The Founder's Foyer with Aishwarya Ashok

So your product is now launched and it's out for customers to try. You know it’s awesome, but do you know whether they know? How do you ensure your potential buyers understand the value you’re providing; do they care? Often we hear about go-to market strategy—but before all that, what should you do to ensure your target customers know your secret sauce? Here’s someone, the ONLY one, who has all the lessons to teach us how to position a product! April Dunford is the author of the most-famous book on tech product positioning - Obviously Awesome. She’s an executive consultant and speaker who formerly led product, sales, and marketing teams across many startups (now bigger companies) as their VP of Marketing and currently helps technology companies make complicated products easy for customers. April talks to Aishwarya about the foundations of product positioning, what weak and strong positioning looks like, why building the positioning is a team activity, when is the right time to back up on trends and when it's not, why founders need to segment their target market, and a lot more. So many fun examples and frameworks to refer to from the conversation—tune in!

So you’ve got a great idea and you’ve been building out your initial version of the product. With a little bit of socializing around, you see that people are starting to gain interest in what you’re building—what next? Obviously, the thought of building a community is something that’ll definitely cross your mind. But building a community and engaging with your early believers calls for so much dedicated effort that needs to be consistent. This conversation is around making those connections and investing in a supportive community. Nazuk Jain is a Product Manager at Apple. She’s also a creator who runs Product Career, a community with 30k+ people around all the social platforms, and she shares knowledge about early-career product management. Nazuk talks to Aishwarya all about the ways in which creators and founders should find their niche and purpose, go on to set up that initial close circle of conversations, and practical ways to scale the community with context. 

If building a startup is an arduous journey, finding the right people to grow with you is another mountain to climb. Ideas can meet product, but both of these need to meet the right team to live the vision. But how to find the folks who are as passionate as you in helping build great ideas? What should the benchmark be like? That’s exactly what we’ll navigate in today’s conversation about building teams and culture. Joining Aishwarya today is Padmini Janaki, Co-Founder & CEO of Mind and Mom, a pregnancy welfare app. Padmini has formerly led product teams at PayPal and she recently represented TN at the World Economic Forum in Davos, with her Mind and Mom team.  What we discuss: - Finding the inner circle of advisors and supporters - Importance of co-founder and how/why to find one - Building the culture and values for your team - Legal procedures and incorporation of a brand - Things founders often miss out easily - Representing Tamil Nadu and India at the World Economic Forum, Davos - Growing a startup brand over the pandemic—the learnings and takeaways - Importance of clear communication and candor 

#FoyerFeature—a section that completely focuses on a particular project and how the founder created an impact with it. We’ll be discussing all about their journey, the way they come up with creative ideas, and patterns they follow to learn and shine through. Kicking off the first feature is someone special, who had a mission of democratizing mentorship—and, he actually went on to do that with his project-turned-venture. Let’s say hello to Felix Lee, Co-Founder of ADPList, a platform and community that helps everyone learn and grow with the help of world class mentors. Felix chats with Aishwarya about all things Awesome Design People List aka ADPList—the base idea, the way he built the team with people from across different countries, how a community of mentors came along, designer-to-founder journey, challenges in being a creator, and more. 

Discovering ideas is definitely an exciting phase—we wake up, walk around, and go to sleep thinking about the best ideas we can build for. But, what happens to all those ideas? Do we really have a tried and tested way to pick out just the right ones and get to implement them? I know that journey is super hard. And this conversation is all about discovering, analyzing, and validating the right ideas to work on. Ravi Mehta chats with Aishwarya Ashok about building out early-stage ideas and validating assumptions in the best way. Ravi is the Co-founder and CEO of Scale, a platform that’s reinventing the way people learn and grow with the power of coaching. He was formerly the Chief Product Officer at Tinder, and led product teams at Meta, Xbox, and TripAdvisor.

When was the last time you thought of working on a new project? Choosing between ideas and actually getting to work on it are two different jobs for the ones who build stuff. Often we are left confused, exhausted, and unclear on how to manage our energy, time, and effort, leading to a stall in the journey. Well, today’s conversation is all about how to navigate such phases and get past to working steadily with our ideas. Joining Aishwarya today is Amy Young, Founder and CEO of Redefine Possibility, also formerly a Top Partner Lead in Google’s Global Partnerships. She’s been coaching executives and leaders on mindset changes to align effort with high performance.