What are some of the valuable learnings and inspirations Siddhartha and Nansi got after recording 200+ episodes with the most successful entrepreneurs, VCs, and creators on the 100x Entrepreneur podcast?

The new episode with our duo is out now!

Tune in to learn how to start a podcast, what you can expect after a certain number of podcast episodes, how you grow with each conversation, and which guests inspired Nansi & Siddhartha the most!

We hope you enjoy this short, crisp and insightful episode from 100x!

Notes –

00:22 –

Intro 01:15 – Learning Consistency: Publishing episodes every Monday

02:26 – Learning Networking: Bringing Top-notch guests

06:24 – Learnings from Gaurav Munjal, Unacademy: 10000+ Notes on his iPad

08:40 – “A Startup Team is Sports Team, not a family.”

09:34 – Learnings from Vidit Attrey, Meesho: Listening to your customers

12:35 – Realising that you know nothing and absorbing the best of your guests

14:02 – Shoutout ft Prashant Ganti, Head of Product, Zoho on where founders struggle with Payroll and how they can fix it.

16:12 – Learnings from creators who’ve cracked distribution

17:42 – Being professional with people you work with

 

Read the transcript here:

Nansi 0:23

Hi everyone. Welcome to the 100x Entrepreneur Podcast. Today we are sitting in our studio, we finally got the place but we have very childishly put this logo here because we haven’t done any interiors in our studio yet. There is a lot we need to do with this space. But I was so excited that I couldn’t wait for some more time to record here. So finally, we have started recording. So this is the first episode we are recording in our studio. And in this episode, we want to talk about skill sets we both have acquired in the last 200 episodes we have done and where we have hosted lots of entrepreneurs and VCs, angel investors, creators, and authors on our podcast. What we have learned after doing this many episodes and what we have learned from our favorite guests that we’ll be discussing in this episode, so stay tuned till the end to know our journey. Siddhartha, let’s start with your journey.

 

Siddhartha 1:16

I think when I started the podcast along with you, Nansi, one thing we wanted to do was learn consistency. So we have been able to consistently publish one episode per week for the last 200 weeks. That is one key thing that people outside appreciate us for. This has percolated in every aspect of our life, the consistency that we maintain with a podcast the same goes with my investing. The same goes for my work. The same goes for my reading. So now my life has focused mostly on input metrics. Being consistent with the podcast helped me get better at it.

 

Nansi 1:52

And thanks to Siddhartha, all our team members including me, have inculcated this habit so that they know that no matter what we have to publish the episode if it’s someone’s wedding if someone is traveling, or whatever it is, we have to publish the episode no matter what. So they prepare and do all the work in advance so that we don’t miss publishing the episode. So our newsletter goes out every Monday. We publish this episode and all the audio platforms we publish the episode in our YouTube, so we never miss publishing Any podcasts in any week. This is something we learned from Siddhartha. And one more thing I have learned is networking.

 

So what happened, I interned with Siddhartha’s startup in my second year of college and after my college finished, I joined Sheroes. But in both places, I was never required to interact with people who are outside my company. So it was very challenging for me to talk to these people who I was talking to for the first time. What do you say, what’s the right thing to say the first time you talk to someone? So this is something I learned from podcasts. Now I know how to share the kind of email, the kind of Twitter, LinkedIn message, and I know the word limit of all these platforms’ DM messages. So this is something I have learned and how do you network with these people once the podcast is done. This is something I learned from podcasting, which was very difficult for me before we started our podcast.

 

And I still remember when I was interning with Siddhartha’s startup, I was managing their community or I was building their community because it was the very initial phase. They just launched their product. And I was supposed to talk to parents about their experience with the app. And then one day Siddhartha asked me, Nansi, why don’t you start conducting offline events, and I was so scared. And I started counting my days, how many days are left until my internship gets over and I don’t have to do this particular work. And I was very enthusiastic when it came to talking to these mothers on phone but conducting a workshop or conducting an offline event or networking with these mothers or Siddhartha’s early investors for also there was something unimaginable for me at that time.

 

This is something I have learned over the last three years. Now I can talk to these guests who I host on my podcast and how I like to work with these people once the podcast is finished. So there are many guests who we brought through the reference of the guests we had already hosted.

 

Siddhartha 4:26

And Nansi has been able to bring guests like Kunal Bahl Snapdeal, Vani Kola from Kalaari which are like huge institutions in themselves. And I think this is a skill that she learned on how to bring guests, how to reach out to them and how to customize a message for them. What would appeal to their interest? Why should they come on our podcast?

 

Nansi 4:48

And I also learned how to cold email. This is a very important skill set, one should learn what kind of message you should write and how you write this message at the time. You can’t always cold email everyone all the time, you should know the opportunity and the time and the message. So I still remember it was around 8 or 9pm. Kabir was just one year old and I was super duper hectic because Kabir was feeding that time. And you can imagine one schedule if you have a one year old baby at home and it was lockdown. So my day was superduper hectic and I was super tired by that time. And I got a notification on Twitter that Kunal Bahl followed 100x Entrepreneurs, it made me so happy, it just lit my mood. And suddenly I just replied to him sharing about my day and that time I was just seeking validation for my work.

 

I just messaged him that Hi Kunal, and I was having a very hectic day and very stressful day and I always doubt if I’m doing the kind of work and the work I am doing is sufficient or not, and he said, No, you guys are doing a fabulous job. You guys are creating an impact in the startup ecosystem. And it made me so happy and it was such a fulfilling moment for me being a podcaster being a new parent who continued her work and next day, I messaged Kunal, Kunal, we would like to have a podcast with you. And he said, Yes, and it is one of the best podcasts we have on 100X Entrepreneur podcast. So this is how you cold email to people, you reach out to people at the right time and say the right kind of thing. So this is something I learned from the podcast.

 

Siddhartha 6:24

One episode that I’ll always remember is with Gaurav Munjal from Unacademy. So me and Nansi went to his place to record the podcast. Once we started recording it, we felt that we were in his aura, in his energy. And he’s so passionate, so obsessed about solving problems in education. That’s how he has built all the skill sets. First is, he has like 10,000 Plus notes in his iPad to the ferocious note taker he is. So he doesn’t rely on his brain to do the hard disk work. For storage work. He relies on his brain only for processing everything. Even our meeting, poster meeting notes he kept on his iPad.

 

And the second is he figures out time on a daily basis to read, every day on his calendar, five to 6pm is meant for reading, no matter how busy his days are. And you can imagine, Unacademy today is the $3 billion company more than $200 million in yearly revenues, how hectic it must be, for Gaurav but these are the things that I keenly observed from him and I started taking better notes muscles, I’m not there, where he is, but I aspire to be where he is. Similarly, in reading, I try to read in whatever free time that we have, you see our library behind me. I have not read like 90% of the books in it. But my aspiration is.

 

Nansi 7:47

This is just one set. Our beds are also full of books. Thanks to Siddhartha. Something interesting, I learned from Gaurav’s episode, it was such a nice experience for us to be with Gaurav in that room. And the energy was actually very amazing. And I literally got goosebumps while we were recording that podcast episode. And he was speaking from his heart. So I would request all of you to listen to this episode with Gaurav. And you’ll realize what happens when someone speaks from his heart. And he uses this word obsession many times in the podcast. I have learned from him that it’s good to be obsessed, it’s okay to be obsessed if you’re solving a good problem, if you’re bringing a change, if you’re creating an impact in so many lives. And you’re obsessed about that problem. It’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing, we have already considered that being obsessed is not good.

 

Siddhartha 9:40

One of the key things I also learned from Gaurav is that, and this was a big mistake in my own startup, that for me, my team was my family and I couldn’t let a family member go. You don’t sacrifice your family members. When tough times came upon us when we had to take hard calls when someone was not performing. It was really like cutting an arm when we had to fire just one person from the team but Gaurav told me Hey, a startup team is not a family. It’s a sports team for a country. And let’s take example of cricket, only the best 11 players will play even sometimes you have seen, Kohli or Dhoni have also sacrificed from the team. Because the goal is to win for India similarly Gaurav said that in Unacademy they follow a sports team. Uncademy is not a family so only the best players will play for Unacademy and that was like clearly that changed me internally on how you view teams.

 

Few other podcasts that have a huge impact on me. Vidit Attrey from Meesho, Meesho today is a $5 billion company and Vidit started really small I remember when in 2015 Me and Vidit both had the same investor Radul Grag and Radul had given us two crore around the funding of total and Vidit had secured only 90 lakhs. When I came to Bangalore and met Vidit, I took him out for lunch.

 

Nansi 9:56

Hi, everyone. Before we begin, I would like to share that this podcast is brought to you by Prime Venture partners, an early stage VC fund led by Amit Somani, Shripati Acharya and Sanjay Swami. Prime is often the first institutional investor in category defining tech startups in FinTech, SaaS healthcare and education, such as Markit Quizzes, Planet Spark, Bolt and Glip to know more about Prime visit https://primevp.in/

 

Siddhartha 10:28

At that point on time, Vidit’s model of Meesho and today’s model of Meesho is very different. But what was special about Vidit is that he was constantly talking to the customer so much. I was in awe of how he incorporated customer feedback into his product. He changed the product. So he was never in love with the product at Meesho, he was just in love with solving e-commerce problems for smaller sellers, tier three sellers and then the tier three consumers what they buy. And that’s how we see it today. Meesho is competing with the likes of Flipkart, head to head in 2022 they clogged almost equal number of orders or higher number of orders in the recent day, the great India annual festival, which is done before Diwali, it’s just amazing how if you can just listen to your customers and keep on iterating.

 

Me and Nansi what we did is, you see today our some of the best mics, some of the best equipment. And we constantly listened to you saying that your content is good, but your audio quality is not so good.

 

Nansi 11:24

Yes, and in general, if we meet people who say that we really like your podcast, we all immediately ask which episode is your favorite episode? What do you exactly like about that episode? So we want to hear more from our listeners so that we can improve. We started with a mobile phone and we are now sitting in our Halfdan studio. But we have come a long way. It all happened by listening to our listeners, we implemented all their suggestions and hopefully will improve our audio quality.

 

Siddhartha 11:51

It is a big step for us to take a studio, recording with the best of equipment and get you the best of content out there. So that this is our journey of 100x we are going along with you. And we will want to listen to what will help you grow 100x of yourself through our podcast.

 

Nansi 12:03

I think Siddhartha you always wanted to read, you told me that from your first salary, like before you got your first salary, you decided that every month you will be spending a part of your salary on buying books, but you were not reading religiously that time. But after meeting these people, like after talking to these people on the podcast, your inclination towards reading it grew, and now you read one two hour every day and all the books you have collected in the last five, seven years, you now have started reading all these books.

 

Siddhartha 12:36

What had changed me, when we interviewed like 200 people, we realized we knew nothing, or we knew like just 0.1% of what they knew. And the common habit among all of the guests, which have accomplished so much, is they are voracious readers, reading is part of their daily lives. And they are in this game of entrepreneurship or venture capital, not to make money, like money is the outcome for them, but to get better, and they play it like a game.

 

Nansi 13:00

Something very interesting I learned in the recent months is collaboration, how do you collaborate with the best set of people. So we used to host VCs and Angel investors on our podcast till episode 98. And after that, we decided that let’s also host entrepreneurs on the podcast because by that time, we had pretty much covered all the VC firms in India. So we thought let’s also host entrepreneurs on the podcast because they have an interesting journey to share. But what happened in the recent months is that I thought like there are so many creators like Vaibhav, founder of Growth school, Ishan Sharma, founder MarkitUp , and many more creators who have their own startup now, like after tracking the distribution and working on content or making a community of their own, they started their own venture. So I thought let’s also host these young people on the podcast.

 

So I also learned how to collaborate with the right kind of people because we said we want to host mature founders who can make early stage founders or aspiring entrepreneurs learn from their journey.

 

Siddhartha 14:02

Dear listeners. Before we dive further into the podcast, I would like to welcome Prashant Kunti, Head of Product Management at Zoho payroll and Zoho books. Prashant, What trends are you observing in the payroll and agile space?

 

Prashant 14:16

Thanks Siddhartha. So first up with the pandemic induced remote working, so that’s something that has caught on and hybrid working a distributed workforce is here to stay. So this affects the way a company’s HR and Payroll departments operate. And so this introduces some complexities while a distributed workforce is good. It introduces payroll and HR complexities as well.

 

Secondly, we are going to see more and more in the emerging area of compensation and payroll analytics. Next, what I’m seeing is more and more the first regulated embedded banking, payroll systems connecting with banks, more and more banks, more and more banks coming forward to integrate with payroll systems. And so do insurance providers so that the convergence between banking insurance, FinTech and payroll that’s going to happen. Also expect more AI and ML going to be incorporated into payroll as well, that’s not something that comes to your mind at the very beginning when you think about payroll, but we are going to see payroll assistance that employees can interact with to understand their compensation details better.

 

And finally, we’re also going to see a lot more payroll being more deeply integrated with various other systems, not just from the transaction point of view, but to help with better decision making across organizations.

 

Siddhartha 16:03

Thank you, Prashant. Dear listeners, you will find more about Zoho payroll in the show notes. Now, let’s further continue with the podcast.

 

Nansi 16:14

But you have to keep making the change in your philosophy. You can’t be this old person who has the set philosophy no, I want to do this thing in this particular way. So we thought we should host young entrepreneurs who have cracked the distribution, and build the audience for themselves. The product is early, but they have something solid to teach. So I also learned how to collaborate with these authors we hosted on our podcast. This is something very interesting I learned in the recent months.

 

Siddhartha 16:39

You’re right Nansi, creators who have cracked distribution, they have so much to teach. Because it was my mistake at my startup that I thought product is the king, distribution is the king, queen. And after that, because once how to build a large audience, let’s say a half a million, a million people, then you know their pulse also, which product will click for them now building for that audience rather than marrying yourself to a product that, hey, I want to get this product to this audience. Rather, you work backwards, I have a 1 million followers, what is now the need the most, which I can solve and I can also monetize. Each of the creators has started Vaibhav from Growth school, Ishan from Markit Up, even Varun Maya from Avalon.

 

Nansi 17:21

They have so much to teach about distribution building communities. And we work with so many PR agencies, and they’re like you said, you don’t want to host early stage founders and you’re now hosting these people. And we’re like, No, we are not focused on the stage of the startup, we are focused on people who have something solid to teach our audience. We’re talking about PR agencies here. So something else I learned how to be professional with the people you work with. So we get five, seven requests from PR agencies to host their clients on our podcast every day. So these PR people, they are not our team members. They are not our clients. They are not our guests. But we work with all these PR agencies, how do you maintain a professional relationship with them?

 

And what happened, as I said, we have been getting a lot of PR requests, and I used to tell them that see, this is the profile you shared is not a good match for us. I used to feel very bad , when I used to say that, because I didn’t want to put ourselves here. And then because they have also achieved a lot in their own way. It’s just that the match was not good. But I just made a little change in the communication. I said, we are not a good match for them. And it made me feel a little less guilty. So how do you maintain a professional relationship with the people you work with. So this is something I learned by working with these PR people.

 

I think that’s all from today’s podcast. I hope you enjoy this conversation and do let us know in the comments. If you want more podcasts from me and Siddhartha.

 

Siddhartha 18:52

Do share with us what are your learnings from the podcast, we would love to hear from you. What are the things that you would like to see more in the podcast. What skills that you would like to develop that we can bring to the experts in those skills on the podcast.

 

Nansi 19:06

Yes. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you guys. Thank you

 

 

 

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