EE 2019: “Zero to One” with Sharechat’s Ankush Sachdeva

We had the pleasure of hosting Ankush for one of the most awaited masterclasses at Extreme Entrepreneurs 2019. Ankush is the Co-founder & CEO of Sharechat–a Lightspeed portfolio company that shaped the massive vernacular market in India. Walking through the journey of building one of the fastest growing social networks in India, Ankush candidly shared interesting insights and anecdotes from his early journey. We’ve captured highlights from the session that you might find helpful in your entrepreneurial journey.

Failures are opportunities to become better

The story of Sharechat exudes persistence. For the three founders, the journey of building products started way back in 2012 in IIT Kanpur, with their first product being a real estate discovery platform. Soon realizing that Kanpur was not the right market, the team quickly shut the idea and started working on a data analytics platform visualizing NCR crime statistics . Navigating from peon to the commissioner at the police headquarter, the founders convinced the police to use their product. The founders continued experimenting with different ideas, tasting success at some during college. Reflecting on the 14 products that didn’t work out before Sharechat, Ankush shared that in these failures were learnings that gave him clarity on how to recalibrate to succeed in the next endeavour. “People might call it naive irrationality but we always thought the next product will surely work.”

Listen to your audience

Unlike for the last 14 attempts, the idea for ShareChat didn’t come from a brainstorming session, but from the raw insight looking at user-behaviour on a Hindi meme of Sachin Tendulkar on Facebook, to which thousands of people replied with their phone numbers. “It was baffling that in the age of data privacy awareness, people openly shared their details to just receive content on a Whatsapp group!”. Closely observing users’ behaviour on tens of such groups, the founders were convinced that this audience was very unique and hungry for content– “If you put 100 Americans on a Whatsapp group they’ll never keep exchanging content likes these users did.” From that point the founders actively tried to disprove their hypothesis that the rate at which English fluency would increase would be much slower than rate of internet penetration in non-English speaking audience. The honest feedback they gathered from user-behaviour helped the team iterate through multiple products to arrive at the current version of Sharechat.

Trust your intuition before you reach product market fit (PMF)

“Before PMF, data cannot tell you about what is actually going on in a user’s mind”, said Ankush. In fact, data can put you in wrong local maxima path and bring an incremental not transformational growth. As in Sharechat’s case this becomes even more critical when the audience is so far from you in every respect– behaviour, background and geography. You need to talk to the user to understand his/her point of view. Sharing an example, Ankush explained how most of their users selected English as their preferred language on the app but couldn’t say anything in English beyond hello when the founders called them to get their feedback. The reason of this behaviour was internet bias– this audience was never exposed to good quality non-English product. Trusting gut over data, the team took a provocative decision of dropping English from the platform.

Investors back smart teams addressing large markets

Talking about how Ankush and team raised their initial cheques, he shared that the first two rounds of funding were not for Sharechat but a debating platform called Opinio. “Investors understand that in early stages the business models and products can change. They are looking for smart teams addressing markets which are large enough to provide returns.” What impressed their first investors was the ability of teams to ship product in just 19 days– it was unusual!

Hire self-learners

Ankush explained that for the first 20 hires, entrepreneurs will not be able to attract top talent from outside their network. He also stressed upon not expanding the team if someone is not bought into the idea. “If you want to hire high quality people during the experimentation phase, onboard them as co-founders so that they stay.” Ankush shared that these initial set of hires need to be self-learners– “In a high growth and ambiguous environment of a startup, you need people who can walk through unchartered territories, quickly learn and iterate.”

Talking about how he balanced his personal life with a rollercoaster like startup life, Ankush said in good humour that “My parents became immune to my eccentric choices over the years– be it leaving school in 12th or not sitting for placements.” But he believes that while it can be difficult to get them on-board, it is equally important. “When times are rough, you need someone who will not judge you for being honest.”

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