 Hello. So let me just kind of, yeah. All right. Yes. All right. Good. So good to see you guys. Right. It's always great pleasure to be here. Feels like home. And thanks to all the organizers, I know how hard it is to put up a show like this. So thank you. And thank you for coming here. It speaks a lot about who you are and what your commitment is. You may not realize that, but hopefully in this session you will actually realize what is special about you. So I don't want to really do too much of an introduction. The talk is about dream chasing. And I had a lot of dreams. And one of the decisions that I made as in very early in my childhood, my dad is a chain smoker. Was a chain smoker. And there was this ad that I saw in magazines and that read basically saying that I will get what I want. And when I used to see that I made two decisions in my life. One, I will never smoke. And two, I will get what I want. Those two decisions have actually driven my life. And I've always been number one. Schools, I was number one. Whether that is academics, whether that is co-curriculars, I was always number one. I started my business when I was 18 years, but I started making money when I was 7th grade. 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade. So I've done a lot of things over the past 22 years that I've run the business for. And I've seen lots of success. So we'll talk about success. We'll talk about failures also. But we'll more specifically talk about chasing your own dreams. So while I'll talk about my stories, what will really make this 30 minutes important for you is if you actually start looking at your life and your dreams. I guess your dreams are more important than my dreams for you at least, I hope. So let's start. So story number one, this is about three years ago, and we are chasing targets. The business is doing well, but we've launched a lot of products, a lot of new plugins, and they are not picking up that well as we had anticipated. So we are seeing some sales, but not as much as we want. We're seeing support requests, and then there is a lot of struggle. The team is small. We still are a small team. We have huge resource crunch. Things are growing, and we want to grow, but we can't grow. Can't find enough talent. All of that is going on at the same time. And Karthik has given us a $1 million target to go to Chase, that I'm chasing it, chasing it, and not able to make it. So $1 million looks like the elusive goal, sweating it out, but not making it. And there is a lot of struggle. Now, while I'm just sitting there struggling, struggling, and almost giving up, and trying to come up with some new ideas of how can we actually grow from here, I actually chanced upon something very interesting, and I came up with what I now call the 10X formula. So 10X formula was like, very simple. Basically, on a website, if you want to make sales, if you want to grow your website, if you want to grow any business, there are three factors. One is you go to get leads, you go to get people to walk into your store, that is visitors. Then you go to sell them something at that point in time, and then you want to be able to sell them something again in the future. So if you double your traffic, if you double your conversion rate, and if you triple your ARPU, which is average revenue per user, the kind of money that you make per customer, you essentially have a 12X business model, right? Or 12X hota ni apan thoda rounded out, so that's why it's called 10X. But if you apply this strategy, your business can definitely go 10X. Now that was a great strategy. It did work for us also. But what is really interesting to learn here is that whenever you are facing a complex business problem, if you apply your scientific mind and break it down into smaller pieces, and then deal with each one at an individual level, you will have a much higher chance of success. So instead of going at, okay, let's do $1 million as a revenue target, right? We said, okay, let's keep it aside. We'll get there. But can we do 2X traffic? Can we do 2X conversion? Can we do 3X ARPU? And we made improvements in each of that. We've still not hit $1 million, but we've come a long way. The real lesson is break it down into smaller pieces so that you can chew it. Okay. So 10X kept on happening like that. Scientific method of applying scientific method to your problems does always work, and we've seen that work. But along with that, the other thing that I realized is that, you know, that need of always winning, right? That I always want to win. I always want to be number one. So before, I want to give you an answer to that, but before let's do this, that what is keeping us from achieving our dreams? Because I'll give you my answers. What's really important is about your dreams. So what do you think? What keeps you away from achieving your dreams? I think the first thing is very simple. We always ask, what do I need to do to achieve my goal? What we should really be asking is who do I need to be to achieve my goal? And there's a subtle difference, right? So doing is important, but being is more important. You've got to understand that what kind of a person you'll have to become to take those actions because your being comes before your actions, right? So I won't go much into the details, but basically ask yourself this question that who do I need to be to achieve that goal? What kind of a person do I need to be? Because the actions will automatically happen. So next, if you aren't better, work harder. We want to succeed, but we may not be good at certain things. Like we may not be good at coding, somebody else may be better at that than us. Then what do we do? Work harder. Because no company can keep you around just for showing up. They'll keep you around and they'll actually be happy for you and give you growth if you're growing them. If you're contributing to the business growth, you're taking care of customers, there is no problem that they will have to give you growth. So work harder if you're not better, but get better. If you work harder, you're going to get better, right? And it's required in today's days. It's really important. So you want to know the truth about being number one? How many of you actually want to be number one? I may be the odd one out, but there are some more odd ones. So do you want to hear the truth about being number one? Anybody? You want to hear the truth? Yes, okay. So the truth, the real truth about being number one, is that it's okay to be number two also? It really doesn't matter that much. We struggle so much to be number one that even when we are number two, number three, number four, number ten, we're like, kill ourselves. Oh, it's not number one. Oh, you're number ten too, right? There is a statistic that in golf, the difference between the number one golfer and the tenth player is just 1.9 shots. Like, you know, you have to take shots in golf and then it's just like, let's say two shots. So the number one player reached there two shots before the number tenth player. The money that they make is vastly different. It's not just two shots. So yes, if you're number one, you do get a lot more reward. But really, it's okay to be number two. It's okay to be number three. Because what's really important is for you to be there in the game. If you're not number one and if you quit the game or if you're number ten and if you quit the game, are you ever going to be number one? If you stay in the game, there is a chance for you to be number one. If you go out of the game, there is no chance, right? So that is the real truth about being number one. So story number two. And you know, I don't know how many of you know, but I call myself an entrepreneur geek because I'm geek first, entrepreneur later, but entrepreneur is more important, that pays the bills. Entrepreneur comes first. But I love coding and I love solving problems. So we have this plug-in called IceGram and another solution called Puttler and for which we wanted to build a little solution. So essentially what we wanted to do was we wanted to take this kind of input of user data that if we have an email address or if we have phone number, if we have the address of the person, we wanted to kind of clean it up, validate it, normalize it and enrich it. What does that mean? So if somebody is given a bad email address and because, you know, we have an email subscription, an email marketing plug-in, whenever somebody subscribes, we want to make sure that it's not a fake email. We want to make sure that it's a clean email. If somebody is saying Neerav plus 123 at gmail.com, we want to normalize that to neerav at gmail.com because it's all the same and stuff like that. And for our WooCommerce plug-ins, we wanted to kind of normalize the address also. Whatever address people have entered in, we need to convert that into a format that we can query on. If you had to solve this problem, what do you think how hard this problem would be? How many days will it take you to kind of solve this? Any takes? Developers? Start developers? Plenty of ace developers in the crowd. So if you had to kind of do this much, how much time will it take you? Guesses? I won't hire you if you say one week. I won't hire you if you say one year either. Anything? No? Too hard a problem to crack? No? Like it's just a matter of few hours? Maybe? No? Six to seven hours. Six to seven hours? Very good. Maybe less, yes. Anybody else? Four hours? Nice. I'm getting some candidates. Anybody else? All right. Go Google. Falsehoods programmers believe. Anybody who is into programming, you go do this. And it's going to give you a list of things that we believe to be true but are not. For email validation, if you did anything other than add the rate, it's going to be wrong. Because people can have email addresses. The RFC spec allows email addresses of all sorts. If you think that when people had to, let me just go back. Are we back? No? Where are we? Okay, good. So, for example, if you think that people will enter addresses properly, that's wrong. If you think people will always enter California instead of CA, people will enter CA. People will enter California. Now, you'll even make that condition, oh, okay, I'm smart. California or CA. I'll validate both of them. I'll convert both of them into CA state. What if they make a spelling mistake? Now, what do you do? Okay. Oh, I'll give them a drop-down. But what if they're coming from a country that doesn't understand English? Then? Make this problem hard. But one can argue that okay, we can just use Google APIs and let Google do all this work. We can just use their mapping APIs and convert an address to a long let. That is what we want. But what if you want to do this for a free plugin? Okay, somebody will come and argue that, okay, don't do it for a free plugin. You're going to burn the money. That's not a good business model. Fine, even if I'm charging, what if I want to do it for millions of records every day? That's the problem we have. We have a free plugin for which we want to do this. And we have a business analytics service which processes millions of transactions per day for which we need to do this. It's a real hard problem. Okay, because we cannot use a third-party API even like Google because it's too expensive. What we had to do, and this is live, I mean, was use open source systems and kind of work through it and find a solution that will be almost real time. This was done in 3 milliseconds. Yeah, this is 3 milliseconds. MS. The entire thing, it takes a lot of data in and processes it. Does a lot of things, but I'll be fooling you. It's not really 3 milliseconds. It's actually cached. But yeah, it does a lot of things. Hard problem. The only thing that I want to tell you is that it's a hard problem. Now, hard problems require genius to solve the problems. I saw it. Alright, that's a joke. Okay, so how many of you interested in being a genius? Or at least being called a genius? Like, other people see you as a genius. I mean, it's not going to happen, but other people should feel that you're a genius. It helps, right? Right. So, the trick with being genius. First of all, innovation is nothing but just taking some old ideas and making new connections. Right? So there is something already out there and then you're making a new connection. That's all there is about innovation because most of it is innovation and not invention. And every great idea it's a formula. I mean, it goes through five phases. The first thing that you have to do to innovate or to become genius is to really think hard about the problem. Like, you have to really study it well. So you have to first define your problem and then you have to go deep into it, right? You have to study a lot. You have to, you know, go through a lot of material. Then what you do is once you've done all that studying, you know, the second bit is done you have to take a break. So you have to walk away from the problem. Now, once you walk away from the problem there will be some time suddenly especially when you're in the shower that something will just hit. Right? And that's the genius because then you get something which is like an epiphany some new idea that was kind of culmination of everything that you did before. All you have to do now is go back you know, assess the idea put it into a proper form and the last fifth step is remaining is just test it out in the world whether this idea really works or not. So that's the trick being genius, I kind of applied that trick to solve this problem that we had if anybody is interested in learning how we solve this problem, you know, you can meet me afterwards it's pretty interesting. I could do a talk on that but yeah, so that's the trick about being genius. All right So, genius is okay but we have lots of these tech problems right now like, you know, React and Gutenberg and 10 only frameworks and then headless WordPress and what not and this is going to just grow so how do you survive all this mess of maddening technology so you want to learn some new technology how many of you want to learn React nice, how many of you want to learn something new in the next 6 months yeah, you better do right so every time I've tried to learn a new technology I've almost gone nuts okay, and I love technology but what has brought me back and what has centered me is asking this one question I'm guessing you want to know that question yeah, all right so the question is no matter what technology it is what's the purpose who are you building it for what does your user really want so I may be building the fanciest geolocation stuff in the world okay, that like works in so many seconds and that just uses open source data but boss who wants it how do they want it that is what is most important because you will build the coolest of technology but if your user doesn't want it what's the point yes, there is a point you get that satisfaction, but beyond that what's the point so anytime you're really going crazy after a new technology you're trying to figure out some React stuff and you know that NPM module and then whatever that new ES6 syntax is driving you crazy take a break and ask what is the answer for what am I trying to solve that technical problem that you're trying to solve is not really the problem there is a business problem there is a user problem that you're trying to solve what is the problem get in touch with that and you'll have your solution quickly that's my method of surviving tech chaos the other thing is distinguishing between while I'm speaking here and I'm giving you a lot of Gyan like a Baba when you'll enjoy it and you'll go back home and you'll say you didn't learn anything all that won't make a difference at all because all you're doing is just learning so learning is accumulating knowledge and information and all you'll have at the end of it is knowledge does knowledge make a difference yes alright somewhat okay does knowledge alone make a difference so you're going to have some knowledge but until you put that knowledge to practice that knowledge is worth nothing yeah correct so you're going to turn it into a skill you're going to turn it into some kind of practice because a knowledge that is not invested is a knowledge wasted so if you're like listening, if you're sitting here for all these 3 days you've got so many new concepts and tomorrow you'll go out and then you'll be like okay I did some social media on Twitter and that's the end of it sorry I mean you wasted your time right and that's not in that was never the intention of the organizers that was never the intention of WordPress so what really matters is take all that knowledge information and put it to practice put something to practice put one thing to practice then you'll see some results and then it'll be worth your time and that applies to everything that applies to React, that applies to ASX that applies to whatever javascript whatever so yes part 2 you didn't expect that you thought there was only one answer from attaining our dreams part 2 the answer is already on the screen right I thought I'll forget so I'll just put a hint for myself really if you think about it what keeps you from attaining your goals is your E to E ratio your E versus E ratio what is the E versus E ratio your entertainment to education ratio how much time do you spend on education and how much time do you spend on entertainment that ratio my dear friends will determine the success you will have in your life really you may not like me for saying that my wife may not like me for saying that but that is the truth the top 20% performers of the world spend a lot more time educating themselves and their teams than entertaining them so yes do entertainment that you need to do but maintain a healthy balance you go to spend more time and energy for money on education than on entertainment right just a simple math movie, food, dining out whatever just do the total how much money you spend on that how much time you spend on that in the last one month, six months whatever how much time money energy you spend on education you know your answer you won't always tilt it towards education than anything else alright ready for story 3 because I talked about entertainment this story is also linked to entertainment so I told you I am an entrepreneur I am a geek and I am really a geek beyond technology you got into games like family playing games so I was going for a conference and we wanted to prepare some swags like something to gift and I got all crazy and I created a game okay so we actually built a game okay do you have it with you so that's a game that we created and a lot of people loved it I did not have enough time to actually make it for everybody we have a few only a few it's a fun game every time we play with family you know people love it it's called demon and I wanted to give it as a freestyle swag I told you but maybe next time and my wife is questioning me you have to go to US we have to finish all these deadlines before going there why are you working on this like really why are you spending endless time and nights just doing this if nothing else at least sleep right I mean don't work on this till 4 o'clock in the morning and you know next day you have so much of other work to do also but that's the geek right so anyways back to this so we have few people my team is here wearing these badges okay great t-shirts and these badges we have three games with each at the end of the session you know in the tea break you can go find them and you can just tell them and I'm making it at runtime is you can just tell them what are you going to take from this three days of world camp and practice into your life okay don't give me much knowledge we don't need from you so practically you know tell that to one of my teammates and if they like it they'll give you the game make sense alright okay thank you right so back to the story so I'm making all this game and then my family and maybe my team also you know they don't tell me on the face but I'm sure the question what are you doing up there spending all this time working on designs and illustrator and then coordinating printing but it's because of this achievement is always going to be less than fulfillment and fulfillment is always going to be more important than achievement so peppy post will probably become let's say the number one email provider email sending service provider for people and that'll be a great achievement for them but what will be a great satisfaction for them right so if we are kind of sees that okay that 8 billion number is great but out of those 8 billion emails that they sent out okay if even thousand of those emails made a real difference okay in some people's life it turned their businesses around it made some good to the world I think that is what will make him happier then all the other numbers put together so achievement is important fulfillment is even more important so you really got to be asking yourself that okay what fulfills me what is my real passion and then do that that brings me to the next slide part 3 right so question doesn't end what keeps us from attaining our goals because we are talking about dream chasing see when we are talking about dream chasing there are two words in here already and it's loaded already we are talking about a dream so tell me when does the chase end does the chase ever end the chase never ends exactly it's not even once one dream is over it's before that dream is over maybe you have another dream most likely for and if you are like me, for folks like me once your dream is 30% over you have 4 more dreams okay so what what really keeps us from attaining that goal is that we are always chasing it and we are always thinking about the destination we are not thinking about the journey we are not thinking about the now we are not thinking about the present we are always thinking about the future so why that game is important for me is because that game gives me happiness with my family now why that game is important for me is because if you play that game with your family that's going to give you happy moments right now and more than your business those happy moments are more important for me okay that's why I do those crazy things that I do so whenever you are thinking about just the destination you are doing it wrong you go to enjoy the process also because for example I was talking to a friend and he says you know I want to be free so once I get this this this then I will be free and I asked him alright so I get it that you want to be free but if you cannot be free now how will you ever get free then if you cannot get if you cannot get freedom in the moment how in the world are you going to experience freedom at the end of it if you cannot be happy in the moment how in the world are you going to be happy at the end of it right so even if you are just learning a new technology even if you are building your first website even if you are taking those baby steps in content marketing what really is important is enjoying the process if you do not enjoy the process you will burn yourself out you will never reach the goal so enjoy the process as much as you are driven to get to the goal that is important my friend and mentor told me about ikigai and I just love the concept just google for it you will get it but essentially what I get out of it is that you want to be doing things and you want to be spending your time and energy on this intersection of ikigai something that you are good at something that you love doing something that the world needs and something that the world will pay for that's the ikigai it's a great phenomenal concept I definitely encourage you guys to learn more about it obviously you can buy the book but you can get a lot of things online just by googling for ikigai also and but I have a twist to that also okay and I tell my team in your life see most of us actually choose our careers much earlier in life right so when you are in 10th you are asked to choose the stream you want to go for science commerce whatever you have to choose your career early on in your life I would say ask yourself what kind of a life do you want then choose a career okay so in my case for example I was very clear that I do not want to travel a lot to go to my workplace so I had the privilege I always kept my office 10 minutes distance from wherever I was living so I could just reach office in 10 minutes right if it was raining like it rains in Mumbai I could just walk but that's a privilege that I had because I was starting my office right obviously you can also do that choice but what's really important is that you got to be clear about what you want and then build your life accordingly but most of us don't have that choice so what do you do so you are stuck in a profession for example if you are stuck working with me you have a hard time right I mean you get to work on a lot of interesting problems but you have lots of challenges right what do you do and there will be moments when you will not really enjoy the work that you are doing I would say again one more truth is that 80% of it you will not enjoy 80% of your work you will not enjoy even if you are sitting in that Iki guy position it's the rest it's the rest that's important and you want to be looking forward to that so every time you are stuck in that 80% piece of work that you do not enjoy whether that's talking to clients writing that code supporting customers or making that design whenever you are stuck doing that 80% that you do not enjoy just be okay do not resist accept it embrace it and look forward to the other 20% right because your profession is something that you chose okay turn it into your vocation turn it into your passion so turn your profession into a passion if you didn't get the profession that you are passionate about get it like if you got lemons make lemonade find love discover love in whatever you've got okay don't just keep chasing love you will never get it so if you are stuck with a bad job I don't think it's really that bad a job really there are tons of plenty of good things about it if it's really that bad you can change it but really think twice right if you are stuck with a bad client change the client alright so the last story of the day so that's me with a lot of hair I don't like that not the hair part but the falling part so you know every now and then I get into this downward spiral which is where things are completely stuck so completely stuck nothing seems to be working everything seems to be going wrong like just recently there are tons of things going on my dad has cancer and you know that's kind of deteriorated so I have to take care of that there are tons of things going on in office lots of product releases lots of things to do in marketing and just the kind of problems that you saw right I mean hard problems that I have to solve and I feel stuck I feel alone I feel overwhelmed I question like I can't figure out a way and when that happens it's like a downward spiral it's like I'm going down faster and faster and faster so I don't enjoy the work that I'm doing I'm probably getting irritated with smaller things and a whole lot of things and why I bring that up because you will face this or something similar in your life more often than you like I hope it's not as bad but you will face these downward spirals how do you deal with that right because you want to chase your dreams you will go after the big things and you are stuck down there falling tumbling down so what has worked for me is is what I have now called a three step formula which is not the arm but it's A plus A plus A equals M the first A stands for awareness so if I'm aware that I'm stuck when I get aware that okay I'm into this downward spiral then only I can do anything because awareness precedes change before you can change anything you have to be aware of it measurement precedes awareness until you measure something you cannot even be aware of it but I kind of measure I kind of track myself am I getting irritated am I eating late at night am I skipping my exercise am I skipping my good habits when that happens that's a clear sign that I'm in that downward spiral so I want to be aware that I'm in a downward spiral first and foremost once I'm aware of my downward spiral the next step is the hardest step the next step is to accept it and acceptance is really hard anybody who has had a heartbreak knows how hard it is to accept hopefully we are not talking about that those kind of heartbreak so often but whenever you are in a tough situation you basically want to just run away you do not want to deal with it you just want somebody else and you don't want to deal with it but what really makes a difference what will really make a difference to you and your life and your people around you is if you accept that situation as it is don't fight it it may not be your fault right it may be the circumstance but just accept it as it is because this is magical once you accept it that bulb will go light up again you know that bulb that happened in the shower earlier that bulb will come again because then you will find a way out and once you find the way out all you have to do is act that's the next day and if you cannot figure out if the bulb doesn't go like okay the electricity board doesn't like you very much and they have cut off your power supply whatever if the bulb doesn't go out again if the bulb doesn't go all you have to do still act what can you act pick up something small pick up something the simplest action that you can take at the moment if you are stuck in a problem the simplest action that you can think of at that moment is to go out and run go out and run as in like not run away but run as in exercise or cycle and take pity on yourself I mean you can do that no problem no problem with tears but beyond that don't just keep sulking get out take action take any action by the way and then think about the next action and then think about the next action and then think about the next action why? because that feeds into itself and it creates momentum and momentum my friends is the key once you get something into momentum there is nothing stopping it no matter how hard the problem no matter how big the challenge no matter how impossible the dream looks like once you are in motion once you are in momentum you are bound to get it and this is simple formula just act act act that's going to be momentum so we told you about dreaming I am now inviting you to stop dreaming because that's the reality most of us walk half asleep like we are just in the daydreams yes yes I don't know if they still wake up or not right but we like ok they will do this this is my start up I will earn so much and they will do this and they will do this so working doing the actions is most important that builds the momentum that's going to get you to your dreams so take action because like I said consistency is the ultimate key to success do small things do them repeatedly that will compound