feedback and recognition, your ability to do this continuous performance review, even if you need to go back to business review, everything falls in place just if you solve that goals problem. Now, what is the goals problem?
00:34:31
Speaker
The goals problem is that does every employee knows that what exactly are their goals? Do they know that how their goal or the work they're doing, how is it aligned to the overall company's purpose or their strategic objective? And most importantly, what is company's strategic objective?
00:34:52
Speaker
your top leaders in the middle of the night and you ask them this simple question, what is the company's top three strategic priorities? You would be surprised what people say and this is the leadership. I'm talking about top leadership, how misaligned they are. And that is where we realize that the answer is in both in a framework and a product and that framework is okay.
00:35:23
Speaker
Because our companies were using our tools, we already had a goals of OKR software, we really realized the power of. Now coming back to what is OKR.
00:35:34
Speaker
First of all, OKR is something which is just taking the whole startup world by storm. It's spreading like wildfire today. So there are startups like Zita, Bhawan, who is the CEO. He swears why. But at least we did some very, very high level research. We realized that 70% of India's unicorns today use OKR. Now, what is OKR? OKR is a goals framework.
00:36:03
Speaker
and which actually helps you align your molds all the way from top to the bottom. So, it was actually started again by Andy Grove, the famous guru who also started one-on-ones or at least the concept of one-on-ones. So, he did it in Intel and he wrote it in his book as well.
00:36:23
Speaker
It was made famous by an employee of it, who later became the investor of Google, John Doar. He wrote a book about that. I'll make sure what matters as well. So this is the early age of Google. When Google was very small, less than 100 employee company. And John Doar went to them and said, yeah, I learned something from my boss, Andy. And he had this really good framework. And he should go and use that. OK. And then Google didn't. And then Spotify, LinkedIn, Twitter, in India, you know, Zeta, Zeroda.
00:36:52
Speaker
hundreds of companies. And the thing about OKR, right, before I go into the detail, it's not that this company came and said, yeah, we did OKR, it was helpful.
Aligning Strategy with OKRs
00:37:02
Speaker
They said that we became this because we used OKR. That's what OKR is able to do. So OKR has multiple things. But the number one thing that OKR does is that it helps you focus.
00:37:16
Speaker
A very good saying is that OKRs are a reflection of how focused the company is. And what OKRs do? Let's take any other frameworks like KRAs or KPIs. So you say that I use KPI. So what will happen? You say my KPIs are revenue or could be in a SaaS world MRR.
00:37:36
Speaker
In a consumer world it might be mau or near you, okay? And it's a metric that you track, okay? In KR, what happens is that people go and put some key results area that you have to drive better business, you have to drive better customer success, okay? And they're usually set for annual ones and looked annually as well, mainly for a performance group.
00:37:57
Speaker
OK, it starts from the top. What is company's top objectives are? And they break into objective and key results. So objective could be, for example, for Google objective would be to become the fastest or the best search engine. How do you do a key result? A key result is measurable. It's measurable means that ensure that you have submitted 20 million daily activities. OK, something. And then for that, what is the objective of the product team, engineering team, and then further down a product manager?
00:38:28
Speaker
Now, what makes OKR? As you can see, there are multiple things about OKR. One is that it aligns. Second thing is, you break it into smaller channels. So, rather than an annual, you break it into quarterly. So, every quarter you set it.
00:38:40
Speaker
Then another thing is, it is very motivating. So, the objective is motivating at the same time, measurable as well. So, you know where you are going and how do you know you are going there? So, objective is, where do I want to go? The key result is that, how do I know I am going there? Another thing is the moonshot. You set very high goals, all of these things. But all of these things, I would say, are not the reason what makes OK, are so disruptive.
00:39:07
Speaker
The number one reason what makes OKR so disruptive is this five-letter word called focus. And I want to give you with an example. And that example is really, really important one, probably the one way I think how to understand OKR. Let's go back to 2015. If you remember, 2015 was a bloodbath year for food tech sector.
00:39:34
Speaker
Instead, there were tiny halls and there were food funders in Swiggy and Sumitra and all. And nobody was ready to fund. Now, for a moment, let's imagine that you are Swiggy. And Swiggy, if you look at Swiggy at early time, they had the least amount of funding, they had the least number of cities, they had the least number of restaurants, and they were not giving what everybody was doing, which is giving discounts.
00:40:02
Speaker
And Swiggy Billie was there, I'm going to go and win this market based on just one thing which is timely delivery. I'm going to focus on time. And the philosophy that Harsha had, which I really loved about, he said that bad food delivered in good time is a good experience. And he said, look at Domino's. Domino's don't have the world's best pizza. But we are a billions of dollar company because they deliver in 30 minutes and nobody is able to beat them. And they are growing like crazy. And that's what we want to do.
00:40:31
Speaker
Now, let's take a hypothetical scenario. Let's say this is December 2015. You are the CEO of Swiggy and I am an investor. I'm a tiger. And I come to you and I say, Harsha, I really like you. I really like your company. Okay. You are at, say, 4,000 deliveries a day. If by next quarter you reach to 10,000 deliveries a day, I'm going to sign you a $20 million check.
00:40:59
Speaker
And I mean every word of it. Okay. And I go away and you call everybody and you say, guys, we have a goal. Okay. What would be your number one goal? Number of deliveries. It makes sense. The number one goal should be that to make 10,000 deliveries by end of next quarter, right? It has everything written on it. It is smart. It is measurable. You know, it is a specific measurable team and all that.
00:41:26
Speaker
But there is one problem with this goal that OKR solves. This goal doesn't talk about how. How are you going to do that?
00:41:38
Speaker
What is it that you're going to focus on in the next three months that you're going to achieve to 10,000? Because it has taken you some time to come forward. It's a moonshot goal suddenly from 4,000 to 10,000. So you've got to do something different. What is that something different? You've got to do something different. And that is a challenge that you see with every hyper growth company. They put numbers into their goals, even though they have strategies. Now the problem with not including your strategy in the goal is this.
00:42:07
Speaker
Let's suppose, now let's suppose we set ourselves as this thing. Every week I'm going to go and track it. Okay. So now how is it communicating to your team? We have to go and achieve 10,000 delay of this. So everybody's going to do something. Somebody is going to say, let's go and launch in two more cities. Let's go and focus on discounts. Let's go. Yeah. Let's get more restaurants.
00:42:31
Speaker
Let's focus on a better onboarding experience. And this is what you call a textbook definition of misalignment. Because now every team is going into different direction to achieve a particular number. So now if you were to use OKRs here, what would be a number one objective? What would an OKR look like? So your company objective will be this. Become the fastest food delivery company
00:43:02
Speaker
The important thing here is fast test, which means I am telling that our focus is going to be speed. Now, what will be the key results? The key results will be 95% of deliveries should happen within 37 minutes. The next key result will be client NPS should grow from 40 to 60. The next key result would be increase your average monthly delivery per customer from 5 to 8.
00:43:29
Speaker
And then if that happens, achieve 10,000 delete delivery. Because if you do this, 10,000 delete delivery will automatically happen. So what you're communicating to people is the most important thing is how. And it's not that the companies don't know how, how is nothing but a strategy. They spent hours and days into going into the, you know, all these off-sites and all or getting into this,
00:43:53
Speaker
whiteboard to building that strategy. It is they forget to replicate that strategy into goals and bring it into their business. So what happens is that when you actually go and set your goals and review it, nobody talk about a strategy until end of the year or end of the year.
00:44:08
Speaker
And that's the number one thing that makes OKRs different. And when we learned that goals are at the center of it, we showed that for us, our OKR or our mission is just about one thing. Helping startups, mainly hyper growth startups, grow tenants by focusing on the right goals and measuring them in a magically easy way.
00:44:32
Speaker
That's what, because if you do that, like I said, everything falls. And that is what our journey has been saved for the past six months where we have been able to very, very much focus on that and force get to, you know, finally find our four on a, what do you call a, you know, sweet spot. And then of course, you know, the product market fit. So.
00:44:58
Speaker
So this would be like a waterfall, right? Like it will start from the top and then have to be drilled down. And it would need a fair amount of setup time, right? Like you would need to really, as a founder, first as a founder, you would need to think about what are those objectives and broad metrics. And then you would need to think about how does that metric translate for each of my teams? Like, is that how it happens? So, so generally that you're thinking,
00:45:28
Speaker
I think the question is, does it take a lot of time from the founders? The answer is, know if you do it smartly. Because that time is already being spent. Like I said, every company has a strategy. Because that's the strategy they go and articulate to investors. If you look at any industry, let's look at crypto. Let's look at some of the industries.
00:45:48
Speaker
We don't employ insurance, okay, or you can look at, you know, even e-commerce, right? When investor come and ask you this question, how are you going to win the market? How are you going to go and beat it? They have an answer. Sometimes this answer is cost, sometimes this answer is better product, or this, our focus is going to be this. You know, for example, what for sweetie the focus was about title, I think almost every startup have that.
00:46:13
Speaker
The problem is that they keep it somewhere stored and long and do not reflect that or articulate in their goal. So while they go and say we are going to go and focus on, say, time or cost or something, when they set goals, they are nothing but business as usual metrics. OE revenue, OE MRR, OE ARR, OE DAU, OE MEU, OE Marchant and all.
00:46:40
Speaker
which does not communicate to your teams. What is our focus? When we say that there's a misalignment, people don't get misalignment about number. If you go and say, my goal is to reach 10 million ARR, you wake up people in the middle of the night, they'll say, yes, our goal is 10 million ARR. That is not alignment. Alignment is the how.
00:47:01
Speaker
What are you going to focus on? What is the company's number one strategy priority which will help you achieve that 10 million error is the where misalignment happens. And that happens because your goals that you track on a weekly, daily or a monthly level and the strategies that you have set are miles apart.
00:47:19
Speaker
So if you just do it smartly, you know, before the quarter, anyways, teams are meeting. Anyways, the leadership is meeting. Anyways, they're building out a strategy. When you're defining your goal, just make sure that you're reflected. And that's why OKR has given you that framework, very easy. Put an objective, put a key result, and then give it to your teams to align. Now, does it require some effort? Does it require some learning? Does it require some coaching? Absolutely, yes. OKR, despite being
00:47:47
Speaker
So powerful have a very high 90% first-time implementation failure rate. 90%. In 90% of the companies, OKR fails at the first time. In fact, even in Google, it took 18 months. And it takes a long time. Because people don't know how to do it right. They do it in the wrong way. They just convert their KPIs into OKR. A very common behavior is set and forget. You set about it and you forget.
00:48:14
Speaker
But if you do it rightly, it doesn't take any more effort than you're already spending. In fact, the return on investor, in fact, it will save you a lot of time while giving you a 10x better result. So essentially, you're saying that just do your documentation properly when you're making your strategy. That documentation properly is setting the OKRs.
00:48:40
Speaker
The most important thing when it comes to OKRs, in fact, any time it goes, it's too big. One is setting them right. But I would say that's just the one part. OKR fails, when OKR fails, right? When we say OKR fails, what it means is that they were not able to bring that substantial value or an impact that your earlier framework, could it be a KPI, KRA, balance scorecard, whatever it was, or business as usual metrics were able to. That's what means that OKR fails.
00:49:07
Speaker
This is the number two reason why OKR failed is not setting them right. But there is a bigger one, which is set and forget. You're not tracking them. So a very common behavior that we have seen in companies is you spend two, three days setting your OKR, put it into a Google Sheet or in an HRMS system or even in a sort of OKR performance management system. And then you forget about it. You go back to a weekly KPI tracking sheet where every day you track every KPI and
00:49:37
Speaker
And then now you have two parallel goal tracking systems. One is an OKR, which only looks once in a quarter or twice in a quarter. And the famous saying that the only worse thing than a bad news is bad news late. That's what happens with OKR. At the end of the quarter, we have to focus on the customer experience.
00:50:03
Speaker
because nobody was able to bring strategy into your bone tracking meeting.
00:50:09
Speaker
So while documentation is an important thing, it's just starting. The most important thing, without any goals, is tracking. And when you say tracking, I would say specifically your business review meeting. Because if you look at your goals night, the only time when goals are looked at are your review meeting. Now they could be your weeklies, it could be your MBR, QVR, whatever it was. So those meetings, if you track your goals in the right way, that's why our number one OKR is to help businesses
00:50:38
Speaker
track their goals in the magical easy way and of course the second one focus them on the right goal as well. That only of course you know if you do the tracking right that's when you are able to achieve that results. Okay so tell me what is the usage and you like it will start with the founder first signing up and setting something and then
00:51:00
Speaker
Yeah. Like you probably need to create like a hierarchy on the tool first. Like what's the user journey? Like just talk to me about that. Yeah. So the hierarchy is usually automatically created because we integrate with any HRMS system. So the employee records are usually, that's the single source of truth is either an HRMS system or people, if they don't use HRMS system, they already have data on the Google sheet. So we just. So you know, reporting managers and everything about it.
00:51:27
Speaker
I think it pretty much starts from either the founder's team or sometimes strategy or also get involved there. So it always starts with setting company objectives, you know, and usually not more than three that what we said on a quarterly level. So if people come, they put their goals objective. So one objective, three key result, one objective, three key result, one objective, three key result. And of course, we also hand hold that until you know, this is the board objective.
00:51:53
Speaker
A lot of times people make key results as an initiative. Like I'll give you an example. Launch iPhone app. That's not really a key result. A go-to-key result is get 4.8 rating on App Store with a minimum of 50 years. Because it's an outcome, not an output. So the very first thing is about setting the goals. Now the problem, and then of course we give it to the department heads, the functional head, and they set them both and they need to align it to the one.
00:52:17
Speaker
To give an example, let's suppose that one of the very important thing for you is about user experience. So you say that, yeah, my user, which might be, let's suppose, could be a salesperson, okay? That my salesperson NPS should be 50. It's a good key result, okay? What you cannot do or what we don't recommend is that, okay, that's your company objective. Now, engineering goal objective is build better tech speed.
00:52:47
Speaker
we build a bugless product, launch three versions of app, because it needs to be something which aligns with your overall company objective, which is the sales percent MPS. So going back to that swiggy example, right? If you go and say, my focus is on speed, then the engineer objective and key result should be about improving speed. Customer success should be the same, customer support should be the same, product should be the same.
00:53:12
Speaker
Everybody's goal should go and align to our focus which is fastest time and then whatever it is. So, that's how a typical setting goals happen which is typically a less than a week exercise once every quarter.
00:53:28
Speaker
But the real journey is what happens during the quarter, which is a tracking. And how is this setting up done? Like, there'll be fields to enter the object. There will be fields to enter. No, this is very, again, an important thing that you said. When we started building our goals product, we had a very interesting epiphany. We realized that almost all the companies that were putting their goals, they had some two goals
00:53:58
Speaker
storing or goals tracking software. It could be a HRMS system. Most of the HRMS system comes with goals because obviously they have to do a performance review. It could be a project management tool like a Asana or a Notion or even it could be a performance management tool that they would need.
00:54:15
Speaker
But almost none of them were using any of these tools for their goals. They were using simple spreadsheets. Could be Excel, could be a Google Sheet. And of course, we tried to understand why and it was a no-win because it's simple. So what our number one OKR became was to build a super easy to use single page application.
Enhancing Goal Tracking and Meetings
00:54:35
Speaker
which is as simple as a spreadsheet so that you never have to go on any point, have all the benefits that a spreadsheet doesn't have. Because if you put your goals in, you have to have multiple tabs or multiple places. You can't see an alignment. You can't see go on multiple things. You can't have a log. You can't give notifications. Think of it as a spreadsheet or a Gmail, which is a single page application. 95% of the things can happen on that page. That's how it happens.
00:55:06
Speaker
And so once everybody has set this up, how does the tracking happens? Like you said, magically tracking. That is now the way. So let's just go back to the old days. Okay. Let's say you are sales guy. Okay. And your job is to get 10 crore revenue. Okay. Now you use a CRM system, maybe a Salesforce lead square and HubSpot. Okay.
00:55:30
Speaker
Now, you have both set either in a spreadsheet or in an HRIS system. So, when you do your sales, what is the first thing you do? You go and put it on your CRR because that's the only way you want to track. I'm asking you, please can you also go and put it in the Google Sheet? And then, because we use another Google Sheet for our weekly tracking, can you also put it there? What would you want me to do? You want my sales? You want my spreadsheet data?
00:56:00
Speaker
But the number one problem, like I said, the companies face when they put their OKRs into some places is set and forget. People don't update it. And the chief of staff, the HR, the leadership, they update it. And one of the main reasons why OKRs are not
00:56:16
Speaker
are trapped in a weekly basis because getting them to update it is so difficult. So the very first magical thing that we go and do is we integrate it with any software that you use wherever that data is set. It might be sitting on a database, could be a MySQL, Postgres or all that. It might be on a SaaS tool, it might be a humspont inside, Jira and all that, or might be on another spreadsheet. We go and say,
00:56:44
Speaker
any key result which is a number must be sitting somewhere. You go and integrate the moment it gets updated. So now you have one place in the company, one single source of truth in the company where your entire company's goals are aligned and updated in real time. So now think about it, the impact of think about it. A lot of business review meetings happen about visibility.
00:57:15
Speaker
Now, you don't need to have a meeting for visibility. You don't even need to ask somebody because that data is clear. It might be coming from, let's think about marketing team. Marketing and data comes from Google Analytics to Google AdWords, from HubSpot to, you know, reply. Even a small company like us use some 10 tools for marketing.
00:57:35
Speaker
But a larger 200 employee company must be using some 50 tools. So collating that data and getting that updated is extremely difficult. But now that you have that, at least your business review meeting is nothing about visibility. It's just about strategy, red flags, roadblocks and all, and the future plan. So that's the first thing we do. But then there is a second bigger problem, which is also very interesting, which is very rarely, in fact, almost never,
00:58:06
Speaker
The goals tracking in a business review meeting happen where your goals are. So where are your goals? Your goals are either in a spreadsheet or in a say an HRM. But where does what happens in the business review? Most of the business review, there are PPTs.
00:58:24
Speaker
So there will be a free sales team, marketing team, operation team. They will go and spend two or three days, find graphs and find narratives and find inner PPT and will go and project. And people will ask questions. Why? Why PPT? Because PPT is pluggable. You can put anything there. You can put a story, you can put the progress, you can put status, you can put graphs and all that, which of course, a typical goal sheet would want because a goal's tracking will mainly have a snapshot.
00:58:56
Speaker
Now because it is a PPT, now people go and focus on PPT rather than what is the status of the goals are. Okay. And again, it creates multiple tracking systems. What we have worn and make sure that if you just fix this problem, you fix your business review meetings and make sure that there is one tool where your goals are and the tracking of them back by making all the data and narrative pluggable.
00:59:21
Speaker
So I can drag and drop. I can drag and drop a story. I can allow people to ask questions earlier. I can allow people to answer a simple example. And this is the most common behavior. Can you imagine any meeting where notes are not taken and action items are not there? Every recurring meeting, notes must be taken. Somebody notes are an action item. You launch this or let's go and focus on this and let's create a campaign for this.
00:59:52
Speaker
how many times the action items created in the prior meeting, in the next meeting starts with the previous week action item or previous month action item. Very, very rarely. So you created action item and then people forget about it. Okay. Now, if you make it so easily, what can happen is you make action item, the next business that you start with an action item, what were the action items that we discussed. And if there's anything you can take a small snippet of say your GRA dashboard, put it in there.
01:00:22
Speaker
So, the time you need to prepare for your business, it uses so much. Now, if the time needed for the business review is less, if the visibility is not a problem, you can track your goals much more frequently and in a much shorter time. So, you don't need 3 hours. You can spend 30 minutes, talk about the challenges, talk about the plans, discuss the strategy. Done! So, you don't need few years now. You can move into monthly business reviews or weeklies.
01:00:49
Speaker
And that is where the magic of tracking your goals comes in. If you remove these blockers, that, oh my God, updating takes a challenge, creating PPT takes a challenge. So one of our OKR is a three-letter word. Kill that PPT. That's it. Kill that PPT. No business review meeting should have a PPT.
01:01:14
Speaker
I'll give you more examples. Let's suppose you are showing me a graph on a PPT. And I say I'm the CEO, and I go and notice onto the graph and say, I'm going to go more about this. I start asking questions. So somebody said, we did, say, 120 trials. And I said, but I want to know more about, among these 120 trials, how many were from, say, ICP? How many came from this region? And the guy says, I'm sorry, I don't have that data. Let me come back to you.
01:01:40
Speaker
Very common thing, right? The reason is because PPT doesn't have an RNN property to dig deep. But if you make your data pluggable, you can actually go as much deep as you want. And people don't even need to have this blindsided view that you usually have in the review.
01:01:58
Speaker
So that's the most important sort of thing for us, that if we have an aim to help startups grow 10x and achieve those moonshot goals, then tracking becomes the most important thing, followed by helping them set right goals.
01:02:20
Speaker
Is the integration manual? The one-time integration because there would be so many different tools. Is the onboarding process for you like a manual onboarding process where you have to integrate all the data sources? Well, actually, surprisingly and very proudly, no. Because if you think about it, the point that it is, it's a big problem and we also internally discussed it.
01:02:45
Speaker
That year, how can we go and integrate with every tool? Okay. So the easier part, let's see, was JPL. JPL integrates, so we've become a middle. JPL is a tool, but we decided against it. And the reason we decided against it is because the same problem that if we put JPL, the experience of integrating with another tool is bad. First, I go and sign up on JPL, then I go and build an API through JPL. What we did was a native integration. It should be so simple that I click
01:03:15
Speaker
Let's say I put a link of a Google Sheet or I put the MySQL connection, put a SQL or a cell value or a jQuery and that's it. You do not require anything from us to actually go and integrate. If you are a user or an admin of that product, it should be that simple. But we want to take it way ahead. I mean, this is just the start. Right now, what you are doing is you are setting a goal and then integrating.
01:03:43
Speaker
But just think about it. A lot of goals are not even set. Let's suppose that you are using MailChimp for your campaign. But you forgot to add that goal. I need to do something about my campaign. But if you're using it, there's got to be some goal associated with that. This goal must be aligned.
01:04:04
Speaker
Can you let our mission or vision is that how can we go make it so easy for people that they can capture goals even without writing it so that when they are at Mailchimp, they identify, this is a goal, one click automatically integrate with people. Now I have a goal. It is automatically integrate the moment the campaign runs, whatever the key results come automatically updated in people book and aligned with the overall board.
01:04:31
Speaker
So like I said, that's why we say that the ROKR is to help companies track it in a medically easy way. And my companies are mainly, our main niche is hypergrowth startup.
01:04:42
Speaker
So this would need some sort of a technical administrator first who can connect Mailchimp or who can connect Salesforce or all of these tools who can do that one-time connection. Not really. And as long as you are an admin, if you are an admin of a HubSpot, you don't really need a technical guy. And for wherever you need a technical one, for example, a MySQL, you anyways are the owner. See, the people who need to go and connect it with, say, a MySQL, mostly are going to be engineers and they are anyways the...
01:05:11
Speaker
If I'm a customer success guy, let's suppose, then I use Kinsight. Anyways, the admin for that. So it's easy for me to go and sort of integrate with it or similarly on AppSpot as well.
01:05:25
Speaker
Like how would it happen? Say like a MailChimp integration. Think of HubSpot, right? So what if you just go and do that is you say this data comes from HubSpot. We ask for HubSpot credentials. And if you are an admin, we allow it. Then you go to HubSpot and you click that this data is coming from this place. So you click on the field. So let's suppose the number is revenue.
01:05:45
Speaker
OK, or trials. Now both of these data sets in HubSpot. So you just go, this is the data. The moment it gets updated in HubSpot, it automatically gets updated. So you've built your own version of Zapier basically then? Yeah, but only for people both versus this one. And one of the things that we have ensured, and again, that is very important OK for us, is the turnaround time. And we could even say that as long as there is another tool which has an open API, we will go into integrating, even if it is your internal tool.
01:06:14
Speaker
Okay, so what kind of customers use Peoplebox? Give me some case studies of the integration, how it happened, what kind of results did they see.
01:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, so all of our customers are, most of our customers are hyper-growth startups. So, if you look up what India, you know, Danzo, Katabook, Plum, you know, Nova Manifed, Silver Push, Exotel, even Lightspeed, the VC firm uses Peoplebox.
01:06:46
Speaker
And like I said, OK, this is the center of it, but we have different use cases as well. We also have a tool that we didn't talk about when remote hits because we were also always about closing. We launched a small feature called Coffee Connect, which basically replicates the water cooler chats and connect, you know, help people. We also have a performance review entirely in Slack. So because integration is very core,
01:07:08
Speaker
One of our focus is to get people onto people's walks as little as possible. Can they do work outside people's walks? But still get the best value out of it so that you don't have one more software fatigue. So most of the companies are funded, well-funded, fast-growing startups.
01:07:24
Speaker
And they use from all, like for their entire goals, performance management and employee engagement, because we have a full suite now and everything centered around goals. You know, so people use this for running their surveys, for connecting their employees to way better peer connect or doing their one-on-ones or doing performance management. And of course, most importantly, setting and tracking their goals. Yeah. Is it an HR driven activity typically or like?
01:07:49
Speaker
Who drives it? That's a very interesting question. There are two bits about our software. The performance management and employee engagement is HR driven. The OKR is a mix of both. HR is involved, but there is also somebody from the founder's team or strategy who becomes owner to make sure that the strategy is well crafted and it is aligned because that becomes the more forte of the strategy in the founding team.
01:08:17
Speaker
So we work a lot close with founders or if they're a founding team like a chief of staff. So in a way, PeopleWorks is like the operating system for
01:08:31
Speaker
the software aspect of your organization. The people part of your organization, the people box is like the operating system for that. You can call it an operating system or a control panel or a command center, whichever way, for your culture, for the whole to help you build.
01:08:54
Speaker
high performing in English culture. And then, like I said, we primarily, like, a lot of people ask you, what is the ROI? What is, why should I go and spend? And I say, it's all about two hours. Two hours, okay? Results and retention. Like, a typical 100 employee company, if your target is, say, 200 crore, okay? And if you don't use people box or say, okay, you will most likely, say, achieve 200 crore. If you use that, it will be 250 crore or 240 crore, okay? That's, so we help you
01:09:21
Speaker
impact and grow your pipeline. So the cost of not using us might be that delta. And second is retention. Let's suppose if you, from say today, second February, from second February, 2022 to second February, 2023, you may have, you may get 10 undesired attrition. Okay. We will help you at least save three of them. So you can imagine the cost of these or the value of these three retentions. So ultimately that's what I'm when.
01:09:51
Speaker
So how big is the time for this? Like, you know, you made that mistake last time around when you were building for mental wellness and health, because this is not something which intuitively you would think, even though once you understand it, then you may have that conviction, but like common parlance way, it's not like people are asking, it's not there yet.
01:10:18
Speaker
As you will be surprised and then we can see that the cost of our CPC for Google AdWords has just gone crazy. The number of people who are searching for it and at the same time the whole competition as well. But you are right. I think what you are saying is that it's not like HRMS system or it's not like a CRM system that if you have a Salesforce, you must have that. But that is changing very, very increasingly fast.
01:10:46
Speaker
Like I said, you know, we did have some, you know, some high-level research. We realized that 90%, sorry, 70% of India's unicorn are using OKRs and OKRs are any way of doing better goals management and business will be becoming very fast. And ultimately it comes down to efficiency. If you think about it, right? Any business, and of course, we focus a lot on startups, but any business, the moment they go over 50, use business review. They use a meeting to track their goals.
01:11:17
Speaker
there is a huge gap in inefficiency there which not just makes the preparation and the duration of that time really really high but the impact that they could do really and it doesn't affect like some smaller thing it affect your ultimate results.
01:11:34
Speaker
So this is becoming very big. I believe that even the startup's world that we focus on, that in itself is very, very huge. Because for them, the OKR, they're usually the early adopters. So what we're increasingly seeing, and I would say it has changed a lot in the past one and a half years, is that we don't really need to go and sell the concept of OKR anymore.
01:11:57
Speaker
It's becoming infinite. I would say yes to a lot of non-startup companies who come and say, we have heard about OKRs and how do you think and what is it? Tell us about it. Now it is all about we are already using OKRs or we are already thinking of using OKRs. You tell us how are you better than a Google Sheet or an HRIS system.
01:12:19
Speaker
because we both had the availability of both and that's where the conversation was. So do you see like this being as mainstream and big as say like you know Darwin Box became a unicorn obviously because every company of a certain size needs an HRIS and therefore it's a large market. Do you see that happening with people Box? Without a doubt.
01:12:41
Speaker
Without a doubt. And a good example, and if analogy you go and take that is lattice. I don't know if you heard of lattice, but lattice is again, their focus is not so much of goals, but it has increasingly become now, but they are also an OKR performance management. And they just raised, just like three days ago, they raised a round of, a big round with $3 billion valuation. So why see?
01:13:01
Speaker
But if you look at OKR market, just like although we are not just in the whole OKR, we are also a full project. But if you look at OKR, suddenly it becomes so hot, like Ali or the recent OKR tool which got acquired by Microsoft. There are at least three almost unicorns or unicorn companies in OKR space as well. So again, think about it.
01:13:23
Speaker
If we go back to the days of customer success software, or customer onboarding software, these new categories or sales enablement, where people are thinking, is this good to have? To very soon transform it is to must have. And I think KRS or goals management is at the cusp of that. Right now, it is already there for the start-ups, if you are. Very soon, I think it's spreading
01:13:53
Speaker
to the other industries as well. As soon as it's going to be a must have. So what's your moat then? There is no network effect as such, which, say, a social media platform might have, which ensures stickiness and all that work. I mean, here, people could replicate a similar version of it. So what is your moat? I think that's a good question. And I would just say one answer, or at least what we aim to be, and that is focus.
01:14:23
Speaker
Four, two things, fast-growing startups focus on helping them magically track it. There are so many things we can do. And look at our product. I think, I mean, we were talking about practice, right? And it was just so easy for me to go and say that there are practice. But look at us.
01:14:39
Speaker
we didn't do any better we had despite we burning our fingers and i would i would say that again repeatedly that you know it was so easy like you know they say life is so easy to speak and so difficult to live when we came out of practice we had clarity that one of the challenge we faced that practice was that we spread so thin and look at us we had performance management we have uh coffee connect
01:15:02
Speaker
And ultimately, it should have been like today. It's one of our very big move when we are compared against any of the tools we've done because we have a full. But we shouldn't have at the start at this stage, we should not have. We should have had that focus. So it's difficult for us. But if we have one more, it's just about this thing. We focus on helping startups, especially hyper growth startup.
01:15:25
Speaker
track their goals in a magical easy. As long as we do that, that's what remains. That's why integrations become very important for us. That's why business reviews become very important for us. Yeah, the integration product is not easy to replicate because there are so many integrations to do and to test each one, make sure it is like that magical experience that could be tough for a newcomer to replicate.
01:15:53
Speaker
Again, integration is still, I would say, people, at least I know some of the HRMS companies who are attempting, because at least in integration, you know what to do. I have to integrate with the Google Sheet.
01:16:10
Speaker
I think the place there which is again a bigger problem to solve or a very tough one is reviews because you can integrate with all the software in the world. But if nobody looks at goals, what's the point of integration? And where do people look at goals? They look at goals in the meeting. And that's a tough meeting. And that's a really tough, very, very tough problem because this meeting is a free flow
01:16:39
Speaker
A crazy meeting happens on a very, very unstructured way. Some do it on a Google Doc, some do it on a PPT, some do it on a dashboard. In fact, majority of the people, you know how the meeting happens. The founder sits, every department comes, and every department comes their own tool. Now, you need to go and structure the meeting. It would be very difficult for an HRIA system or a performance management system to even look at this problem.
01:17:08
Speaker
So that might be another sort of L1 answer of your mood that becomes for us. So how does the meeting product work in Peoplebox? Is it like a, like say you have one Canva where you can just put elements and then go to presenter mode, like something like that? Something like that. So you make so what, what the mode one thing if you look at, right, that there are three assets in a business review waiting. Okay. There is data.
01:17:36
Speaker
There is narratives and there is Q&A. Can you make all of these things pluggable? Okay, can you make sure? And at least that's what people try to do it on a free fatigue with a lot of disadvantages. Can you make it so pluggable that one click? Because my goals are already there. You know, notes are already being taken, comments are already there, action. Can you make all of these things pluggable? That's the, you know, how we want to go and disrupt it.
01:18:06
Speaker
Got it.
Target Market and Growth Ambitions
01:18:07
Speaker
OK. OK. So what kind of startups do you look at? Like, what is the size? 100 employees? 100 employees? Typically, 100 to say, now we have many thousand plus as well. So now, of course, it's growing. We have had Odaan as our customer, which is about 1,000 hundred. We have Exotel, which is 1,000. We have Danzo, which is 1,000 plus. But if I were to go and put our sweet spot, it's this.
01:18:35
Speaker
hundred to thousand and even more most of our customers are hundred to say five six hundred. I saw your pricing was about five to ten dollars like in that range right yeah so isn't it pretty expensive for like a uran with so many or is there like a volume for pricing also no no certainly we have a volume president we also be pricing for india so we have so one thing is we have we have today almost
01:19:04
Speaker
500 companies using us in 60 plus countries. So we have customers all across the world. We have, like we have company, which is a London Stock Exchange company. We have companies sort of all over the world. So our pricing is of course a global pricing, but at Mars, we do give, you know, of course some discounting. And we also have, you know, especially for the larger employees as they go, we do some Indian price.
01:19:31
Speaker
But what would I actually buy a license for?
01:19:36
Speaker
each employee. So Uran actually used us for Coffee Connect when Amod was there. So Amod was very, very passionate about the whole Piers Connect and all the rebuilders working from home. So they used our Coffee Connect product for this, just for the engineering team. And they did a good pricing. They didn't run well-funded companies. But of course, when we go to the likes of, say, Benzos and Exotel, which is 1,000, there is
01:20:06
Speaker
Do they buy for everybody? Is it something? It wouldn't work if you don't buy for everyone, right? Again, it depends on what feature do you want to use, but let's take OKR for them. If you use Peoplebox for your performance when you're going to be employing it, but it has to be for everybody. Because you're going to take a survey from all your employees, you're going to do a performance. But even for the OKR bit, right? What is the purpose of OKR? The purpose of OKR is to communicate what is our focus.
01:20:36
Speaker
If your employee, including an intern, doesn't have the access to what are company objectives, then what's the point of keeping leadership? At least, the strategy is that they don't forget about the prioritization and they forget about the tracking. But it's only there. So there was this very famous research which was done around 86% of the employees did not know what their company strategy was.
01:21:05
Speaker
Okay. And there was another one where in London, you know, in the non-corona time when everybody was going to office, they took the top leadership and asked them what are the top three priorities of the company. Okay. And this is the time when this is the top leadership going to office every day. And I think around 60% of the leader could not speak the common single one. Forget about the number of the top three. So, which is why
01:21:33
Speaker
Visibility is a very important thing. And when people use OKRs and we always recommend whether you set OKR for every person or not, that's a separate thing. But you make sure that everybody has an access to it. So what is your current revenue like ARR or whatever you track? I think that's not what we let. But I would go and say that we have grown
01:21:59
Speaker
pretty significantly or pretty good in the last six months, you know, and primarily because of the whole focus and finding out this thing. What is the goal you're targeting in terms of like monthly run rate, like say by 2024 or whatever, like one or two years down the line?
01:22:19
Speaker
I would say one of our aim is to sort of hit 10 million by the end of next year. That's something we want to go and believe in. And it's not that it has not happened. I think the sector is very odd. Covid has really given a sort of boost to it.
01:22:38
Speaker
It has its tailwinds and primarily because of when teams are distributed when they're remote. Misalignment is bigger problem, the lack of visibility, the lack of misanamity, it's hard. Second thing I would say is that thanks to the likes of Harwin, Google and a lot of other startups, they have made OKRs a very, very common thing. In fact, VC companies also have a very good role to play here. What has worked for
01:23:04
Speaker
And so it's again a very, very, I would say, hot market today. Is this like a 10x growth target? Like, have you crossed one million? Not yet, but more. It's like that 10x more than that. But we are talking about two years, right? Not one year or so.
01:23:25
Speaker
So tell me about the competition that you have right now. Who are the other companies in this space who are also offering a similar service? And what is your differentiation vis-a-vis the competitors? Awesome. This is a good question. And it's a very interesting question. Because our number one competitor is Google.
01:23:51
Speaker
So when we say that we have a gold trucking software or an OK trucking software, people say we do it on a mobile sheet. When we say that we have a one-on-one software, people say we do it on a mobile dock. When we say that we have an employment software, people say we do it on Google Forms.
01:24:07
Speaker
I think majority of the time when we go into a company, we replace Google. It's a mix of Google Sheet, Google Form and Google Doc. Now, when we talk about softwares, especially SaaS software, we get competition from three different categories of software. One is HRIA system. So, all the... Like a database. They have some module of an OKR or a performance management.
01:24:36
Speaker
Now, of course, where we go and wait with neighborhood very deep into product and very, very different UI integration become variable. For example, one of our most loved feature these days, which is our very newest feature is performance reviews in Slack.
01:24:51
Speaker
you can run your entire performance review cycle from self review, 360 degree review, everything is snagged without even leaving that. So now for our Darwin box to even focus on this much, this is sort of a bit difficult. This is not their core, this is not their focus.
01:25:10
Speaker
The second sort of competition we get is from a full-fledged performance management tool. In the US, I would say there are the likes of all these lattice and better works and all that. Who again? But their focus also remains on performance reviews. Which is a once or twice a year exercise and they are very focused towards, their primary is solving the HR pay need.
01:25:38
Speaker
Okay, no, not much of the founders. They would not have those integrations to basically track. Yeah, we'll have some because it's now more of a hygiene, but that's wrong. And the third, and I think of a place where we get the most compared with our full-fledged data, sorry, not full-fledged, dedicated OKR software.
01:26:00
Speaker
Okay, work is like OK. So, you know, work mode is one. Then there is this company I spoke about in Delhi. We just recently got acquired by Microsoft. So, these are just focused OK tools. Now, and then we can call it, you know, in the irony or in Hindi, there is a word called Vidambana.
01:26:21
Speaker
We need dedicated OKR software because we have other features. We need full-fledged performance management software because our OKR tool is very good.
01:26:34
Speaker
So somehow we have been able to sort of, you know, get the best out of it and, and the primary because now I know that in the hindsight, I would have never gone and done that. I would have preferred not to do it, but we spent so much time in building this entire suite of product that we ended up building now again.
01:26:53
Speaker
our our forte because we both me and Allahu we both have been product rise have built our standard we focus a lot on product now there are companies there who are consulting first companies we become a product trust company so for us everything is about how do we make it so easy to use so i give you a simple example right well if you want to go and update your goal
01:27:19
Speaker
You get a notification, say on a Tuesday morning, where are you with this? If you have not integrated, can you even do it in the Slack itself? So when people use our product, especially in trials, things, I was just speaking to one of the founders and he said that I tried some 12 OKR software and I use yours and give it to the team. And in simple words, he said...
01:27:47
Speaker
It was told that way, we do not need to have any learning cover, we do not have any complexity. So that becomes our number. But the second bit, I think which we have realized a lot, is our hand-holding support. I like to go and give sessions about OKRs, how do you do that, Swiggy's examples and all that. What are the best ways?
01:28:13
Speaker
So, think about it, right? Giving a survey tool is one thing. Telling what to ask is another thing. Giving the performance review is one thing, but doing how people performance review to where you should look is a, and we focus a lot on this customer support and success. In hand holding, every journey of whatever you are doing right from
01:28:36
Speaker
OKR is drafting to alignment, to building a review cadence, to building OKR champions and all that. So that's one rather very, very important. Have you built this through AIs? Where somebody is putting in a goal or a key result which doesn't align? So that automated coaching in a way, or is that in the roadmap, like an AI-driven coach for using OKR?
01:29:06
Speaker
So this is a very important thing. Like I said, the first feature when you were thinking about closing the loop for us all AI coach, okay, that's when we sort of renamed our company to Peoplebox.ai. There was another reason that it was cheap. And we tried some bit. I won't go over it. We tried, okay. But we realized that
01:29:26
Speaker
That's not going to be the core differentiator for us. You didn't have the data for that coach to work and then we didn't have enough data as well. But right now, like I said, if at least for this moment, we see that it's so badly broken.
01:29:43
Speaker
Goals tracking and goals given creation is so badly broken in the companies that you don't really need an AI to solve that. You just need it easy. That's why I said we didn't say that we make your goals tracking effective. We said we make your goals tracking magically easy. If you like the found a thesis podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like marketing, technology, career advice, books and drama.
01:30:10
Speaker
Visit the podium.in for a complete list of all our shows.