Building Product

Ahmed Cheema: Coming up on the branding deep dive podcast.

Parthi Loganathan: Building product and code has started at is increasingly becoming commoditized 15 years ago. Really hard to like you have to buy your own servers. You have to code in like with poor frameworks, it's just a very different world. I think the barriers to entry have decreased quite a bit.

And so anybody can do it. There's no code tools or lots of platforms. There's lots of frameworks. Things have gotten quite a bit easier. And so distribution matters more than ever marketing matters more than ever. How do you get in front of your customer and how do you get their buy-in that matters

a lot now. And if you think about like traditional companies, non software companies, that's where a lot of their spend is. It's like marketing, like Coca-Cola Pepsi. They're spending on marketing because I don't know that their products are almost commoditized. Anybody can make soda

and the same thing is happening slowly to software. There's the trillion marketing and SAS companies out there. How do you stand out?

Ahmed Cheema: This is Ahmed Cheema and welcome to the Branding deep dive podcast. If you're new here, this is a podcast where we have in-depth discussions about what brands are doing well to drive customer loyalty and how you can take those principles and apply them to your own brand. Today we're talking to Parthi Loganathan. Parthi is a serial entrepreneur, not the kind that makes money off of teaching other people, how to make.

But the kind that actually builds products and ships them. Parthi is a former Google product manager. And he's been to the startup space since he's built a few startups. And currently he is the CEO and founder of letter drop.com. In this episode, we dive deep into the rise of product management, the importance of distribution, collecting data for startups, and much, much more.

If you're a founder or have ever thought of founding a startup, pause this right now, grab a notebook. You're going to want to take notes. Here's Parthi.

Parthi, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for accepting the invite. Really excited to have you here have a lot of questions for you. Before we get started for the people in the audience that may not know who you are and what you've been working on for the last number of years, can you give us a brief intro to.

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm the founder and CEO of letter drop.com. We're a content marketing ops platform. So we help businesses with everything from idea generation to project management. Actual publishing and distribution around like blogs and newsletters and social media. Before that I was a product manager at Google.

I worked on the search team and on the chat team I've been in startup land for the past two, two and a half years now working on a variety of products some of which I've sold, some of which bring passive income in the back. And I've been focusing on letter drop for almost a year now,

Ahmed Cheema: Parthi just looking at your background here, you also you went to Columbia, right?

Yeah. So I'm going to ask you a question and then this is like a personal thing. A lot of my friends that I know that kind of went to these top schools are now they're getting into, they're trying to get into. And what I'm seeing is that, like, when I had conversations with them, I was like, I've never heard you talk about any product ideas or anything like this.

And it seems like it's becoming product. And also startups are becoming a way to signal. To the market. Hey, I'm a, I'm an awesome person, right? Just some of these universities that they bring a lot of clout to your rep, right? And so the reason why I want to ask you is because you're someone that not only have you, you have the signal value, right?

You went to Columbia, Google. Now you have all these startups on your belt. But you've actually built products and you've actually sold them. You've actually done the grind. What I want to ask you is like, how. First off. Do you like, do you see, I haven't been in product, do you see a lot of people that are just in it to make a lot of money or signal that they're really cool.

And then the second thing I wanted to ask is how do you actually make sure that you're not in that mindset and you are building something and actually creating something rather than just trying to look cool.

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah. I think I'm going to distill that down to. Maybe two questions. One is why is something like product management really Poplar right now?

Perhaps, and maybe the second question is are people focusing on like looking cool or external indicators of success and trying to validate themselves, or are people trying to create something of value, do things that they enjoy. And that they're good at and what's driving that.

I think the second is probably more of a philosophical question. I can answer the first question. For sure. I think product management really wasn't. Discipline till recently I'd say maybe Google was one of the first companies to start thinking about product management very specifically.

There's a whole story about how Nerissa Mayer was one of the earliest employees at Google. She started like this APM program at Google, which I was a part of. And the entire focus was, Hey, we're gonna, we're going to create technical re technical people. Product managers, because all the PM's or PM's and quotes till now come from a business background and they're not able to succeed at a technology company.

I think that's grown quite a bit over the past 15, 18 years that's existed there. Many more product management roles now than there were before. I think there is a lot of marketing and branding around it where people are like, oh, As a PM. You're the mini CEO of your product or something.

A lot of that honestly, is BS at the end of the day. You are you're a part of an organization. Your job is, Hey, look, we have a lot of moving parts in our company, how do I get these various stakeholders to work together, to ultimately drive business success through product and how do I like make sure, like we hit these metrics.

You as an individual, as a product manager, really don't like you're not essential. If you wave the company, we'll keep going. Maybe not in the right direction, but we'll keep going. Product will be built. Engineers will keep shipping designers. We'll keep designing. Marcos, we'll keep marketing.

You don't need to be there. But there, but I do think like a good PM on a team can really help focus a team. And help you go from, Hey, here's like a dumpster fire over product too. This is something really good. That's creating a lot of value and it's a hard job. I think it's very much overly like glamorized.

And I think it's very popular for that reason, but a lot of people go in and then they understand or realize like what this is all about. I think your second question was around what are the reasons to be a PM or do any of these kinds of jobs or whatnot? And I would say I think when people are early in their career, they're very much people are generally influenced by the media and things around them, what their friends say.

What's cool. It takes a while for people to start building their own opinions on what they think isn't. Versus what the world tells them is important. And in some ways, like I've also fallen into that trap. I do think I followed traditional paths to success by just like working really hard for the longest time, like Google and Columbia and YC and all that stuff.

But then you go through all the hard stuff and you just realize Hey I don't know if this stuff actually makes me happy. What do I enjoy doing? What do I want to do with my life? How do I want to spend my day to day? And then you start thinking more about okay how can I create or construct an environment for myself where I'm happy in the moment.

And I feel like I'm providing value and I'm doing the things that I enjoy doing. I think everyone gets there eventually. Some sooner than others. And so I just hope like more people realize that earlier in their careers and don't end up on a track that they never intended to be on and we're too afraid to weave.

It's very hard to leave that truck and you will face a lot of failure. But I think in the long run it pays off to to deviate and branch off and do something. That's uniquely you whether that be starting a company or like just finding the role and company that makes sense for you.

Ahmed Cheema: Yeah. That's powerful. I think you summed it up really well. I think, especially with. All the content that's out there and how much we're consuming. It is really a lot of times we're just acting on the opinions of other people from what we're being fed. So that's powerful. Thank you for sharing that. I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about.

You're someone that's literally I think a lot of people wear the hat. Like serial entrepreneur, I think, has been popularized with Gary V and stuff like that. But you're actually someone that's built a number of businesses. And when we were talking before we started recording, you said that you're not a public person.

So what I'm really curious to hear is how are you thinking through how to bring a product to market right now, nowadays we have a lot of these companies. They benefit a lot from a public CEO, right? Elon Musk, for example like you can, you don't even need a marketing department sometimes if you have a really powerful brand in the CEO spot.

So how are you thinking through how to bring a product to market and just any best practices you have for taking an idea? Once you have an MVP and then actually getting users.

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah. I wouldn't say I, I'm definitely not a public person in the sense that never done a podcast before or been on a YouTube or anything like that.

But I would say that I've definitely worked on my Twitter and LinkedIn presence. It's more so like long form. Thoughtful content. And in the text format also, I work on a content marketing SAS company. And part of my job is helping businesses figure out what, how do they get their brand out there?

How do they help educate their customers? How do they help? How do I help them distribute their content? I think there is incredible value from having a crystal brand from your company, having a grant. Okay. Honestly, like building product and code has started at is increasingly becoming commoditized 15 years ago.

Really hard to you have to buy your own servers. You have to code in like with poor frameworks, it's just a very different world. I think the barrier century have decreased quite a bit. And so anybody can do it. There's no CLO tools or lots of platforms. There's lots of frameworks. Things have gotten quite a bit easier.

And so distribution matters more than ever marketing matters more than ever. How do you get in front of your customer and how do you get their buy-in that matters? A lot now. And if you think about like traditional companies, not non software companies, that's where a lot of their spend is. It's like marketing, like Coca-Cola Pepsi.

They're spending on marketing because I don't know that their products are almost commoditized. Anybody can make sense. And S the same thing is happening slowly happening to software. There's a trillion marketing SAS companies out there. How do you stand out? So yeah, I do think that every company should almost I don't want to strongly encourage this, but I do say that, Hey, let's almost think about distribution first and product second, figure out like where there is demand the market.

Places where people have problems they're already searching for solutions to their problems. They're there Googling for answers. They're following the right people on Twitter. And they're looking for like content for thought leadership. And they're like, Hey, like, how do I get better at sales? Or how do I build a web three app?

Or how do I improve my GTM? How do I decrease my costs and support? People have these questions. And so if you can. Position yourself as a person who knows a lot about the space and can help help people think through these problems. You'll often find like good ideas and good products to be.

Just through the kinds of things you're saying. So for us, it becomes like you producing content then becomes you maybe consulting for people and then it becomes, then you realize patterns in terms of what kinds of things you're consulting for. And from that you, you have a product in your hands, so you just have to figure out, okay, how do I productize?

Things I'm doing for people. Cause there's clearly demand. That's not the part I'm trying to validate anymore. It's more so okay. Like how do I build this and how do I automate it and how do I create a solution out of it? So yeah, very much a proponent. Distribution first. I wouldn't say I've been the best added historically.

I come from an engineering and product background, so very much in the weeds on okay, like how do we design the most amazing product? And if you build it, people will come. That is sometimes true. But in the vast majority of cases, it's not. And so you need to think about distribution Focused on distribution before product.

There, there are exceptions. There are definitely places where Henry Ford and the model T like, if you focus on distribution and ask people what they wanted, they'd be just not better horses. You'll never have a car. And so I think that exists in today's world. People definitely don't know what they need, but still I think even identifying that people want faster versus means like you can figure out the solution and the product later, at least, it's a problem.

Ahmed Cheema: Yeah. That's I'm surprised at that answer. I didn't think with your background, that's the advice that you would give.

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah. I think it's one of those things where you make a ton of mistakes as have your biases and then you course correct.

Ahmed Cheema: Yeah. And then I remember you were giving us, so we have a newsletter and you were giving us some advice.

And one of the things you said was you need to spend as much time marketing as you do on the product, which is yeah. I think that's a total shift. We were on the same thing. Hey, we have a decent product. We'll eventually find enough people. And we are slowly realizing that we need to figure out how to market this.

Yeah, it's definitely I was wondering if he can I don't know if you're I don't want to pressure you to share any specific examples from your companies that you've built, but you, so you've gotten into Y Combinator with letter drop. And then I don't know if have you, any of your other startups, have you tried to go that route?

Parthi Loganathan: So my story is it's actually a little bit backwards. I quit my job with that. Knowing what I was going to do apart from the fact that I was going to start a company, which I'm not sure if I recommend to other people. That's what I did. And then over the course of the past two, two and a half years, I've shipped like 15 products, like full products.

One of them sold for the smallest and not like a massive exit or anything but enough to like have runway to worker and company. And two of them, one of them went viral during the pandemic and then came crashing down as like things opened up is very much a pandemic era product. And the third one just keeps growing passively in the background good business, but like high and not something that I'd want.

Invest all my time in which is why it's, even though it's a good product, but organic growth. I'm Hey, like this business is inherently attorney product. So yeah, like I made a lot of mistakes and made a lot of iterations going through building shipping, talking to customers for 15 different products.

Most of the time. And for me, I'm just looking for that one thing that I want to spend a bunch of time on where I think Hey, there's a big market. There's a huge opportunity. I think in the process of building all of these companies, I've also are these products are not companies. I've also learned a little bit more about what do I enjoy working on?

What are the types of products I want to work on? And I don't think people understand that before they started company. They don't understand w what do you want, what do you care about? Cause companies are really hard and if you don't care about what you're working on you're going to be hard pressed to continue when things get really tough and they will get tough.

So yeah I would say just quit. My job got into YC actually with another idea. We were part of the COVID bad. During YC. So the pandemic hit like two-thirds of the way in and fundraising, try it up. We lost half of our customers pivoted away from that product have how to let go of a, co-founder all kinds of things happened and ship a bunch of other products and finally landed on a letter drop.

So yeah it's very much a zigzag. Completely non-linear path to get to where I am today. And I think that's just startups and weren't trying to new life with no one really knows what they're doing, but I think through running a lot of experiments and exposing your stuff yourself, a lot of stuff you start connecting the dots and getting ideas and that's the most important thing, like getting those ideas and like having those experiences.

Inform what you do. Next.

Ahmed Cheema: One thing that I'm interested in. So there's two things that are, I guess let's start with the first one, which is like a letter drop right now on the subject of distribution. What's your strategy? I know content marketing is part of it. What else are you guys thinking through in terms of getting the word out and acquiring more custom?

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah. So let her drop started a little bit more creator focus, which is why we're just how I guess we met and you started using letter drop and we still run that business. It's a very competitive market. And she was just purely a game of like customer acquisition. And whoever has the deepest pockets is going to win that game.

And then so I think. There is a future flywheel in which that consumer part of the product drives to our business. Part of the product, our business part of the product is the content marketing ops platform, which is just basically a souped up version of our sort of like consumer offering.

We do a lot of content marketing and dog food, our own product. I tweet and link and post on LinkedIn quite heavily, where we produce about one to two blog posts per week using our own platform. We're slowly seeing or organic traffic through SCU settled, we climb up and we get a lot of inbound that way.

Me posting on LinkedIn and Twitter definitely gets people in. They'll be like, oh yeah, like I saw your posts. And I, we have to think about SEO for our business. So I reached out beyond that. It's early days. It's still. Like account-based marketing running through like a cold outbound sales process.

It's good that we have a lot of content. So people have heard of us in passing. When we do reach out to. Most of our early company, early customers or other B2B YC companies for the most part. And so we've been seeing a lot of referrals through them. When a company suddenly starts like investing a lot in content, you're like, Hey, like what are you guys doing?

And then they're like, oh yeah, we use this thing called letter drop. And then it spreads from there Yeah, I think it's like a pretty traditional SAS playbook. A lot of inbound marketing and then combination of like outbound sales and referrals. I think there's a lot of interesting, go to market motions in the future where like a, we start targeting, partnering with agencies and then they distribute the product for us to their customers.

We're not doing that right now, but it's something we've experimented with, but I think the product has to be modified for their use case. The second thing is we're helping connect freelance writers, editors, and illustrators with these companies, Mo most of them come from us stress recruiting them off like job boards and stuff, but some of them are actually coming from our consumer product where somebody writes a newsletter.

For themselves and they're making money from that, but they're looking for additional sources of income and writing for companies. If you want money quickly as a writer like writing for companies is pretty good. And like companies really content at like finding good, talented writers who understand your domain and can produce engaging content is quite.

And yeah, like it's a good market and you can charge a lot if you know what you're doing. So I think there's some sort of flywheel there where we get the consumer part and the writers just to get an to letter drop, they go to other companies and they're like, oh yeah, you guys should check out letter drop because it makes it really easy to interact with freelancers like me.

And we have this flight and we'll go I think that's a little bit down the road. Right now I'm just trying to get the basic. Set up through sales and inbound marketing. But it's definitely something we want to think about in terms of like, how do we make this grow exponentially as opposed to later.

Ahmed Cheema: One of the things you just highlighted there is like the number of pivots you guys have had since you started. And I remember when we first signed up, like the landing page was completely creator focused and you go on now. I don't even, I can't even find you can find it, but it's more about like content marketing that works and stuff like that.

And so one of the things I wanted to ask you. And I also was curious about versus Google, right? What kind of data are you using to inform the pivots? Like how are you thinking through, okay. This isn't working, let's shift here. And then also going back to Google, when you have a product, what kind of like data testing, user research are they doing?

And then how, how are you coming? Is it the same process or how is it.

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah, so I'd say Google at Google, we had a lot more data, like probably the most data of any company in the world. Like maybe Facebook's on par or close. So I was in search which is a 20 year, like just a massive project, like 3000 plus people working on that thing.

And. You have hundreds of experiments going on in search on any given day? Just little micro optimizations trying to figure out okay, how do we show somebody searching for something that is actually valuable to them. And that they're even actually like open and click and read.

And yeah so any small change we make there, we run something, we run an AB tests. There's a counterfactual. We have. Stats PhD. So sit down and analyze all of our experiments, the various control arms, et cetera, to decide, Hey conclusively, is this the right decision for us to be making? Are we produced?

Are we providing like better results? For people using search? Very data-driven perhaps like to data driven almost I also worked on G suite at Google. Or I think it's currently called Google workspaces, like basically Gmail drive, calendar, all that stuff. And that is an enterprise play.

Like we sell to companies like Boeing and stuff like that. And. We got a lot less data there. As soon as you go enterprise, it becomes more about relationships. It's Hey what is the IP admin at this fortune 500 company won? Or what is their CIO want? They care about enterprise security or they care about this.

These AI features like art. Are they going to use these AI features? We don't know, but this is what sells. And so you can see how, like different types of businesses. Use different kinds of data to make decisions. At the end of the day, it really comes down to your business model. And what are you trying to sell for enterprises?

It's I need this person to buy my thing for a search. It's just I just want as many people coming to Google searching and be happy. Yeah. Because then we can make money off ads. We just need to keep them here. And then as long as that, that works than the ad and should be run on the side. When you're at a startup on like a big company, you have zero data.

Like you can barely get anyone to talk to you. And so it's harder to be, I'd say you definitely want to be data informed. We tried. Use post hog and Google Analytics and a bunch of like analytics tools to look at our funnels and see what users are doing, understand like where people are having trouble.

But honestly I'd say like a lot of our driving decisions come from my conversations with people. You have to just like is why we have a slack community where like people can post feedback and DM me at any point in time, I just make myself very available to our customers so that they can give me feedback.

And I just try to be very responsive will respond, try to respond within minutes. As long as I'm not otherwise occupied. And that informs your product decision. Lots of calls, lots of customer calls asking them, Hey, like what do you need help with? What is going to make you succeed? What can I do?

That's worth you paying money for some things. I think the really hard part there is most people don't know what they want or what they need. And so you have to ask a lot of hard questions. I think the mom tests. Like the holy Bible in terms of the kinds of questions you should ask. But basically you just want to observe and understand like what people say and then figure out connect the dots from lots of conversations and figure out like, what should you be building?

Yeah, but just you operated with a lot less data to start up. And I think that's why you just need to be close to your customers and try to make the best decision. That you can and the good thing about startups is it's not expensive to fail. Like you're just a small company.

If something doesn't work out, like you can try something new next week, or if you launch a feature, it's not a big deal at a company like Google. It's very expensive to launch a failed feature because you work on it for six months and you do, you put in lots of hours, like you have billions of people might be impacted.

And so you need that data to make those kinds of pictures, the transgender.

Ahmed Cheema: So I think one thing that you're highlighting here that I think the audience really needs to make sure that we're getting is that conversations is where you're getting your data. If you're a startup, I think a lot of people when they start, they're like, oh, I need to do X, Y, Z collect this kind of data, but right.

When it comes down to is like talking to people and you got to get outside of your shell and actually communicate with your, the people that are using potential users and make sure that you're getting that feedback from them. You mentioned the mom test. I've actually never heard of the mom test. Maybe I'm just blanking on it right now, but what is the.

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah, no, it's the canonical book on how to run a user interview. So you talk to any product manager, founder, user researcher, and they'll always recommend the mom test. It just tells you like how to go into a user interview or talk to a potential customer with the goal of coming out of that conversation, understanding their needs and what you need to be building.

Without putting words in their mouth, I think a lot of people go into these conversations being like, here's my great idea. Do you think it's great when people don't want to hurt your feelings? So they'll say yeah, sure. It's great. And so this book tells you basically helps you figure out, like how do you structure your questions so that you don't bias the person you're talking to so that they'd give you their actual opinion and not tell you what you want to hear.

Ahmed Cheema: Any advice for people. General advice for people that are looking to create a startup and go on this journey. I know what you highlighted here is how difficult it can be. How many pivots, how many times you've changed and just the difficulties that lie ahead in that journey. But just for people that are looking to make that journey, any advice for them.

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah. So I think the first thing is ask yourself why you want to do a startup. I don't think it's for everybody. It's pretty darn. And I think on you, you see the success stories, but you don't see the 99.99% of people and startups who are failing. And even the success stories went through a lot of failure before they got.

I was just reading about the nerd wallet guy that just went public. Recently. He spent his first three years just writing a blog on like credit cards and he made two grand and people ask, why don't you keep doing it? And it was like nobody would hire me. It was the financial crisis. I got laid off wall street.

So this is what I did. And now they do something like 300 they're on track to do $360 million in revenue this year. So even the success stories, runaway success stories have a really hard time. So ask yourself are you willing to do this? Do you really want to do this? Are you doing it for the right reasons?

Not because you want fame and fortune, but because you want to see something out in the world and you really want to solve this one problem or you really want to be in control of your own destiny and be your own boss. Or learn a lot of skills and be, self-sufficient be able to go from zero to one.

If these are things that matter to you, yes, those are good reasons to start a company. Make sure you're starting a company for the right reasons and say that's the number one thing. Ellis, you're setting yourself up for a world of pain and disappointment. I'd say the second thing is trying to figure out like, How do you set yourself up for success to start a company and when do you want to do it?

I think that comes down to just exposing yourself instead of doing what I did and quitting your job and then trying to figure out, like, how do I start a company? Or what ideas should I work on? You're already probably working on a company and that company has problems or you. Personal problems and your life through like your hobbies or activities or whatever, like your day-to-day life.

Being more cognizant, just like aware of problems for both businesses, for a company that you work for and in your personal life and for people immediately around you. And if any of those seems like it could be something that a lot of people have And you see a way like that. It's a valuable problem.

There's lots of problems for sure. Not valuable. I think it's a valuable problem where people would pay for a solution or you can find a way to make money then pay a little more attention and then try to find more examples of that. Until you have some sort of conviction around an idea where you're like, Hey, I think there's something here.

I want to go do something about it. And then you'll organically have a great startup in many ways versus a forced process where you go through a lot of iterations and you have this pressure of runway and capital, and do you have enough money in the. Social pressure from people asking you like, Hey, like how's the startup going, all that stuff.

So yeah, if you could, if you can begin that discovery process, even before you quit your job or before you officially start a company it will save you a lot of time and pain down the road. So yeah, be curious and start looking for opportunities. The other thing I would say is try to start a company that you think you're personally interested in starting, and that matches well with your skillset.

It's very hard to start a company or work in a company where. If you're not, if you're not like super technical, don't go start like databases company. Or if you're not super into social media, don't go start like influencer marketing platform figuring out like, what do you enjoy doing? And don't stray too much from that.

I think I personally enjoy providing value to businesses as a business owner and the person who started a lot of companies understand the distribution. It's hard. And I think I've learned a lot and trying to help other people with content marketing and kind of not like a pseudo SEO expert.

Like today I talked to the customer and they're actually, yeah, honestly, like we just like talking to you because you're an expert in SEO. And I was like, wow, I didn't know anything about us six months ago. So yeah I enjoy what I do. I enjoy the product that I'm working on. I enjoy the customers.

I see. I think that's so important too, to help you like stick through it for the long-term. Because there's no such thing as an art, there are such things as overnight success, but they're very rare for most people to spend a lot of time working on something for become successful. And you want to set yourself up so that you can get there.

Ahmed Cheema: Thank you so much. This is really great advice. Partly where can people find you? If they're looking to follow along the journey or sign up for letter drop?

Parthi Loganathan: Yeah. You can follow me on Twitter. I am Parthi underscore Logan, P a R T H I E underscore, L O G a N. That's where most of my stuff is. You can also follow me on LinkedIn.

I'd say those two platforms are where I posted those. And then if you're a. Business owner or a marketer and you need help with SEO and email marketing and things are starting to get a mess become a mess, or you just want to know like how to get started. Definitely like visit letter drop.com and, or shoot me an email or the letter dropout com and I would be happy to help get you.

Ahmed Cheema: No as always, I have my key takeaways from this episode, but before we get into that, I want to share a clip with you from our episode with Chris Blauvelt on LaunchCode.

Parthi Loganathan: Why should someone use your company, your platform versus one of the established players out there. And there's always going to be an opportunity when it comes to personalized service is not scalable, at least early on, but that's

Ahmed Cheema: okay. Because one of those. Aphorisms of

Parthi Loganathan: Paul Graham is do things that don't scale early on, do

Ahmed Cheema: things that don't scale,

Parthi Loganathan: It's, it doesn't last forever.

Brian didn't, doesn't still take photograph apartments. But you know what they have done for Airbnb, they've set up. Network of photographers that if you're listing your place on Airbnb, it's really easy to find a photographer

Ahmed Cheema: in your

Parthi Loganathan: location that can do the photographs for a couple hundred bucks and

Ahmed Cheema: this is

Parthi Loganathan: what they do.

And so you'll find those opportunities to scale. If you created something.

Ahmed Cheema: If you enjoyed this discussion with Parthi, I am sure you will also enjoy the discussion with Chris. Check it out wherever you listen to this podcast. It's episode number 28. Now here in my kitchen. Number one, think through distribution before even building product, this is a mistake I learned the hard way.

And one of the projects I was working on, we spent over a year building a product without even thinking through distribution. We wasted tons of resources, time and energy, without a way to actually get the product into the customer's hands. And number two, if you want to be a founder, if you want to create a product that actually makes people's lives.

You have to constantly be on the lookout for problems. And that is all for this episode. If you enjoy this discussion, please consider leaving a review and sharing with a friend. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week.