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Hello, I’m Mayuresh Shilotri.
I excel at assessing market needs and building organizational capabilities in order to help define the organization’s strategic thrust, future goals, and product/service offerings. I can set direction, mobilize the support of teams and drive for results.
I have bootstrapped for 3-member founder teams – to work in companies sized 100,000+ people. Experienced in raising funds from Angels and VCs. I have seen the life-cycle of businesses from inception to successful exit multiple times. I have worked and experienced different aspects of business – strategic, commercial, people, creative, financial and delivery.
I have worked in Healthcare for 6 years (Pharma/ Payor/ Provider), B2B SaaS for 4 Years and EdTech for 4 Years. I can mix Data Science, Technology, Learning, and User Experience to build products for all stakeholders. In the future, focus is EdTech. Specifically, on building products for Learners that create impact for learners and drive financial for businesses.
If push comes to shove – I can code. Check out my GitHub profile.
EdTech
Best thing about EdTech is that you get to impact the learners in a positive life changing way. Very few sectors offer this opportunity. The last 4 years were the best 4 years professionally.
You need 3 things to survive. Strong Academics, Meaningful economics and Clean Heart – If these exist in harmony – you can scale this business.
Learning Outcomes
We are fanatic about learning outcomes. The fact is – it’s difficult to measure. Especially when you regress regarding the career outcomes. We address a large part of this puzzle via the ‘Systematization’ School of Thought brought in by the Instructional Designers. It helps. However, at the core of cracking this puzzle is have a deep insight into how people learn. Various trajectories people take to learn technology, skills & applied knowledge.
When we add the dynamic of remote delivery – we further trim the list of controllable factors. Learning outcomes matter. Period. This is directly proportional to ‘the heart’ being in the right place for the founders.
We have up-skilled 2000+ people in our flagship program.
Upskilling at Scale
When we put the OYO or Uber playbook at work in EdTech strange things happen. Key to scaling EdTech with ‘human touch’ is to onboard operationally heavy model. Still, loss of fidelity is bound to happen.
A lot depends on where the customer perceives quality. If its a mentor game, and the quality perception is in Mentor’s experience/ expertise. Scaling takes a different route. If the customer perceives quality in “orchestration”. Scaling has a different complexion.
Scaling Delivery is Hard.
Pay Later models
ISA is an American import to India. If applied as-is, its bound to fail. Far too many companies have burnt cash on this.
There is a way this can be made to work – Not completely ‘Lambda-School’ like. But more like a improvised version of train-to-hire with partial prepayment to ensure skin in the game.
We processed close to 350 students in the Income Share model from Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns.
Kickstarter Programs
Everyone likes a quick-start. Short sachet sized workshops. Programmes with a finite end.
There are valid short programs – where the agenda, delivery and learning outcomes are commensurate with the price. Like Executive Trainings, Workshops on specific area of subject, etc.
Then, we have the short programs which are loss leaders to penetrate the market, generate the Top of the Funnel and up-sell to larger programs/ products.
Delivered 4600+ students in 5 Day workshops.
On Adults Learning Technology
Teaching technology to grown-ups has its challenges. Simply put, the unwiring is as much as rewiring. The mental conditioning of – “you can do it” takes some effort.
60% of our paying learners are working professionals. The trickiest part is the definition of quality and expectation shift as a function of progression in the up-skilling journey.
For the last eight years, I’ve been building tech products.
Built 2 tech Products
B2B Product in Customer Engagement Management Space - Customer360
- Enterprise Customers: 7
- SME Customers: 2,200
- Freemium Customers: ~90,000
- Licenses Sold: ~11,000
This was a B2B Customer Engagement Management platform. It a software that connects a customer to a business in meaningful ways (Email, Chat, WebRTC, Social and Knowledge Base).
Yatra and Housing were the flagship customers for Customer360. The product was progressively customized for Indian businesses. We built the product ground up for 18 months. Interactive Intelligence (NASDAQ: ININ) acquired Customer360 in December 2015.
Stack: Java, Angular.js & Ember.js, Spring Boot, REST, Micro-Services
B2C Product in EdTech - GreyAtom
- Flag Ship Program Learners: ~1,600
- Short Program Learners: ~4,600
- Freemium Learners: ~200,000
- Learners with career pivots: ~500
Intelligent Learning Management System for grown-ups to learn to programming and emerging technologies. A Web App through which we want to change the way people learn technology. Test Driven Online IDE to give real time feedback to the learners. GreyAtom’s GLabs is a rare “Education Technology” product were the ‘Tech’ was truly in the Education Part. Technology is NOT just for orchestration, operations, automation but to strengthen the core fabric of learning.
That’s a whole host of learner analytics that we enable, which helps learners learn faster, better and with stronger learning outcomes.
Growth
My earliest stint in marketRx (Cognizant Inc.) introduced the world of data driven marketing approaches. The methods under study were mostly from the North American geography. However, the approaches were universal.
There is also a dark underbelly to the insight generation and data driven advisory that some of these Analytics firms dole out. Having seen the value and pseudo-advisory, I was better prepared to launch my career in growth.
Work on consumer behaviour by Malcolm Gladwell, Nicholas Taleb, and other authors at the crossroads of observing human behaviour and economic implications had a timely impact. Bringing the Micro and Macro to build a communication fabric that creates impact and drives result.
Early Stage - Organic
I bootstrapped the Customer Growth at both the startups. Going from ‘0’ customers to a critical mass.
This involves market discovery, message stabilization, creating integrated communication strategy, establishing multichannel presence, iterating the Product Offering, price discovery/ signaling, discovering the Product – Channel – Market – Model fit.
If you are a person who thrives on chaos – Early days are fun. I strongly believe early stage members are born – not made. Ability to systematize, high speed experimentation, high learning per unit time spent, ability to see larger patterns, picking the winner, seeing the expiry of certain approaches, taking a cost and RoI view of channels are some key skills.
Building Repeatability
Once you have a ‘going concern’ – once you have a pulse of customer pain point and a product that can delight. You want to re-factor and build for repeatability. Easier said than done.
Key to building repeatability is – talent, going beyond the founding team, bringing in specialist, zooming out but holding on to the core before handing over. People management capabilities of founder’s comes to fore at this stage.
Invest in right tools, people and processes to build right organizational muscle.
The Good Parts
Explore practice, theory and research
Edtech
"2000+ words per post"
EdTech
"Ethical Customer Acquisition, Instructional Design, Delivery and more"
Product
"On User Experience, Technology"
Product
"Customer Development, User Retention, SaaS"
Short Stories
"100 Words. Daily thoughts."
Short Stories
"Edtech, Teaching, Learning"
Videos
"From my Youtube Channel"
Discussion/ Opinions/ Explanations
"EdTech Only"
Book Reviews
"Book I recommend"
Book Recommendations
"Career and otherwise"
Select Writings
"Detailed & Analytical"
On EdTech, Product & Growth
"4,000+ words articles"
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