Varadh

Tag: Product

  • Potential Startup Ideas for 2020

    Some thoughts on Christmas from a coffee shop. A lot of these are problems I’ve been thinking about or directly encountered.

    International Visa Management 

    • If you’re North American/European, this might not be as big a problem for you but if you’re not the process of getting visas is terrible.
    • If anyone is building a plaid for legal identity/visas, please save me from this hell of entering the same basic information, the set of documents, credit card information, references, etc. 
    • Tourism across the world continues to grow and making this easier to unlock a whole lot more travel. 
    • A key challenge here will be intercepting the monopoly of VFS over this process but do think it’s possible with a few countries to test a pilot with. 

    Notes/Documents + Task Management + Links

    • The context for tasks resides in documents. Documents are filled with links. Links are websites or resources/assets in other apps. Making it all work together I think remains a very real opportunity.
    • So far, dropbox paper & notion come closest to the best. There’s one or two smaller co’s (Roam & Pine) which could potentially become the defaults here.
    • P.S I want to write a longer note doing some research on the future of productivity

    Privacy & Security Management 

    • I’m relatively paranoid and more people should be, especially in the wake of multiple scandals. However, it is cumbersome and very hard to get new people started on the path of trying to secure themselves and do any kind of ongoing monitoring. 
    • Here’s a list of some things I’ve done and I’d love to see tools to simplify this: 
      • Phone Numbers: I maintain a public and private number to reduce attack vectors
      • Credit Cards: Use privacy.com to generate credit card numbers for payments on shady websites.
      • Settings on phone / laptop: around notifications, location, sharing, background refresh, camera/microphone, ad limiting etc. 
      • Regular audits of platform apps: removing unwanted apps, disabling web & location tracking on google, etc. 
      • Password management: Continues to be a challenge to get users to adopt. (Either this needs to be done by OS providers or we need to get rid of passwords completely and move to magic links + otp verification)
      • VPN: Quite valuable for somebody who uses public wifi’s frequently. 
      • HaveIBeenPwned.com: Set up account alert monitoring for various email addresses 
    • One co. that’s interesting for some parts of this is Jumbo which launched earlier this year. 

    Venture Debt Financing in India

    • Spending time here in the last few weeks here, there’s a clear opportunity to build a fund focused on venture debt in India. There’s only a companies focused on this (innoven, alteria) and none of traditional banks have any plans to doing anything in this space. 
    • Especially in a world where’s there’s more D2C & SaaS companies being built in the country, the demand for this product is only likely to continue to grow.

    OS for SMBs

    • Growth for small businesses, especially in traditional sectors, remains hard as it’s hard to operationalise and become process driven. In a world where they are not used to paying for SaaS subscriptions you’d likely need to make money in adjacent ways (first: financing) but better tooling 
    • I think of Square doing this well for retail companies (stores & restaurants) but think there’s an opportunity to build in 100’s of other kinds of small businesses including real estate, real-world 1-3 person shops around specific skills (plumbing, furniture makers, etc.), freelance tech talent, etc. 
    • Enabling the sustainable GPD growth via better ERP tooling and process management (eg. Bringing in better metrics visibility, okr accountability, task delegation etc.) 
    • & Freelances?: do think there’s a some overlap with this and helping freelancers manage themselves and their businesses. 

    Home Financing Products

    • Homes are getting harder to buy for a variety of reasons in the cities that people want to live with. 
    • Additionally the primary way of purchasing a home remains the 30 year mortgage. I say this caution but do sincerely believe there’s likely many places to innovate here. We’re starting to see the rise of equity sharing/downpayment assistance, fractional ownership, rent-to-town, rent/mortgage splits, etc. and am excited to see the adoption of some of the above services but also many new ones. 

    Family Account Management

    • Over the last couple of years, I’ve moved to all things Apple: from music, to storage, to devices, for the entire family as it’s really helped do account management much better.
    • However, it’s still complicated to get family members onboard on new services, organise the billing, and manage the subscriptions. 
    • I think there’s an opportunity to build an Okta for Families. One that I would pay for but also could be a great way for subscription apps to increase conversion & retention. This one’s a personal problem more so than anything else though. 

    Unroll.me / Substack, Medium, Mailchimp Aggregator

    • In the last 3 months I’ve now subscribed to more than 10 Substack newsletters which has me thinking about so many different issues & opportunities. Brings back 2016 memories of medium publications and mail chimp newsletters. 
    • How do you better read the subscriptions without cluttering your inbox. What about unsubscribing and discovery? Does it make sense to integrate with emails clients, potentially? All TBD, but. if personal audiences are having a moment right now then it seems like an opprotune time to solve customer problems here. 

    If you’re building any of these, let’s chat me@varadhja.in. I’d love to help, if relevant, and invest 🙏🏽 More about me here

    Misc collection:

    • B2B Marketplaces around commodities
    • Contract management tooling 
    • Real estate transaction management 
    • Better financial management at startups: budget, planning, forecasting, ap/ar 
    • Professional feedback & references library for personal growth (analogous to medical records which can be seen by any doctor)
    • Artist discovery -> TikTok now for music. What other creative industries mighty we be able to improve new talent discovery in a non-direct way. 

  • Switching from Audible to Scribd…^ Some Links Related to Audio

    When somebody mentions “audiobook” there’s a high probability you’d probably think of the Amazon-owned entity, “Audible”. I, too, did for the longest time. I didn’t even think anyone else offered audiobooks. Plus, I’ve been on an Audible annual subscription for about two years now. Tweeting on something related to this, Jackson tweeted back basically saying: Scribd > Audible.

    Scribd: My last memory of this site wasn’t much. My memory extended to needing to upload a document to get credits which you then used to download a different document…and it not having a great interface. That was probably back when I was in college. I didn’t know they did anything else. Visiting their website, it looked like they’ve added significantly to their offering: Unlimited books & audiobooks for $8.99? Plus a clean inteface? I’m intruiged.

    Essentially if I read more than 1 book a month it was cheaper than the Platinum Annual plan (~$9.5/book). Plus, it would give me the flexibility to abandon any books I didn’t like. It made sense to sign up.

    I signed up for the service last month (Jan) to test out the service and test the depth of the catalogue. About 70% of the titles I had previously purchased on Audible were available and the same with the next 10 titles I had hoped purchase, 7 of them were available. Good enough for me to switch behaviour and potentially unlocking some latent demand to consume even more…maybe more than 1 book a month.

    Hence, I didn’t renew my subscription to Audible with the plan of using Scribd + purchasing any titles it didn’t offer directly from Amazon. The only downside to this remains not owning the title and being locked into the subscription for as long as I’d like to use their audiobooks — not dissimilar from the expectations you’d already have from subscribing to a Netflix.

    If you currently subscribe to Audible, I’d encourage you to look into Scribd (#not-an-ad). They’ll even throw in an annual subscription to Pocket & Blinkist.

    Scribd raised $22mm in 2015 from Khosla and other folks…they’ve had this available for a while. It should definitely drive up audiobook consumption https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/02/scribd-khosla-funding/. Here’s a recommendation of books from Scribd (and Opendoor) board member Keith Rabois (@Rabois) to get you started.

    More on audio

    All of this got me thinking a bit more about (non-music) audio in general. Here’s a loose collection of links/unstructured thoughts.

    • Audio drives consumption. Voice is the complement that drives creation.
    • We’re seeing audio become more and more mainstream as potentially the next big platform. We’re already seeing the growing numbers for increased consumption of audiobooks and podcasts and could extend further.
    • Audio – Demand:
      • One part is no doubt driven by the growing popularity of AirPods – personal consumption. See “AirPods Have Gone Viral” – LINK (High visibility, social signalling, and something different). “AirPods Are Now One of Apple’s Most Important Products” – LINK
      • Another part via the in-home voice assistants: Alexa, Siri, Google etc. LINK, LINK
      • Growing podcast revenue proxy for increased demand from consumer. LINK Efficacy of listening: NYT Op-ed LINK Industry report on Audiobooks LINK.
      • Dive deeper into Sirius to understand more about the biggest audio platforms of yesteryear: radio. Radio is a $40b ad business. LINK What’s the transition here. Maybe there isn’t one Sirius bought Pandora…x-sell users and maintain base?
    • Voice – Supply:
      • We’re also seeing an increase in creation tooling eg. Anchor acq Spotify (Podcasts) and Voiceflow (bots).
      • More picks and shovels will be built. including ad tooling, analytics, content moderation, user verification, etc.
    • Exclusive Supply:
      • As all of this happens: owning exclusive content and apps (skills) will start to become more and important. Ben Thompson (aggregation theory) has more which touches on this topic in his post about Spotify acquisitions LINK.
      • Audible has Originals already. Spotify has Gimlet. What’s the equivalent for Scribd?
      • Are original audiobooks similar to super in-depth podcasts like Hardcore History?
      • Would such titles ever make it to being in a book format? Will they become more interactive: either with the screen as the second medium or via interactions?
      • Certain skills will be available on one device and not another. I cannot find any good examples of this right now.
      • Will we see more dedicated production houses? Is Serial an equivalent to Game of Thrones for HBO? How many more podcasting production houses will we see?
      • There was the crazy $500mm deal for Howard Stern back in 2004 LINK when he joined Sirius. There’s Joe Rogan. Who’s next? Will they go to a platform?
    • Networks:
      • v1 is most obvious here: a social network for audio books (a la GoodReads) or for podcasts (a la Breaker).
      • v2 here will be native to the platform itself: For eg. TTYL (ex-UCLA folks) are attempting to build audio social network and Chai (ex-USC folks 😏) building voice chat for teams.
      • How will these v2 networks interact with the supply not from friends?
      • What’s after this? Will we see existing networked platforms build here? Twitter/Fb/Snap/Google/etc?

    If you have interesting links on the audio space and/or are building something is this space, I’d love to chat: me@varadhja.in or @varadhjain.

    P.S. Any good newsletters in this space?

  • BCC Protection

     

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    At Opendoor, there’s a healthy default towards transparency. While we are a Slack-heavy company, we still use email a good amount–especially for communicating with external parties. However, email and transparency aren’t something that goes hand-in-hand, unless you’re Stripe I II. Luckily, BCC can be used to build openness and keeping relevant internal parties in the loop when emailing external parties. I never really used to BCC or get BCC’d until I worked here but now it’s become indispensable. That being said, getting BCC’d or BCC’ing somebody has also become one of my biggest fears.

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  • Keyboard Shortcuts: The Blue Bubbles of Apps & Websites

     

    iMessage is a default messaging service on top of SMS on the iPhone where your messages to a sender appear in blue bubbles as long as the other person has an iPhone (yes, even if you don’t sign into your iCloud). If you message a sender who doesn’t have one, DISASTER occurs–your messages are now in green and you think of the counterpart differently. This stark call out of bad behavior in iMessage is probably one of the one biggest reasons of why people don’t move off of an iPhone. It forces you to think about the pain that the other person might feel when their message goes out in a green bubble should you make the switch away from an iPhone; making iMessage one of the biggest moats that the device has. The blue bubbles of iMessage help justify owning an iPhone as it’s probably your most used app.

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  • Product of the Week: Wells Fargo Card-Free ATM

    A few weeks ago, I saw an interesting billboard by Wells Fargo near one of the first few exit ramps of the freeway after crossing into San Francisco via the Bay Bridge. The billboard illustrated  Wells Fargo’s latest consumer experience/offering – Card Free ATM Access. I was excited because this was one of those product ideas everybody, including me, has probably wondered, “Why it isn’t this a reality yet?”
    I believe the first time this thought crossed my mine  was right after the time I had encountered Venmo in college. I questioned why everything didn’t just work from my phone – the washing machine, the doors, the lights, the vending machine, the ATM, etc.
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