Hello World

Dubai, Job and much more :)

Kicking off a weekly newsletter here, where I'll share bits from my personal and private life. Expect a new piece every Saturday.

This idea came from a talk by Farza - founder of Buildspace, who mentioned how jotting down weekly updates for three years really made a difference in his life.
Going to do the same and then maybe one day, I'll scroll through this and see the steps that led to the Future Ritav.

Personal Life

• Went on my first international trip with Friends to Dubai, went to Singapore as a child in 2011 that was my first international trip.

• Attended Buildspace IRL event, if you don’t know Buildspace you can check it out here - https://buildspace.so/

• There were around 150 people from at least 50 countries, talked to a lot of them, had great conversations, on a personal level about their lives and on a professional level in which we shared the products we were building and took feedback regarding it.

• Started a new job in Bangalore, currently loving it, it’s very new. Hope to sustain these feels.

GetFriendly (My Product)

• It is a product I am building which helps you make friends with similar interests; this was the product I was working on for the last 6+ weeks and presented this at Buildspace

• There’s a lot of feedback I got from people which I will be implementing upon

  • One was constant iteration recommended by Stavan.

    • My main goal currently is to make people meet and help them make friends.

    • So was advised to focus on making the people meet first and then talking to each and everyone how was their experience and were they able to make 1-2 real connections, if not the meeting was a failure was for me and I needed to iterate and make some changes.

  • Another recommendation was by Tom.

    • He mentioned instead of launching it globally or even nationally, focus on specific regions.

    • Like Launch in Bangalore and don’t keep 100s of interests, rather than that put some very specific high traffic interests which will make sure there are enough people to form a group for

  • Another recommendation was by Alec and honestly this was a thing mentioned upon by a lot of people.

    • How do I make sure if there are no creepy people at the event?

    • Honestly, I don’t know, even big companies like Hinge, Bumble have not found the solution to it yet.

    • But the simple solution we came up with was of simply checking their social media platform and making sure they are not a nobody and have a basic social media presence. 

    • Haven’t thought how I would implement this for now, but it’s on the list.

  • Revenue Model

    • Main question, how the hell am I planning to make money through this venture?

    • Honestly, that’s not my mission for now, if enough people use it and it solves their problem, I will ponder on it later on that.

    • One suggestion someone gave during my demo was (there was a demo day where I explained my app to 50+ people for 2 hours) I can contact people who are having events, ensure them I am going to bring a certain amount of people and take a cut.

Professional Life

• Joined a new company in Bangalore, I am the 7th member.

• It’s daunting yet exciting because it’s very new and different from my past company.

• Best thing is there’s no meeting culture you can work on your things and the founder is v. Cool.

• I am a great person for this job because we’re working on a mobile app which helps you limit your time on social media apps and focus on better things like the article you never read :)

• I am great for this because I have been using similar apps for 4 years now and have a detailed idea on how these things work.

• Let’s see how this journey goes.

• And ya I am using a Mac for the first time, it’s amazing yet shortcuts are tricky, someone help me out.