PicPal – Mahesh Rajagopalan
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About the Episode
How do you deal with the ups and downs of entrepreneurship? Well today’s guest shares the internal disciplines that he’s build to successfully found two companies. Also, listen to the part of the show where he shares how he established a presence on a college campus and got early user feedback from his target market.
Mahesh Rajagopalan is CEO and Co-Founder of Picpal.
Show Notes
Internal Disciplines that He’s Build to Successfully Found Two Companies
What Mahesh realized in his startup journey is the fact that it is long, filled with risks and adversities, and that you and your co-founders face these challenges alone. While you learn skills in business schools, they don’t really prepare you for what’s to come to be successful in your entrepreneurial journey. One of the key skills to survive is to develop internal disciplines: the discipline to maintain a higher energy level to be able to sift through data and maintain balance and develop routines which can force you to unplug to enable you to refocus.
Establishing a Presence on a College Campus and Getting Early User Feedback
When they were working on the early concepts for their app, they decided that they needed to be near their target audience so they established a presence in a college campus. The first decision was to pick the place and since they came from a small startup, they couldn’t hire an agency or be in multiple places. So they picked a university where one of their key team members graduated from. It was a vibrant college with a large population and with dynamic student activities. They initially had a core group of 3-4 people and it snowballed from there. They had real, onsite discussions with users and this supplemented their research online. Many of the earlier iterations of the app came out of these discussions. An example is the removal of their app’s one-minute deadline, giving more users time to respond. These interviews also helped confirm their assumptions. They found out that these teenagers want to share but they don’t want to do it publicly in a very large group. And this is why they built the app to be intimate — to be shared to your squad and not to everybody.
Show Mentions
Fav app: Quartz : (iTunes | Google Play)
