Startups fail at an alarming rate of 92%. Very rarely, it is because of a bad idea. In fact, most startup ideas are brilliant and very connected to the problem they are looking to solve. They fail due to bad execution, which is a result…

Sales is the fuel for any company. For a startup, it is it’s lifeline. And, because startups are often crunched for resources, the sales expert in this setup is expected to deliver on several things at once: from generating leads to qualifying them, the actual…

A few weeks back, I was invited to a collaborative talk on building lean startups that are self-sustainable and independent of investor funding.   I took this as an opportunity to reflect on Exotel’s journey that started from a dingy, windowless room. At the time,…

Successful companies around the world have one significant differentiator – they know exactly what their customers want. According to a survey by marketing solutions provider Yesmail Interactive and market research firm Gleanster, most marketers only have basic transactional data or demographic information of their customers…

How would you explain an API (for e.g., call API, SMS API) to your grandmother? — This is a question we ask our potential hires during their interview. And here are some of the funniest responses we’ve received over the last few years. For the…

This post talks about the approach we took to build an Auto Scaling infrastructure on AWS. In the process, we used Terraform, Ansible and Jenkins to create a build pipeline and deployment framework. Our hope is that people can use some of our learnings and re-use some of the code we wrote, to minimize the time and effort required to set up an auto-scaling infrastructure on Amazon AWS.

Imagine this. You enter a footwear shop in your neighbourhood. You try on a bunch of shoes and finally select one. You then ask the shopkeeper how much it costs and he gives you a number. You are unsure if what he says is reasonable...

One of the biggest advantages that cab aggregators like Uber gain out of number masking is customer privacy. For those of you don’t know what number masking is or how it works, when you book a ride via Uber, the driver doesn’t see your phone…

Updated: April 2018 In February 2016, we partnered with Pratham Books to bring the pure joy of a bedtime story to kids in some of the unprivileged parts of Delhi. What if we could just get these kids to give a missed call and get…

Everyone thrives on being productive. For startups, being productive or not can be the difference between being alive or not. Startups experience unique constraints in terms of time, talent, resources and money. The combination of these constraints makes them productive in creative ways. There are…