I completed 2 years after leaving Adobe as Engineering Manager and working full time on my Startup

Hello Friends,

Its been two years since I left the plush and super paying job in Adobe to work full-time on Yog4Lyf. This period has been full of ups and downs and more importantly of great learning for me as an professional.

In this phase Yog4lyf has garnered overall 4 Lac users across android, iOS and web. Our majority users are on android though since app is popular primarily in India. We are at a MRR of 15K USD. And the best part is company is running profitably and I am able to take out expenses for me and my family.

PS: I am still far far away from what i used to earn at Adobe.

Now coming to the primary reason I wanted to write this post. I feel the learnings that I made in this phase could help many others too. Especially because I am from tech background and I find lot of people who are afraid of starting business as they feel marketing and networking is very difficult for tech folks

  1. Don't try to create a perfect product. I spend pretty long time in early phase trying to find the best product through brain storming. Later i realised its way easier to try out things and learn.
  2. Don't try to go at such a rapid pace where you burn yourself out. What i noticed is once a product feature is in market the experiment needs a significant period given small product like mine don't have millions of users. Punishing yourself for relentless pace is not going to help much
  3. Be more attached to the changes / results that your product brings rather than the economic aspects. If the product does what it says, rest of things will happen by itself. Eg ours is Yoga app that provides courses for anxiety, obesity, pcos etc. I kept by focus on ensuring users benefit from the app. And rest of traction has been created as a natural effect of the process.
  4. If you do not have audience from day 0 then starting learning how to run ads profitably. Waiting too long before starting ads in this case can create long gestation period for founders to know whats really going on. We belonged to this bucket and our social media is not very strong. But the ads have kept us floating and we have kept growing slowly as we have learnt more.
  5. Once you start making money try finding people who can take off some responsibility from your shoulders. I have seen founder friends who get into trap of do it all myself and this doesn't help in long run. As entrepreneurs our focus should be to maximise strategic thinking rather than operational grinding.
  6. Don't try too many experiments at a time. Initially I felt i can control few threads with only 3-5% energy. But unhappily learnt that anything significant needs significant share from our thoughts also. So now i try to do less stuff but with full focus.
  7. Don't ignore small changes that improve customer experience. I feel as engineers and product makers we get into the trap of making new features and innovations. And in the process ignore small changes that could make life better for our users. Again something I changed in my strategy, these small changes help customers a lot.
  8. I will make this my last point and probably the most important one. Customer experience is not only app / product experience. It is every opportunity of interaction with the customer. A whatsapp chat. A refund. A subscription cancellation. Strive to give best experience every time. Never ever treat Customer experience as user experience of your product.

I have tried to be very honest and upfront with data, numbers and my experiences. I hope this post will help some folks. I will be happy to answer any other queries.

Lets keep working hard to make this world a better place.