Palansh Agarwal

The riskiest decision I made at Zoko turned out to be the best f*cking thing we ever did. When we started, there were about 15 WhatsApp providers. Now there are over 300 offering the same sh*t. "Omnichannel communication in WhatsApp", "Unified Inbox" Everyone was going broad - trying to serve every possible use case. - Insurance - Real estate - Healthcare - Whatever pays We said f*ck that. We decided to focus on Shopify merchants. (Not e-commerce - ONLY Shopify merchants.) People thought we lost our minds: "You're cutting your market in half!" "What if Shopify changes everything?" "Why turn away money?" Here's what actually happened instead: We can now solve 5 very specific problems that ONLY Shopify merchants have. Problems so specific that no generic solution can touch us. Turns out • Our demo-to-paid conversion rate are 75% • We have 80% logo retention • 2 people in support is all we need. When you solve someone's exact problem better than anyone else, price becomes irrelevant. They don't even think about competitors. Meanwhile, our "smart" competitors who stayed broad: • Racing to the bottom on price • Generic solutions for generic problems • Fighting over scraps with 299 other providers • Customers churning because nobody's truly happy The safe route is actually slow death. You get customers initially, but they leave. Margins suck. You're constantly scrambling. LESSON: In a crowded market, the risky move is staying broad and pretending you can be everything to everyone. Pick your f*cking lane. Own it completely. Let everyone else kill each other over what's left.

124

17 Comments

Ever watched your startup go from calm to chaos in 48 hours? 48 hours ago, Kartik and I thought we had steady growth figured out. Nothing crazy, just consistent users. Boy, were we wrong. Today? Our servers are literally melting 🔥 Yesterday alone, Omnara processed 30,000+ messages. Our single cloud instance? OBLITERATED. We had to emergency scale to FIVE Render instances just to stay online. The catalyst? One Hacker News post hit #2 and triggered an avalanche. Lessons from our first viral moment: → Always have a scaling plan (we definitely didn't) → Server costs can 10x overnight (painful lesson) → Community-driven growth is incredibly powerful Easily the wildest 48 hours of our startup journey. Want to see what caused all the chaos? Check out our open-source repo: https://lnkd.in/gJjjGtVc

289

39 Comments

I asked ChatGPT, What do I mention the most to you and what impression gave I given to you of them. I was quite surprised with my secrets. 1. HACA What you mention most: - Scaling the business, hitting revenue goals, and expanding into new markets (UAE, Kerala, South India). - Differentiating from competitors. - Building a strong culture (Culture Test, Culture Handbook, Founder’s Code). - Improving sales systems, marketing strategies, and content-led growth. - Enhancing student experience, placements, and product quality. Impression you’ve given: - You’re deeply committed to building HACA as a standout ecosystem, not just a typical edtech company. - You balance ambitious growth goals with a long-term people-first mindset. - You care a lot about structure, clarity, and high standards in operations, culture, and leadership. 2. Leadership & Team Building What you mention most: - Hiring key roles (Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, Head of Media). - Training and empowering leaders (Project Leads, Builders, mentors). - Driving accountability through processes (daily P&L, dashboards, weekly reviews). Impression you’ve given: - You’re very hands-on as a leader and have high expectations. - You value talent creation as much as talent acquisition (giving freshers opportunities). - You want leaders around you who are self-driven and can scale your vision. 3. Culture & Values What you mention most: - Freedom with ownership, empathy, transparency, responsibility, and client-first thinking. - Building the Culture Test and embedding cultural alignment into hiring and operations. - You dislike shortcuts, politics, and misalignment in teams. Impression you’ve given: - Culture is non-negotiable for you; you see it as the foundation of long-term success. - You’re inspired by best practices from companies like Netflix, Google, Zoho but want HACA to have its own unique playbook. 4. Content & Personal Branding What you mention most: - Your own content on LinkedIn, YouTube, and The Mallu Show. - Positioning yourself as a relatable mentor/big brother figure for career aspirants. - Scaling HACA’s organic marketing through storytelling and student/alumni success. Impression you’ve given: - You’re a strong communicator and educator, with a focus on depth and authenticity. - You want your personal brand and HACA’s brand to mutually reinforce each other. 5. Ambitions & Standards What you mention most: - Clear financial goals (₹8 Cr MRR, 10x growth in 2 years). - Building HACA to be “Global.” - Long-term product iterations (AI-first, experiential learning). Impression you’ve given: - You’re ambitious but methodical. - You hold yourself and your team to very high standards, which sometimes makes you frustrated when processes aren’t followed. - You’re very self-aware about your growth as a CEO and want to get better at delegation and strategic focus. PS: Photo was real candid. Not plandid. What impression do I give you. Let me know 🤓

186

35 Comments

Most companies analyze less than 5% of their customer calls, leaving 95% of valuable context and insights completely untapped. For the past year, we have been obsessed with cracking voice conversations at scale. Not just any voice conversations - Indian ones. If you've ever tried to build AI for Indian markets, you know the pain. People switch between native and English mid-sentence. Background noise from traffic, kids, construction, side-talks etc Regional accents that throw off every model you have trained. We went deeper to solve this problem. Now we're processing hundreds of thousands of minutes every month across logistics, edTech , mobility and marketplace companies with 95%+ accuracy on conversations. The patterns we're finding are wild. Things hiding in subtext. Compliance issues that manual auditors miss completely. Product insights buried in casual complaints. On 2nd July, Raja and I are at MagicBall's Agentic Summit - part of a 6,500+ strong gathering of AI builders - to demo what we've been working on. Still feels surreal that this thing we have been heads-down building actually works in the real world. Honestly, this feels like day one. Voice AI for Indian markets is barely scratched. Come say hi if you're there! Thanks to MagicBall and team!

59

You don’t need to quit your job to start a startup. As a founder building a cofounder-matching platform, I want every aspiring entrepreneur to know: you can start without going all in–yet. How to test a startup idea while working full-time: 📌 Validate before you build - Talk to 30+ potential customers - Ask about their pain points, not your idea - See if they’d pay for a solution 📌 Start small—MVP > full product - No-code / AI tools (Webflow, Cursor, Lovable, Zapier) - Landing pages + waitlists - Begin with manual, non-scalable solutions before automating (yes, even spreadsheets work!) 📌 Find a cofounder early - A committed cofounder de-risks quitting - Split responsibilities to build faster - Align on equity + commitment before taking the leap Many successful startups don’t start with full-time founders. They start as low-risk experiments and gradual commitments. If you’re waiting for the "perfect time" to start—test first. You’ll know when to go all in. #startups #founders #entrepreneurship #buildinpublic #cofounders

252

61 Comments

Startups are not for everyone 🙂 1. A customer gives brutal feedback. → Ship an entire new service in 24 hours. Never letting this happen again. 2. Lose a deal on pricing. → Build a new pricing model overnight. 3. Prospect says “I can meet tomorrow for 30 mins.” → Catch the next red-eye and be in the room before they are. 4. A team member is sick. → Take their calls, ship their code, and still close that upsell. 5. Demo fails 5 mins before the meeting. → Rebuild it live while in the meeting. 6. Competitor announces a big feature. → Launch something 10x better by the weekend. 7. Database goes down at 3 AM. → Get the entire team together to fix by 4 am. 8. Can’t afford an expert. → Learn it in 2 nights and become an expert. 9. Someone quits. → Thank them, absorb their work, and keep building. -- This is what building looks like.

2,469

252 Comments

[agentic browsers] ChatGPT's Atlas browser is out. I asked it for a simple task - go to MMT and find me a flight. it took 8 mins to come to the listing page and was still trying to close out their AI pop up myra.ai cos it was interfering in its flow (how ironic). Reminds me of this tweet from Andrej Karpathy (copy pasted below) - in the short term the effect of AI is hugely over-rated and agentic i think is one of them. while everyone speaks about AI writing 80-90% of the code, nobody is telling you the amount of guardrails and checks and balances in place to make that happen. I think we will all be short changed if we believe AI is going to change our life dramatically in the next few years. Yes a lot of repetitive, low value add tasks will be hugely at risk (like booking a flight ticket, search may move to AI browsers) - but more complex stuff , i think the jury is still out there. Thats why I think its a great time to be building as an incumbent cos our connectors (APIs, workflows etc) are in place and as long as we continue to be nimble and shit scared of being disrupted, we have a shot! how are you prepping your biz for AI ? ----- "On LLM agents. My critique of the industry is more in overshooting the tooling w.r.t. present capability. I live in what I view as an intermediate world where I want to collaborate with LLMs and where our pros/cons are matched up. The industry lives in a future where fully autonomous entities collaborate in parallel to write all the code and humans are useless. For example, I don't want an Agent that goes off for 20 minutes and comes back with 1,000 lines of code. I certainly don't feel ready to supervise a team of 10 of them. I'd like to go in chunks that I can keep in my head, where an LLM explains the code that it is writing. I'd like it to prove to me that what it did is correct, I want it to pull the API docs and show me that it used things correctly. I want it to make fewer assumptions and ask/collaborate with me when not sure about something. I want to learn along the way and become better as a programmer, not just get served mountains of code that I'm told works. I just think the tools should be more realistic w.r.t. their capability and how they fit into the industry today, and I fear that if this isn't done well we might end up with mountains of slop accumulating across software, and an increase in vulnerabilities, security breaches and etc" Sunel Tr Shashwat Ramesh Natarajan Ramachandran Santosh K Bharath Raj Utsav Rathi Surotham Suresh

65

10 Comments

The hardest part of hiring in start ups is the learning curve. Hiring in a function you haven't hired before means committing to learning a lot. 1. Understanding what you actually need from this function. 2. Talking to multiple great functional leaders to understand role, levelling etc 3. Understanding the market in your chosen geo. 4. Talking to a range of potential candidates to get direct conversational experience (and build a network). 5. Learning how to attract the best candidates in that function. 6. Learning how to assess candidates on the technical parts of the role 7. Learning how to close great candidates with the right offer and career story I'm sure there is more. The result of this learning means you end up being able to move extremely quickly when you spot the best candidates.

40

7 Comments