KanishkDan.

About Me

👋 I'm Kanishk, I've tried summarizing key life events/facts about myself below. It's a long post but I'll try keeping things interesting.

School

  1. I did my schooling in Delhi (DPS Dwarka)
  2. Mostly spent time playing games on my PlayStation. At some point was in the top 5% globally in Killzone 3
  3. Started playing the guitar somewhere during the 7th-8th standard
  4. Started enjoying Math & English around the 10th standard. Trigonometry was fun
  5. 11th & 12th were fairly memorable:
    • Joined the computers club (CORE)
    • Created & hosted a commerce-based quiz event
    • Got 56% in 11th
    • Loved 12th standard math. At some point, I was convinced I'd go down the actuarial science path

College

  1. Went to Bangalore (Christ University) to do BBA
  2. Joined the theatre team (Zealous) in the first year
  3. Started participating in business competitions
  4. Thought I'd found what I was passionate about - Human Resources
  5. Spent half of a semester outside class participating in something
  6. Just said yes whenever someone offered me to go for a competition
  7. Don't remember any of the subjects being memorable or fun
  8. Spent time studying mostly the day before or hours before the exam
  9. Did my 3rd year internship at a hotel. Spent the first week cleaning file cabinets
  10. Remaining time in college was mostly spent doing drama + business fests

Job

  1. My passion for HR got me to interview with a startup called TopHire
  2. Joined TopHire because the founders were young, cool and I liked their landing page
  3. Realized HR is not what I wanted to do roughly 6 months into it
  4. Was fairly bad at my role. Got into frequent conflicts with my manager, was lazy etc.
  5. Decided to give it another shot, thought "maybe I don't like this because I'm bad at it", spent another 6-8 months trying to get much better
  6. Came across the PM role while hiring PMs for my companies. Instantly got enamored by it
  7. Told my manager (Ritu) I wanted to quit. She asked me "why", I told her I wanted to get into PMing
  8. Got offered a trial PM role by the cofounder
  9. The trial worked well. I finally felt like I was doing what I'd always wanted to do
  10. Learned SQL over a weekend because my boss mocked me
  11. Made UI, did analytics, wrote docs, and did some coding as a solo PM. No designers or analysts. More on what I did at TopHire on my LinkedIn
  12. Shoutout to some of the most important folks from my first job who've been instrumental in where I'm today and where I'll be tomorrow:
    • Siddharth (Cofounder, TH) — he continues to be my go-to mentor for everything. The bot I'm working on, this blogpost, everything
    • Sameer (CEO, TH) — continues to share ruthless (and honest) feedback
    • Ritu (My first manager at TH) — who continues to be an amazing friend and someone who shares great advice that I always find ways to disagree with. Mostly to annoy her
    • Abhishek (CTO, TH) — someone without whom I'd never have been able to launch anything. Even the bot I'm currently working on

Influences

Before we proceed, let me go a bit back and share a few things that really influenced me:

  1. Not being able to speak well in English during school or in front of an audience — main reason why I did theatre in college

    • I worked on getting much better at speaking to larger audiences in English
    • To a point that I really started enjoying doing presentations in class, doing street theatre, business fests etc. Fun fact: a college friend recently introduced me as a "great orator"

  2. Hearing the term "entrepreneur" in school

    • Someone in a speech during a tech competition in school said "entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like others won't just to live most of your life like others can't". Fancied the thought a lot, but seemed too aspirational
    • Reason why I wanted to work in a startup right after college

  3. Watching this video in school by a kid called Jacob Barnett. Key takeaway: what unique thought can you introduce in the world

    • In business competitions, my usual motto used to be "if I can't be better than them, I'll be different"
    • Most of my life now has been spent being contrarian without a cause. You'll often find me debating either side of most things

  4. In college, one of my professors told me: "Kanishk, you talk really well but you lack depth". This led to one of my biggest insecurities: being superficial

Now

  1. After roughly 2.5 years in Product Management, shipping a bunch of things, I started consistently thinking about what I really wanted to do. The reason why I always wanted to work in a startup was to understand how they truly worked. So that one day I'll be able to start one myself

  2. After consistently spending months thinking over it, I put down my papers in February 2023. Decided my LWD to be December 31st 2023 (wanted to try finishing some projects plus save up some money)

  3. From Feb 23 to now — I've been building an AI-based Slack bot for teams who wish to run standups, check-ins inside Slack. It's called HowsThisGoing - an AI bot for running standups in Slack

    • Goal was to learn how to code plus sell
    • Learned from scratch:
      • Django — Django has a simple project on their website you can use to learn the ropes. Highly recommend it
      • Postgres
      • Running an EC2 instance with CloudFront + S3
      • Payments using Razorpay
      • Logging using Sentry
      • Analytics using Posthog

  4. Current goal is to get HowsThisGoing to 100 paying customers