 So, just to briefly introduce myself, I work at Groofers, I'm one of the earliest members at Groofers. Have you guys heard of Groofers? Oh, cool. So when I joined them many years back, we were just a bunch of 10 people, and they had acquired a previous company called My Green Box, we were doing the same business. So I feel like I've been doing the same thing for many years now, trying to solve the same problem again and again, and yet I have no idea how it's done, because the industry is fresh, we're reaching there, but we're not there yet, we're doing the other day, one of the sales we did, 1.7 lakhs sack or 2 lakh orders in a day, so that's the most we could have done right now. So we're trying to cater to mass of India, so it's another design challenge. So I thought I'd come and talk to you guys about designing in a startup, for a startup, at a startup, to startup, because I've been involved with multiple startups for some years. And then I thought we could talk about the challenges, which are particularly for designers and PMs, or whoever works in a small company. It's been quite a ride, so I thought we're going to be discussing mostly about the basics of design, because I've realized the more I work here, the more I've been working, I've realized it all comes down to the basics. In fact, many of the time I was talking to the marketing head the other day, and all our talks come down to the basics of why we should be doing something we have been doing, which reminds me of this story, and you probably know about this particular one. So this US based fast food chain, the Haid McDonald's, came, they did a study in US that was many years back, and they wanted to like, they met these users who were lying in their personas, who were milkshake drinkers. They're talking to them, it's like, hey, how do we make you buy more of our milkshakes? And they did this research, they got these people in their offices, and they spent like millions of dollars on that, it was not really working out for them. So this guy, this user researcher, he went to one of the stores at McDonald's, located in the city around the highway, and he found like most of the people who were coming and buying milkshakes were coming during the day, and they would buy only milkshake and nothing else, quite peculiar, and then he realized why they were hiring this product for, why were they buying this particular milkshake. So the idea was, most of them had a 20, 30 minutes right to work, and they would need a companion to really to be with. While they'd be driving with their left hands, they would need something to fill with with their right, and like something to sip on, and relax, and et cetera, you need a companion for, you're listening to the radio, you need a companion for 20, 30 minutes, and this is really giving you a company. And US, if you've been to the US, most of the milkshakes in US are quite thick, so it takes time to really drink that thing. So the idea being, why were they hiring this particular milkshake? And eventually, they realized what they had to do was to make, they added like a bunch of fruits in it to give them unpredictability in this everyday life, everyday Monday life, so now they're accepting it, they'd eat some fruits and then make it happier, and they would increase, basically they increase the size of the cup. And that's how they started making more profit in that. I suppose what I'm coming to is that you really, and everybody talks about it, right? It's such a cliche thing to talk about, you really have to know and understand your users, whatever I'm trying to say is, and I've made this mistake many a times myself, they really have to know what these people are, who these people are. Why are they using your product and nothing else? If they're not using it, that's a secondary problem. If they're using it, why are they using it for? What are they using it for? What do they want to feel? What do they want to become in life? What are they right now? What do they read? What do they listen to? What do they want to become? How much are they getting paid? How much did they want to get paid? What do they want to achieve in life? You gotta know these people, and this is only possible when you talk to them. They have several faces and you have to talk to them. Are they using your application while sitting on a toilet seat? Are they using it while coming back in a metro in a crowded area? What goes in their mind when they use your particular product? I say, there's a general rule of thumb, talk to five users every day. I've done that the first year of my startup and the results were tremendous. You have to take out time, you have to take an hour to talk to these people. And it's just not your job to do that. I think it's a PM's job, it's an APM's job, it's an ingenious job to do that. It's a director's, everybody needs to talk to the users to really realize what they're doing in their lives. I still do that at times, it's still very helpful. Now that we have a bigger user researcher team, we tend to rely on that, but I really don't like to do that. So just make sure you talk to enough users every day. One of my favorite cartoon strips, a lot of these times, I talk to the CEOs and CTOs that come to me in a meeting, we're like, dazzle me. Well, let's put a daint in the universe. I remember the first startup that we did, we're like, this is not different. The idea of being different, I call this the jobs effect. And I hate it. And it's not a designer's role to make something different. It's your role to talk to them, to know what their functional and emotional needs are and satisfy them, functional and emotional needs. It's not your job to make something different. It's your job to just make their lives better. And maybe the functionality, maybe the end result is gonna be different. So, seven, eight years back, a couple of these people, one of my favorite stories, they were, and they were running this company. They wanted, what they wanted to do was they wanted to simplify the idea of dating. So at the moment, what they had to do was make a profile, go check out the people, upload your own image, you have to answer like 50 questions about yourself. Go find your compatible partner, see if they're compatible enough, text them. It's a long process to get yourself a date. And these guys, they wanted to simplify the whole idea of dating. As I realized, in real life, dating doesn't work like that in real life. You just look at a person and it's a split second decision if you want to go out with this person and not. And then this guy made a couple of cards with profile images where they're left and right with this accept or not accept buttons. So one of these days, he's taking a shower, it gets out, and there's fog on his mirror, and he does this to take the fog off. It's like, hey, to gamify and to make this thing simplified, how about I just swipe left and right on a card? And that's the, that's the tender as we know today. And they've revolutionized the dating industry and they've, in a way, they've revolutionized the UI industry too. And people come to me like, oh, let's make a tinder for, for a font. Let's make, I've heard this one. Let's make tinder for a grocery. Well, it doesn't really work out for everyone. So the idea being, when these guys came up with something different, they were not trying to make things different. They weren't here to make things simpler. Different being different is just an outcome of being simple. Even if you have to, I suppose. But all these products, when they were designed, they were not designed to make something different. They just wanted to make, change the status quo, make something better for people. And hence, I do believe becoming different is just a byproduct of being good. Do not concentrate on making something different from people. If you have to be different, though, be different in your values. Be different in your aesthetics, be different in principles. Be different in your business. Be different in how you're communicating to the user. But don't try to be different just for the sake of being different. Cannot stress this one enough. Context is everything. So the same people, they come and talk like, hey, let's make tinder for grocery. Or like, hey, Amazon can do that. Why can't we? Facebook has done it. Why can't we do it? Because the idea is, same solution don't work when the context is changed. Because what I'm trying to say is, as soon, every company, especially in a startup, every six months, you have a different thing going on. So you have different challenges. And it's really difficult to fathom what the other companies went through and why they installed that particular solution, why, what problems were they solving that they made this particular solution. So it's never really a good idea to blindly copy anything or imagine if we can do the same things. So I did, so this is one of my favorite website called cannopy.com. I'm talking about context in terms of UI and UX and like a product design. As cannopy.com, what it does is, sells really beautiful products and a very different, very minimalist approach. All these white spaces in the gray area of beautiful website, right? So I thought, oh, you know what? What if we sell groceries like that? Would this work? And the answer was no, it does not work at all. And how do I know this? Because I tried to do that. At one point, I think I must have costed a company's lax or even Corose trying to send something out there which was not required. I was not focusing on the right problems to solve. And if the things were not perfect, it would really annoy me. So what I learned was it's important as a startup to really keep pushing things forward and keep learning from them. I think it's important for a designer to actually know what problem we are solving instead of keep finding the solution to that. And the whole idea of falling in love with the details and litigates and the minimalism doesn't really matter at all. You have to really concentrate on the functions and put it out there. Does not work out, come back. The whole thing is more than a designer's or a product manager's ego. We're not making it for you. We're making it for the company. Doesn't matter what the company's gonna say about it. Doesn't matter what the UX designers are gonna say about that. Doesn't matter if the dribble likes you or not. Doesn't matter if you're gonna give a talk at one of these conferences. What matters is the company survives. And so it's very important that you keep your ego aside. You talk to the users and you keep shipping things. You learn it, you come back, you do it again and again. It's very important that you realize what your problem that you're solving. And I've seen this so many times. I mean these designers who are mostly screen makers and they're not really designers. The whole idea being if you're working at a startup, you have to fill many shoes. You're a product designer one day, you're a marketer the other day, you have to get in Facebook and put your ads advertisement live, you have to use bunch of tools and you have to do that. Don't be scared of learning new things. It's all right to fail I suppose, but it's not all right to not do things. I suppose what I'm coming at is, as a designer, as a PM or anybody who's related to design, try to think yourself as not a screen maker and not I make the screens and I'm design a product. Really utilize what you have learned to make a company. Try to apply the design thinking and the philosophies that we have talked about, the design process starting with the why, knowing the user, the empathy with the user. Try to use that in everything that you do. As a designer, if you're working at a startup, if you're opening a startup, if you're running one, or if you're part of it, it's your role to use design thinking to facilitate a good culture, to facilitate good perks around there, to facilitate the right atmosphere, the right communication and use this design philosophies in their everyday life at a startup. Don't restrict yourself to a screen making the wonderful stuff and getting agitated and fighting with the developers. Become the startup and try to save the company from falling apart. Yeah, thank you.