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My strategy and plan to conquer 2017 goals

Lesson learned from the 2016 retrospective

One of the things I observed in my 2016 retrospective was — I had achieved the goals that were clearly defined and had a clear action plan to execute them.

For example — I achieved the goal of improving my fitness by doing P90X3 routine, which required exercising 30 mins/day for straight 90 days.

On the contrary, I did not achieve the goals that did not have any clear action plan. For example — reading a book per month or blogging actively.

Strategy and plan for 2017

So for my 2017 goals, I thought why not apply a methodical approach so that I can be sure to achieve those. I know what I want to achieve, but it didn’t have a clear strategy and specific action plan.

For strategy, applying a top-down approach helps me start with a big picture and then break that into smaller milestones.

At the same time, for a specific action plan, using a bottom-up approach helps me define a day-to-day routine.

Examples

Fitness Goal

One of the goals for 2017 is — to exercise for 9–10 months. So from a top-down strategy perspective, I plan to do 3 repetitions of P90X3 routine. So every 3 months, I will complete a P90X3 routine, and in between take a break for a few weeks.

At the same time, from a bottom-up tactical perspective, I plan to allocate 45 mins to exercise on 6 days a week — preferably at a consistent time every single day.

Reading Goal

Similarly, for reading one book per month goal, my strategy is to read ~300 pages book per month.

And my tactical plan is to read ~15 pages per day. So I need to allocate dedicated 15–30 minutes to read ~15 pages every single day.

You got the point. I have done a similar exercise for my other goals about blogging, programming and building a startup venture.

Summary

My hypothesis is – having some kind of system and method in place will be crucial in making consistent progress on the goals I have defined.

The top-down strategy is important as it removes the uncertainties of how I’m going to achieve a bigger goal by breaking it into smaller steps.

The bottom-up plan is important as it creates daily habits by consistently allocating a dedicated time every single day.

Now this is a plan. Certainly, it might work or fail. We will see. I will update in 3 months if it worked or not.

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2016 Retrospective and 2017 Goals

I have never written any retrospective blog posts or shared my new year goals on this blog before. So this is a new tradition I’m starting. There are a few reasons why I thought it would be an interesting exercise to do –

1. Get back to blogging

It’s been a few months that I wrote something on my blog and I have been wanting to start writing for many days. And since we’re at the junction of ending of 2016 and beginning of 2017, I decided to get back to writing by doing some retrospective of my life and planning for the next year.

2. Get effective in my life

As a Product Manager by profession, I have been doing Agile Retrospectives with my scrum teams at the end of every sprint. As a part of the process, the whole scrum team reflects on their execution in the sprint and discusses how to become more effective in their execution and adjusts their behavior accordingly. We typically discuss different topics and categorize them in one of the below buckets –

  • what worked well that the team should continue doing
  • what did not work well that the team should stop doing
  • what’s missing that the team should start doing

So I thought it would be very valuable to do a similar exercise for personal life for 2016 and based on that decide what are the plans for 2017.

3. Be accountable to my new year plans

By sharing my new year goals and plans publicly, I will be accountable to achieve these goals and write a similar retrospective post at the end of the next year.

Below are the key activities that I pursued in 2016 and for each activity, I categorized it if I want to continue doing it in 2017 or stop doing it in 2017 and if there is anything new that I want to start doing in 2017.

Health

My most important goal for 2016 was to become physically fit. And it wasn’t about just doing 10,000 steps/day to achieve a Fitbit badge, but really push my physical limits and get stronger. So I started doing the P90X3 routine. If you’re not aware of it, it’s 30 minutes a day all body workout routine for 90 days.

When I started it for the first time, I could only do it for 30 days, and then something happened and I couldn’t continue. Then I again started it for the second time and I could do it for 60 days. Then again something happened and I couldn’t finish. Then finally, in the second half of 2016, I started it again for the 3rd time, and I could finish all 90 days.

I think collectively in the entire 2016, I must have exercised 7 months. Ideally, this should have been 9–10 months. But I’m still happy with the strength and fitness I’ve achieved so far. By no means, I’m a very strong person yet, so the ultimate goal is still not achieved.

So I will continue to do P90X3 in 2017 as well and my goal would be to exercise at least 10 months in the entire year.

Reading

When 2016 started, my goal was to read a book a month. It wasn’t a very hard goal, but somehow I still couldn’t achieve it. I barely completed reading only 3 books and 2 books are still in progress. I never prioritized reading books and didn’t allocate any dedicated time every day. Instead, I read a lot of articles shared on the web whenever I used to find some leisure time in between different activities.

Books read:

Books in progress:

Obviously, I will continue to read in 2017 and my goal would be still same — to read a book per month.

Blogging

I didn’t have any specific goal for Blogging when 2016 started, but I knew I wanted blog actively. Unfortunately, I wrote only 7 posts in the entire year. I definitely failed in showing consistent discipline for blogging.

For 2017, I will continue to blog and my goal would be — at least a post per week.

Podcasts

In 2016, I got addicted to podcasts. I probably listened to 200+ episodes from different hosts in the entire year. I learned a lot about different people, various topics, sometimes inspirational stories and sometimes tactical advice.

I have already shared which podcasts I’ve been listening to.

I will continue to listen to podcasts in 2017 as I absolutely love them and my goal for 2017 would be to listen to any podcast for at least 20-30 minutes/day while commuting.

Sleep

In 2016, I wanted to sleep well every day — at least 7 hours a day. Overall I believe I achieved that goal, and it definitely helped me to have fewer health issues and have better focus and energy during work days.

I will continue to have good sleep as a priority in 2017 as well. Even though I’ve more ambitious plans for 2017 in general, I’m making a mental note to not compromise on this activity.

Programming

As I started my professional Product Management career since last 4 years, I pretty much stopped programming. That was a big mistake. I should not have stopped programming altogether. While I don’t need programming skills for day-to-day work, but I’m a builder at heart and enjoy software development. In 2016, I thought I will start coding again and will build some software for fun, but I couldn’t prioritize it. I barely started coding a little bit at the tail end of 2016.

So I will continue to start programming in 2017 and my goal would be to build a meaningful software application by the end of 2017.

Music

I wanted to learn guitar since my college days. I tried learning it a couple of times, but have never been consistent in continuing it. In 2016, I was inspired by my nephews and decided to start learning guitar again using self-learning process. I started watching videos on YouTube, used few iPhone apps and started learning and practicing playing guitar. I did that for a few weeks but very quickly realized that I have other important priorities on my plate and I was running too thin on commitment on different activities. So I decided to stop learning guitar and put it on the backlog.

Unfortunately, in 2017 as well, since I have other important priorities, I will have to stop learning guitar and put it on the backlog.

Outsourcing

One of biggest mistakes in 2016 was outsourcing my old part-time software project. Since this project has paying customers and there were a lot of bugs reported and new feature requests asked, I outsourced the development of this project to an offshore development provider in India. But overall it was a very bad experience.

Partly it was my mistake. Since I did not have a lot of time, I did not give detailed attention to those developers. At the same time, those developers took advantage of that, which ended up in longer development cycles, unethical behavior, and extremely poor quality software. I wasted significant money and was completely dissatisfied with the outcome. The short-term benefit in the cost savings with a cheap labor turned out to be an expensive mistake in the long term.

I will definitely stop outsourcing anything in 2017, especially when I don’t have time to micro-manage them. Either I will learn to do things myself, or hire quality resource locally or just say “no” to any such activity which requires outsourcing.

Startup Venture

In 2016, I did not have any goal to start my own startup. So there is nothing much to retrospect here.

But for 2017, my goal is to start a new venture. The thoughts are still in early stages, so I still need some time to get more clarity. I will be spending some time in early 2017 to learn new technologies, explore few domains, meet few people, and tinker few concepts. I’m personally interested in exploring artificial intelligence domain, but if I’ll find a meaningful problem to solve in that domain is a different question, which I will continue to explore.

While this may sound a lot of goals, if I want to prioritize only top 3 goals or focus areas for 2017, then they would be –

  1. Family
  2. Health (Exercise + Sleep)
  3. Startup (Venture + Programming)

These are the “big rocks” for me. The rest activities like Reading, Blogging, Podcasting, etc. are the “pebbles”. (Learn more about Big Rocks, Pebbles and Sand).

If you’ve read until this point, then I would request if you have any suggestions for me to improve my thinking, or help achieve my goals, then please free to comment or send me an email at aditya dot kothadiya at gmail dot com.

Also, if you haven’t already done any retrospective for your 2016 and planned your 2017, then I would highly encourage you take a moment and think about it and write down what worked well and what didn’t in 2016 and what are your plans for 2017 — if not publicly, but at least for your own benefit.

Wishing you all a very happy and prosperous new year 2017. Hope you all crush your 2017 goals! Fight on!

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The most important attribute to become a leader

A couple of days ago, a senior leader at my company gave me really good feedback on what I need to do to make sure other people continue to look up to me as a leader. I took his feedback positively and started following it right away in my day to day routine and instantly saw the difference between my actions and results. So I thought I should share his advice with a larger audience as it might help people who want to become a leader too.

Before I share the advice, let’s understand the context.

I was in a sandwich situation — on one hand, I was managing one of our strategic client’s stringent requirements and on the other hand, I was dealing with the constraints provided by one of our big technology partners. We had reached some deadlock situation on 3–4 items where the client wanted specific functionalities that the partner was not agreeing to support.

I couldn’t resolve that deadlock situation, so I bought some additional time. I then scheduled an internal meeting with few executives to get their advice. In that meeting, one of the leaders listened to all pending items and instantly shared his point of view and gave his final decisions on how to resolve these situations. Everybody in the meeting agreed with his decisions, so the meeting got wrapped up quickly.

After the meeting was over, he asked me to wait. He said he was surprised to see that we had to schedule a meeting for this, especially when I was handling this situation. He mentioned that he had normally seen me handling these kinds of situations on my own, but was surprised to see why I failed at it that time.

And then he shared some insights with me –

People will start looking up to you as a leader when you take a decision and own that decision.

It doesn’t matter if the decision taken is right or wrong as long as you take the decision. Generally, management expects you take more right decisions as you get more experienced, but it’s completely acceptable if you take a few wrong decisions too. What’s not acceptable from leaders is — not taking any decisions.

His feedback was spot on to me. Normally I’m good at it, but for that instance, I had missed it. I didn’t need management’s advice or permission. I could have just taken the decision and informed the management about it later on. And if they would have thought I took the wrong approach, then I would have sought for the forgiveness.

After that meeting, I already faced with new situations where I had to take decisions. My default urge was to go and ask upper management’s feedback on what is the right thing to do. But then I paused every single time thinking about — what decision I would take if I’m the ultimate decision maker in the company. So I started taking the decisions and owning it. This had helped me tremendously in last few days to make faster progress.

Again, if you’re a leader, there are a lot more other attributes you will have practice in your day to day life. But if you are getting started and want other people to start looking up to you as a leader, then the first thing you’ll need to do is to start taking the decisions and own them. It is the most important attribute you will have to practice to become a leader.

Seek for forgiveness, not for permission.

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on June 5, 2016.

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The Pursuit of Impact

For the last few years that I’ve been blogging, I struggled about one thing — what should I call my blog? What should be its title? What should be its theme?

After thinking for a while, I realized what I really enjoy doing and want to do with my life — to make an impact in other people’s life.

Thus, I have a theme and the name for my blog — The Pursuit of Impact!

That’s how I want to live my life. I want to leave a legacy. I want to make some dent in the Universe. And since making an impact is not a one-time accomplishment, but rather is a continuous journey, it will be my an ongoing mission to make bigger and better impact in other people’s lives. And that’s the pursuit of impact!

To make an impact, I don’t need to be financially very wealthy or some kind of celebrity. The impact also need not be very large scale either. It could simply start making the slightest impact in just one person’s life. It also doesn’t mean that I need to give up my current life and be a full-time social activist or devote myself to a non-profit organization. I will continue to live my current life, it’s just that I’ll have a better purpose and goal for everything I’ll be doing.

The way I believe anyone can start making a disciplined impact in other people’s life is you start working with your circle of influence. Essentially the way circle of influence works is — the people you have the most influence on are at the center of the circle and the people you have the least influence on are at the periphery of the circle. So you start from the center and then start expanding outwards.

To begin with, I will simply start with my core family — my wife, kid, and parents. Giving them a better life from social and financial perspective is my responsibility. I don’t necessarily consider that as making any impact. But if I could influence and inspire my kids or wife with my thoughts, actions, and behavior, and if they could imbibe some of those lessons in their life for good, and achieve greater things, then I would assume I made some positive impact in their life.

Then the next set of people will be my extended family — my sisters, cousins, and their families. If I could inspire their kids to get higher education and achieve even higher heights through my blog, or if I could just help them in any ways to achieve their dreams — like providing tactical advice or financial help, then I would assume I made some positive impact in their life.

Then the next set of people will be my very close friends. If I could help them when they need it, support them in their endeavors, or push them to reach their full potential, or provide them honest feedback about their endeavors, or simply spending a good time with them to add some happy moments in their life, then I would assume I made some positive impact in their life.

Then it will start expanding to my larger friend circle, colleagues and acquaintances. If I could help them in their career aspirations by providing any specific advice, or get them better at what they do by sharing my experiences and learnings through this blog, or inspiring them through my actions, then I would assume I made some positive impact in their life.

Then it will be expanded to even larger reach — communities that I’m part of like the city where I live or the educational institutes I attended, etc. If I could give back to those communities in some way — either financially or through volunteering, then I would assume I made some positive impact in their life.

Lastly, it will be expanded to people that I don’t know today. If I could build a product or business that will provide tremendous value to thousands or millions of businesses or people and allows them to achieve something bigger, then I would assume I made some positive impact in their life.

Now I’m not saying anything here that’s new. Millions of people are already leading their life this way. They’re already making a tremendous impact in other people’s life. By writing these thoughts down, it’s just helping me to appreciate and recognize what others are doing, but it’s also reiterating what’s important to me and how I should spend my time and energy.

Today, I don’t do a lot of these things that I mentioned above. But it’s my wish to do as many things as possible. And I will continue to share my learnings and thoughts on this blog which essentially is also contributing in my pursuit of impact!

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on May 31, 2016.

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Startup & Entrepreneurship podcasts I’ve been listening to


I try to read a lot — mostly blog articles, books, and even e-books. There is no doubt that reading helps you get smarter, improve your vocabulary, explore new ideas, etc. I mostly read about topics which are relevant to my personal and professional development and articles that add positive impact in my life, stories that inspire and motivate me to do something great. I avoid reading daily news about politics, entertainment, etc. unless it’s a really critical news. But since last year or two, in addition to reading, I’ve been addicted to listening podcasts too for my personal and professional development.

Podcasts are mainstream now

While podcasts have been around for about a decade, I personally experienced that they’re getting mainstream since last few years since they’re getting extremely convenient to consume. Podcasts are to the radio industry as blogs are to the mainstream media. Anyone who is expert and passionate about any topic can create a regularly updated content and publish a podcast. You can find thousands of podcasts which are well produced, inspirational, educational, and entertaining.

Unlike reading blog posts or watching videos, which require someone’s full attention, podcasts give listeners a flexibility of multi-tasking. Listeners can subscribe to specific podcasts, auto-download new episodes, and listen whenever it’s convenient for them on their smartphones while doing some other mundane chores. Every day, I listen to somewhere between 30–90 minutes podcasts while commuting to the office (25–35 minutes each way) and exercising (30–40 minutes).

The one overarching reason I listen to podcasts is I learn stuff. As they say, we’re influenced by what we see and hear. It’s a way of exposing myself to the influences of people who are smart and successful. I’ve found them highly inspirational and educational. I’ve learned how to form healthy habits, how to be more productive and efficient, how to start, run and grow a business, how to manage relationships, how to write better content, etc.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying podcasts are a substitute for reading books or blogs. It’s just a different mode of consumption for a different kind of content. Podcasts don’t give visually rich experience if you want to put the faces in front of names, or see things in picture or action. So there are some things which I still prefer to read at my desk while some things which are better to consume while I’m driving.

Podcasts I listen to

So here are few podcasts that I listen to actively. These are my interests of topics, which are skewed to Entrepreneurship, Startups, Product Management, Part-time Businesses, etc. But you will find podcasts on pretty much any topic that interests you.

Entrepreneurship


Mixergy

Andrew Warner’s mission is to introduce you to doers and thinkers whose ideas and stories are so powerful that it will inspire you to build something on your own.


Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders

Weekly podcasts from Stanford University regarding entrepreneurship — hear straight from entrepreneurs and innovators share their stories.


Dorm Room Tycoon

Hosted by William Channer, a British designer, founder and journalist, this podcast is a show that interviews the world’s most influential innovators in business, design, and technology.

Startups


This Week in Startups

Hosted by Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur turned investor interviews some of the most influential names in the entrepreneur and startup communities in order to provide inspiration and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to grow their startup.


The Rocketship

Every week this podcast chats with successful entrepreneurs on how to grow a startup — topics include self-funding, raising capital, product development, and customer acquisition. These podcasts are packed with informative content that every startup founder needs.


The Startup Chat

Unfiltered insights and actionable advice straight from the trenches of startup and business life. The show hosts, Steli Efti and Hiten Shah, are both serial entrepreneurs who have founded multi-million dollar SaaS startups.


How To Start A Startup

Sam Altman and the folks from Y Combinator offer up an amazing course in “How To Start A Startup” at Stanford. This isn’t typical ongoing podcast, but a one-time course.

Ecommerce & Part-time Businesses


My Wife Quit Her Job

Steve Chou interviews successful e-commerce entrepreneurs that all bootstrapped their businesses and most of them in part-time while working at their day jobs.


The Side Hustle Show

Hosted by Nick Loper, this podcast is for part-time entrepreneurs who are looking for business ideas, actionable tips to start a business, and killer strategies on how to turn their side hustle dreams into a growing business.

Product Management


Inside Intercom

On the Inside Intercom podcast, you will hear the team from Intercom interview makers and do-ers from the worlds of product management, design, startups, and marketing.

I hope you will find this resource useful.

Of course, I’ll continue to add more podcasts to my list as I discover interesting podcasts. If you have been listening to any great podcasts recently, and would like to recommend to me or my audience, then please share it in the comments area.

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on March 20, 2016.

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Things are for us; we are not for things

It’s so sad to see that nowadays we care more about making sure the smartphones and wearables we use get required attention and care instead of just being happy that we achieved our true goal for which those devices are designed in the first place.

A few days ago a friend of mine shared a below update –

Instead of congratulating him for 2.5 hours of exercise and burning roughly 350 calories, one of his colleagues asked if he had Fitbit on and did he capture those steps?

Who’s controlling who?

Somewhere in this age of smartphones and wearables, we forgot that these devices and things around us are designed for us and not the other way around.

Shouldn’t it be perfectly fine if we forgot our phone at home for a day? Why do we get restless about it?

Shouldn’t it be okay if our Fitbit is not charged right when we really wanted to go for a run? Why do we cancel our exercise plans just because we can’t capture those steps?

We get stressed if our phones are not charged before we head out. We get restless if we don’t get any new notification from our favorite apps in the span of 5 minutes. We feel frustrated if we can’t capture our 30-minutes run in Fitbit.

But we don’t need to.

Our addiction to smartphones & wearables

I don’t think there is any doubt in our mind that we are addicted to these smartphones and wearables. When you think of the last time you were in the same position, it may be just a few minutes ago. From catching up with friends over the dinner table to watching our kids play in the park, we miss out life’s simple joys when our attention is turned to these little devices that we carry everywhere. We pretend to be still paying attention, but the truth is we can’t really multitask the way we think we do.

I remember a short film titled “I Forgot My Phone — Video” suggests just that. That video has already been viewed nearly 50 million times, which suggests that it hit the cord of many people’s current situations.

While the video is supposed to be a lighthearted take on our smartphone-obsessed culture, it opens our eyes about our smartphone addiction and what we need to do about it.

We can do something about it

Instead of succumbing ourselves into this sensory overload, if we unplug ourselves for several brief moments during the day and looked up, we would experience a whole new world exists beyond that little screen. Specially wearables invading our lives from fitness to glasses to watches, I questioned are they just a fad or a real necessity. I believe it’s a fad — and that’s my opinion, but I also read stories about many people who found it to be life-changing.

For me, Fitbit was valuable in the early days to learn my initial benchmarks. After initial few months of its usage, I learned on average how many steps I walk in a typical workday. How many minutes I need to run or walk to achieve my 10K steps goal for a day. But once I learned my patterns, that novelty wore off after few months. Eventually, I stopped using Fitbit and just started making sure that I exercise minimum 4 days a week. I don’t need to be accurate about how many steps or miles I ran. All I need to do is be in the ballpark. But now the benefit is, I don’t have to worry about charging it every 4–5 days, or making sure I’m always wearing it, etc. Life is slightly simpler :).

But the point is not just about Fitbit or any specific device. In general, I think we can do a better job in being mindful of giving just enough attention to these devices or things, and not at the cost of missing the joy of real life interactions and experiences.

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on March 14, 2016.

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This is how I want to use Facebook

For the last 2 months, I deleted the Facebook app on my iPhone as a part of a casual experiment. Sounds crazy, right? Well, probably not to sane ones, but definitely to addicted ones.

Let me explain in detail.

Being mindful about my time

In general, I’m very observant and mindful about how I use my time. But there was one behavior of a mine I wanted to make sure I’m controlling it rather than it controlling me — the smartphone addiction.

Overall I believe I’m mindful of how I spend my time on my iPhone (my wife may disagree ;)), but still one fine day, I questioned the time I spend on some of the apps I use every day and the value I receive from each one of them.

I use Twitter, Nuzzel, and LinkedIn apps most actively to discover inspirational or actionable articles about startup and product management (the topics I’m passionate about). I also use Quora and Medium once in a while for interesting articles on varied topics. I use Pocket app to save all these articles and read it later when I’ve leisure time on weekends. Apart from these content-specific apps, I use WhatsApp and Facebook pretty actively for messaging and keeping a tap on friends’ activity respectively.

After ranking these apps based on its value I receive, WhatsApp and Facebook ranked last.

I felt WhatsApp is still valuable to communicate with close friends and family with the condition that I opt-out from all groups where sending forwards and jokes was a prominent activity than actual communication.

The value of Facebook

But for Facebook, I couldn’t convince myself that I was being “connected” with my friends the way it’s being advertised. I thought it was happening on WhatsApp on a more intimate level. My Facebook newsfeed is primarily a source for entertaining and political videos, photos of friends’ vacations and parties, and once in a while educational and informative articles/videos. Overall I felt, I’m not getting enough value from Facebook compared to the time I was spending on it.

Having that little Facebook app icon available to tap at your finger tip was a clear invitation to waste 10–15 minutes of your day every single time you open that app.

So I thought — what if I could just get rid of the Facebook app from my iPhone and see how it affects my life?

It sounded like a good idea — and boom, just like that, the app was gone!

And nothing happened in last 2 months. I didn’t miss the Facebook app at all.

Having said that, I’m not saying I didn’t access the Facebook website at all in those 2 months. Once or twice in a week, I would take an effort to open the Facebook.com in the browser on my iPhone. Since the experience is not very great on the mobile web browser, I wasn’t spending a lot of time on it. And I felt that was good enough Facebook consumption for me.

Something changed

Every time I would access Facebook through the browser, I would encounter few updates from Mark Zuckerberg as I’m following him. And most often, I would be inspired by his thoughts, actions, and resolutions. And apparently I’m not the only one. There’re many men who find him as a lifestyle guru.

While I admire his posts about how a farmer in India benefited using Internet.org, I don’t agree that’s how most of the India or even the World is using Facebook. It’s a great story to tell for marketing purposes, but I’m concerned that most of the World use Facebook for passing their time.

Again, I do believe in Facebook’s network effect but realized that it’s better to put that network effect into a positive change than just for entertainment purposes. That’s when I realized, I have a choice to decide how do I want to use Facebook. And there are 2 aspects to it — i) what I should share on Facebook that will be valuable to my friends and ii) what my friends will share that will be valuable to me. While I can’t change my friends’ behavior, but, at least, I can start with me, and hope that it will inspire a few of them to do something similar.

What I plan to do

I plan to share more inspirational and informational videos of all kinds that I personally discover. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a serious person ;). Once in a while, I’ll share entertaining videos too :), but my focus will be on educating and motiving others.

In addition to that, I will share various problems that I observe, and possible ideas and solutions that could solve them. They may be half-baked, but I’ll share it anyways so that conversations will happen and those ideas might get baked by collaborative inputs and wisdom.

I also want to share some of the things that I’m working on and the lessons I’m learning — my day job, my part-time projects, my hobbies, resolutions, etc. I will not just share my success stories or accomplishments only, but will also share my struggles and failures.

What I hope others will do

While I make this my habit, which will take a while, I also hope other people also share similar things so that I and others can also learn from them.

While I’m very proud of people’s achievements when they share them, I’m more interested in hearing about their journey how they got there — including their ups and downs.

While I’m very happy to see photos of their vacation, I would love to read more about how did they plan it, what was their experience like or unique perspective they developed about that location, etc.

Anyways, you got the point. Let’s make Facebook informative, inspirational and personal.

Closing thoughts

We need to leverage Facebook’s massive reach to make a positive impact in the World rather than wasting people’s most precious resource — time, which many of them don’t realize it.

So I’ll be using Facebook actively again — just with a positive twist. And yes, I’ve downloaded back the Facebook app on my iPhone :).

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on March 9, 2016.

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For startups, development is easy, distribution is hard


In the last few months, I have had many friends reached out to me to share their interest of starting a software startup or getting specific feedback on the app they’re building. Every single time I ended up asking them less about their product or app, but more about how they plan to reach out to their customers. Very rarely I see people have thought about it well, so I ended up emphasizing to focus on that activity a lot more than getting too excited about amazing things their product or app can do.

After sharing similar feedback a couple of times, finally I decided to jot down my thoughts. Most of these thoughts are pretty obvious for second-time founders, and most of the first-time founders must have also read these thoughts somewhere else, but I still think it’s critical to emphasize it again.

Trends in software product development

Over the past 5 years that I’ve been building software products, I have seen these two trends –

The speed of building a software product is getting faster and the cost of building it is getting cheaper.

And by a software product, I mean — an iPhone or Android mobile app, or any SaaS or consumer web app, etc.

Development is easy

  1. The availability of languages and frameworks has sped up the development and made it easy for non-technical folks to learn how to code. The advent of step-by-step tutorials, video courses make it even easier to just follow these courses every day and make concrete progress in building a real software.
  2. The cost of hosting is going down. You no longer need to purchase any servers. You can leverage managed hosting services like AWS and Digital Ocean, and spin up few instances of different services as you go. All you need is a development machine.
  3. The cost of building core technology is going down. You no longer need to build every single functionality required for your product in-house from scratch. You can leverage platform services who provide sophisticated APIs for pretty much any kind of functionality — starting from Payments, Email, Telecommunication, Analytics to Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, etc. There is even a term for this — The No Stack Startup.
  4. Processes like agile coupled with continuous integration and deployment have reduced iteration cycles, encouraging to ship smaller features on an incremental basis.

In a very generic sense, it is getting a lot easier to build a software product. All you need is an idea to solve a problem, a laptop to build the software and willingness to build it.

While this is all true, during the same time, building a business around your product has become harder. And by building a business, I mean — marketing, sales, support, etc. And by harder I don’t mean the “discouraging” harder, but “noisy” harder.

The hardest part nowadays is getting an attention of your target customers for your software.

Distribution is hard

  1. Simply put there are a lot of products out there, which create a lot of noise in the market. In order for people to find your product, you have to have a clear value proposition and find the right channels to broadcast the message of what you do!
  2. Now broadcasting your message has become easier with the advent of Social Media tools, but in general, Marketing has become very noisy. There is a plethora of marketing techniques including SEO, Content Marketing, SMM, etc. Everybody is creating so much of content every day to increase their SEO, drive leads to their marketing pages, etc., it’s getting harder to make your voice stand out.
  3. While Marketing has become harder, on the other hand, selling has become comparatively easier with the advent of so many CRM, inside-Sales tools, cold emailing softwares and techniques. Now that’s a good news for you, but then that’s a good news for your competitor too. So it’s getting comparatively harder to make your cold email compelling to act compared to your competitor’s cold email. So in the end, even selling seems become harder.

Product and distribution need to go hand in hand

To build a truly successful company, either you build a remarkable product that sells itself or have a good enough product with remarkable distribution channels. But if you’re starting a company for the first time, then the odds of having a remarkable product hit are quite low. On the other hand, it’s lot easier to build a good enough product as explained above, but without great distribution channels, it wouldn’t matter.

It’s very critical to have a strong focus on distribution channels from the day one of your execution. The way you keep getting excited about your product every day, you need someone in your team who gets equally excited about different distribution channels and need to come up with lots of ideas to get your product in your target customer’s hands.

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on October 11, 2015.

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Every day is a new beginning


I was having a conversation with my friend, who had joined a new company as a Product Manager around 6 months ago. He was sharing his frustration of how his engineering team does not gel and work with him well yet. I will write a separate post on how to handle these situations from a Product Manager’s perspective, but one thing that struck me was — he had pretty much given up hopes on if things will ever improve with his engineering team after multiple tries.

I shared with him my perspective on how would I handle these things tactically, but the most important piece of feedback I shared with him was — “Don’t give up! Every day is a new beginning. Start fresh, start again.”

I said that and realized how powerful this mantra is to live our life –

“Every day is a new beginning”.

Just because we failed in something yesterday, doesn’t mean we have to fail today. Just because we felt sad yesterday, doesn’t mean we have to feel the same way today.

Every day, we can restate our goals, retake our decisions, rethink our approach, rebuild our relationships — for a new, happy and successful life with a smile, hope, and expectations, irrespective of how was our yesterday.

Every day we have some plans, some To-Do list, some goals, but some days we fail to achieve them. If this pattern repeats again and again for few days or weeks, then that creates a feeling of frustration, unhappiness, and failure. And we start believing that we can’t achieve those things anymore. And we eventually give up.

Every once in a while we lose our motivation, persistence, willpower, and self-discipline. But that doesn’t mean that’s how we will have to be tomorrow.

Who cares if we failed yesterday?

Every day is a fresh new day with a blank slate to rewrite those goals and start achieving those again. If you believe in yourself and stay persistent, you will most definitely find the inner strength, wisdom, and confidence to achieve your dreams and create the meaningful life you want to live.

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on September 19, 2015.

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The biggest lie startup founders tell about marketing

Recently I watched an interview of a small but growing and profitable startup, where the interviewer asked the Co-founder about how they have achieved this growth so far and what are their future plans? To that, he replied — “We haven’t spent anything on the marketing yet, and we’ll continue to not do so for a long time.”

The biggest lie startup founders tell to the world is — “We haven’t spent anything on the marketing yet!”.

Of course, I wouldn’t share the name of this company as I admire what they’ve accomplished so far with a small team. But this post is not about that company only. I’ve seen many startup founders tell this lie during their interviews and their startup’s PR outreach.

The reason why everyone is so tempted to tell this lie is — they want to tell the world that how awesome their product is and how fast they are growing, and that too all “organically”.

Are these founders mistaking Google AdWords or Facebook Ads as the only form of marketing?

If that’s the case, then the correct statement would be — “We haven’t spent anything on Paid Advertising yet.” And I can buy that argument as it may be true for many early stage companies.

The key mistake these founders do is — they’re not accounting the time they are investing on all other marketing channels apart from these paid advertising channels.

Sure, you’re getting a lot of SEO traffic from Google for free, but haven’t you also invested your development time in building SEOable pages, URLs, etc. solely for marketing reasons?

Sure, you’re getting a lot of traffic from Facebook for free, but haven’t you also invested your time in building those viral features and gaming mechanics in your product for marketing reasons?

Sure, you’re getting a lot of word of mouth traffic, but haven’t you spent time in building that Dropbox like two-sided incentive referral program for marketing reasons?

Sure, you’re getting a lot of conversions from your site’s landing page, but haven’t you spent lot of energy in that content marketing blog post and having a kick-ass product demo video on your site?

I can go on and on, but you got the point.

Next time when you hear someone says they are not spending anything on marketing, simply ignore that bullshit and make sure to not repeat that mistake.

Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com.