Connecting with startups at InstaOffice
Gaurav Gupta, the founder of SquareBoat recently delivered a talk on “How to engineer growth in your product”, at InstaOffice, one of the most popular coworking networks in India.
Having worked in tech for over 10 years, he had the privilege of working for companies like SlideShare, Educomp and Naukri.com. In 2013, he founded SquareBoat to help other startups build and scale successful web products. He talked about his experiences while working with a list of digital products that he has worked on earlier. One by one he talked about the challenges that he and his team went through while working for on those products and explained the ingenious solutions that were employed to counter those challenges. The aim of the talk was to enlighten the audience about what all can be done, both from a technical and product point of view, to get more customers for their digital products.
According to Gaurav, it is very important to get the basics right. Changes and improvements should happen from the ground up, like in the case of Tripoto, where his team was confronted with the challenge to optimise the site for search engines. Rather than hiring an expensive SEO company, the team decided to start with simply following the google SEO guidelines first. In a matter of months, Tripoto’s traffic increased to 10x.
Additionally, Gaurav believes that product understanding, from a customer’s point of view, is key when conceptualising and building a product. In one his projects for Paisabazaar.com, his team was confronted with the challenge of redesigning not only the UI but also the user flow for credit card application forms. Considering the fact that people don’t like to provide too much information online, his team reduced the newly designed form to just 4 important questions. The results proved his point as Paisabazaar.com had a manyfold increase in credit card applications.
Gaurav believes that world class technology need not be built only in the US, it can also be built in India. He strives to follow the same ideology in all the products that his team works on as part of SquareBoat.
