The Rise of Ritesh Agarwal: PART-2

Sup Geeks!!😎

Introducing The Figur8 newsletter, a tldr (or say 🤔….. “what we can infer”-type of a content. Call it whatever you want, once you start enjoying 😁) of the Figuring Out podcast by Raj Shamani (Props to him).

This will take you in a POV journey (much like a VR headset) of an entrepreneur’s thought process, with many insights and analogies, all in a 10min read every Sunday.

So, let’s get going…

This PART-2 is the continuation of the Insights shared last Sunday (April 30th).

In case you missed that check here

Key Takeaways 📝

Call it TL;DR if you will.

Ritesh when talking about the importance of listening to customer feedback (after finding your target audience, check PART-1) spoke about some iteration done to the OYO system, after receiving customer feedback.

1. 3 major updates OYO has done after feedbacks from customer:

1. Pay-out System: From monthly pay-out to bi-weekly to daily (for select hotel owners) to again bi-weekly. Pay-out from OYO to hotel Owners. Constant iterations.

2. Resolution of problems: Chatbots to solve very minute issues and leaving the bigger ones to OYO’s on field team. Before, every issue was solved by the “team on field”, this was resource and time consuming.

3. Season (late weather) based pricing mechanism (basically a lot to do with data sciences): Pricing of rooms with respect to people movements which was related to festivities, weather (snow fall etc) and just holiday seasons.

   This follows the basic rules of Inflation (supply-demand imbalance).

2. Raj Believes (and Ritesh also agreed upon)

(This is the whole thing about people talking “behind the back”, you lack trust on a person so you bitch about them behind their back. But here lack of trust could even be due to not understanding the other person properly). So have a heart-to-heart conversation #BeReal (not a sponsorship, not yet atleast ✨).

3. 🚨This is probably the most interesting part of the podcast.🚨

So, Ritesh attended ISB for a week or so and had applied for Thiel Fellowship at the same time. He had answered questions (to meet certain criterion) in application form of the fellowship program. He then receives a call from them saying he was in the top 40 short listed candidates and would have to pitch his idea in San Francisco, US.

He recalls his first flight, the cultural shift (from his place to the US) had shocked him (and that he reached 2 or 3 days before the Pride Parade🏳️‍🌈).

All this happened with the hope of him not getting the Thiel Fellowship (inspite of putting forward his best pitch) and not visiting the US ever after. But later after getting the Thiel Fellowship Ritesh dropped out of ISB, as per the rules of the contract of Thiel Fellowship.

4. Fun Fact regarding the Pervious point

I “cold-dmed” and emailed Raj Shamani Regarding this newsletter, but no response (obviously because I don’t have any credible thing to waste his time on).

Now got to make this newsletter big enough, so join in guys if you’re enjoying.

5. Five Methods of learning from Ritesh

1. Reading books, startup/business publications and videos.

   Top 3 books:

   i) No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings

   ii) Zero to one by Peter Thiel

   iii) Hard thing about Hard things by Ben Horowitz

2. Having great people around you. This creates a good sense of insecurity around you, you constantly keep wanting to learn when your around them.

   (This is the only reason I go to college. I am constantly finding like-minded people, listening to different people about their POV etc. Yes, it’s hard at the start but I’ll keep looking for these great people)

3. Cold emails/DMs.

4. Agenda less conversations, learning from newbies/rookies.

5. This one is interesting: Downloading different apps to learn about the product and way to display them.

6. Ritesh’s take on “how to find smarter people than you?”

Taking inspiration of the creation of so called “PayPal mafia” i.e, on how Peter Thiel finds these smart people. The few two or three people is really going to be hard because they’ll have to be smart and also willing to take a bet on you (believe in you, because they too have to surround themselves with people who they believe are smart). After these people the Networking effect comes into play.

Like Naval says

7. In this world of instant gratification, it is very important to focus more on you becoming a better person when you are learning (and always try to keep learning).

(This is when that “ah ah” moment comes within you when you feel that you have achieved a certain accomplishment. Personally, this happens a lot when I am solving a problem set or even when I am watching a YT video. So, always seek out for that “ah ah” moment.) (The Figur8 Life tips 😉).

8. How to 10x your business? (Ritesh’s take)

1. Create a Playbook: Codifying the motion of your business. (Listing down your roots, what you do at the base level)

2. Get the Right person: For moral support etc. Probably a more experienced person. (I think this is the benefit of good VC funded companies)

3. Strong Discuss and Review system: Adapting to customer needs.

4. Watch your costs: Scale and costs are almost directly proportional. Tech driven companies should be generating operating efficiency (because after all you are providing value to your customers, at least that’s what you believe)

9. Jugaad ✨

(How can we not ask an Indian Entrepreneur some Jugaadu stuff he done in his business?)

Ritesh’s definition of Jugaad:

1. Trying to hide a broken thing in your system😅 (This is in fact the hardest I believe).

2. Being creative in problem solving.

Ok let’s get back to Jugaad’s in OYO’s journey:

1. Bright red ads of OYO in hotels across Asia instead of TV ads in the early days.

2. This was the similar mindset with hotel owners near merchants (OYO calls them patrons) attached to OYO. So, they began calling OYO to get themselves attached after seeing their nearby hotels sprawling.

3. 🚨This one is interesting🚨

   OYO created OYO frames which was a feature that would allow hotel owners to click photos of the rooms they offer and recommend changes to be made (like dim lights instead of bright ones etc) to increase their CTR (click through rates).

10. Lastly, Execute.

Decide if you want to be that person who’ll be like “I had the idea of that big company years ago” or be the creator of the big company?

Join in so that insightful posts like these hit your inbox every Sunday.

Until then Bye Bye Geeks👋👋. I gotta go study for my end sems due tomorrow.

Keep creating value.👍

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