Discover One Amazing Creator Everyday #Creator15
Welcome Readers,
Today’s story about a design nerd who is making software release sexier, a guy who have designed products that is being used by millions of people.
Arnob is currently building olvy.co, A customer engagement platform that allows you to create beautiful release notes and in-app widgets for feature announcements, important updates, and much more.
Q. What’s that one thing you want to achieve in 2021?
A. My goal for 2021 is building and scaling Olvy, which directly contributes to my larger goal of becoming a full-time entrepreneur and maker.
Q. What’s that one thing you are most curious about?
A. I am a design nerd, and hence curious about every new thing that humans are exploring around technology, and the things they are adapting to, and usually looking at a pattern around it. Also, some more things that I am curious about are the micro SaaS market, passion economy, and creators market, where individuals are creating the economy for themselves by building small products or content.
Q. What’s the one mistake you have done and will advice others not to repeat that?
A. “You should know how to say NO!” I have a bad habit of saying yes to a lot of people for a lot of things despite being well aware of my time crunch. Being unable to say ‘no’ has caused me to take up a lot more work than I could, leaving me exhausted. Time is the only finite thing in this universe and your daily tasks need to be prioritized in the direction of your life goals. And to prioritize well, learning how to say ‘no’ is crucial!
Q. Which book you are reading these days? Which Genre excites you the most?
A. I can’t read a lot of books really, watching videos and listening to podcasts helps me grasp things better, so I do that instead. The topics usually revolve around entrepreneurship, design, product management, etc.
Q. Why did you choose to become a creator? How do you see yourself differently than the rest?
A. I always aspired to be an entrepreneur and wanted to own something on the Internet. I decided to start something that would help me grow and give me a better perception of how to run things. Looking back, I realize that this was one of the best decisions I’d ever made. It has helped me gain a lot of different perspectives and enlightened me with a completely new thought process. Also, as a product person creating a valuable side project or a product always helps them grow in terms of hard and soft skills, and understanding what it takes to run an end-to-end life cycle of a product.
How I see myself differently is that even though it’s a small project that’s built just by me and a very small team, I can never trade off quality to do things in lesser time. Whatever products/projects that I get involved in, I try to keep the quality bar as top-notch as possible. I think about if Slack, Microsoft, or Atlassian would have launched a product that would look like.
Q. What do you love to do when not working? Any hobbies you want to share?
A. Having a full-time job and building Olvy on the side doesn’t leave me with a lot of free time tbh, but when I do have some time on my hands, I usually dedicate it to my family and my partner. That’s the least I can do for them because without their support, I’m nothing!
Q. What’s something you learnt/realized recently that you wish you learnt/realized much earlier?
A. I have worked as a designer for a bunch of startups. I started my career with a big-data based enterprise product and one of the key things that we do as designers is to research about our users, who we are building for, why they like something, what are their behaviors, and a bunch of other things.
In SaaS/Enterprise products where users are not easily accessible for research because of compliance, it’s not easy to gather qualitative data. The design and product teams rely heavily on sales/CSM teams to get insights about things like what the users are looking for, how do they feel about a new feature, and more, but the nuances are still missed out.
For Olvy, when I and my co-founder, Nishant, started getting into sales, we decided to give a product demo to our users. But our method to do that was to get the user to share their screens and ask them to sign up, and we’d observe them experience our product. That’s when it hit me that if designers could turn into salespeople and take part in sales calls to first-hand experience how the users use their product, it could be game-changing! These sales calls can turn into usability tests or research calls for you as a designer.
Q. What problem you are planning to solve next? If you are comfortable sharing.
A. Currently, I am looking to solve problems around the idea and innovation management market and build products that empower product managers around the world.
In the future, I would like to invest in building hospital equipment primarily solving the mobility issue of patients inside a hospital. From my personal experience over the past 2 years of my life, here’s what I’ve observed. For example, there’s a patient in their 50s with a fractured backbone from advanced-stage cancer (we can not begin to imagine how horribly painful that could be), but our hospitals are not equipped with the right set of mobility tools for such patients. Moving such a patient from one bed to another, say for a scan or a test, is done by having 3–4 hospital staff lifting the bedsheet with the patient in it and then putting them down on another bed. Patients say that they’d prefer to die than go through something like this, it’s painful to just watch this happens, and for someone who is going through this? It’s unimaginable for us to feel their pain because it’s so immense. This is just one example, and in reality, it’s a very serious problem that I am determined to explore and find solutions to once I’ve built the adequate resources to do so.
Q. What would you recommend to others who are looking to start their careers in the startup/SaaS space on how to go about it?
A. There are a few things, I would suggest like,
- Never think that you shouldn’t build something because it already exists. One learning for me is, every idea is a twist of an existing idea, so “An idea or a product don’t exist till it’s done in your way.”
- Spend time experimenting in your career. In the initial days, be on a lookout for what’s going on around you. Startups can give you the exposure to do anything and everything that you like, and it comes with a lot of learning that could be highly beneficial for your future. So according to me, an individual should start their career with a startup for the amount of knowledge that it could provide.
Q. Suppose there is a big whiteboard in front of you. What’s the first line you would like to write?
A. Attitude is the game!
*A go-getter attitude can have a compound effect on the amount of work you can do and the impact you can achieve.
Projects by Arnob
2. Olvy
Connect with Arnob
Thanks for reading.
If you know anyone whose story must be shared like Arnob, let me know anshu@kiwismedia.com.
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