Pratik Gandhi
India, 2013
“Communities.”
“That’s the approach we take for marketing,” said Pratik.
A digitally native marketing agency was being born from his vision, the first team had met (of which, I was a part) for coffee, conversations amongst like minded professionals anywhere in the world flew in and out over Twitter, the name was underway but the focus clear – building communities.
Canada, 2020
“I now build communities in the cryptocurrency space,” beamed Pratik over the screen.
Pratik’s entrepreneurial experience, passionate grasp on digital marketing and a newly found interest in cryptocurrency converged into a contemporary career. He has been the first marketing hire (head of growth) with full-stack capabilities for four early stage product start-ups in the crypto space across US and Canada in the past five years.
“I’ve always followed Naval Ravikant (founder, AngelList & start-up investor). His and Nick Szabo’s (computer scientist & cryptographer) interview on The Tim Ferriss Show forever spiked my interest in crypto. And I enjoy being a first-mover to evangelise and help build this space,” says Pratik when asked how he found his niche.
Transcending Limitations
“Crypto is a different world. It is not receptive to some of the most conventional digital marketing techniques and thus poses an exciting challenge. I haven’t run ads for more than a year now for example, simply because advertising for crypto wasn’t permitted on Facebook and Google. It is slowly opening up but not all countries allow it and the process is tedious, full of nitty-gritties. However, this limitation naturally compels me to approach marketing in an in-depth manner that has a greater compounding effect in the long run. Community building then, isn’t an outcome of the marketing strategy, it defines everything that we do right from the beginning.”
Identifying the Community
“My work starts as soon as the product development begins. We map out target personas and I reach out to people resonating with these personas, building one-on-one relationships with them, representing the product start-up I’m working with. This outreach happens through an existing network, referrals and of course through conversations online with those who contribute to the blockchain ecosystem.”
Conducting User Research
“These conversations convert into video or lunch meetings leading to an enriching exchange. My proposition for interaction is – what are your problems and what can the product we’re building do to solve them.”
“I conduct focus group discussions or surveys with the community we’ve previously sought, or host meet-ups and events with a new audience. One of the most powerful mediums I’ve used to get feedback so far is Twitter DMs.”
“When an idea is being turned into a tangible product, it is important to learn whether we need to pivot or persevere. To measure this, I create feedback loops (the recurring process of collecting feedback from a target group, analysing and applying fixes) to optimise the consumer experience. These loops, once created, are hard to break and they work as a catalyst in creating world-class products.”
“The varied research methods that I deploy, leave me with a diverse set of qualitative and quantitative data points that are analysed and taken back to the team – CEO, COO, developers and designers as key insights. This exercise also kick-starts my customer-acquisition funnel, keeping us ahead of the curve.”
Building a Product/Market Fit
“The ‘outside in’ approach undertaken and the insights gathered contribute to the fundamentals – brand positioning, messaging, user experience and product features and the business model itself. The product co-evolves with our community, by listening to their demands, understanding their mindset and nurturing them through engagement strategies.”
Pratik’s workspace in Vancouver.
“According to Sean Ellis, (an angel investor who coined the term ‘growth hacking’) achieving product/market fit requires at least 40 percent of users saying they would be ‘very disappointed’ without your product. If you've yet to reach this milestone, growth hackers can ensure virility is baked into your product.”
“I evaluate my effort by this quote.”
Running Marketing Experiments
“My approach is based less on tribal knowledge and gut instinct but entirely on data. To ensure success, I run several hypothesis-driven experiments (A/B testing, landing pages, measuring the viral quotient, email deliverability, etc.) along with the discipline of direct marketing with a strict eye on impact, effort and cost. I then double or triple on the channel or campaign idea that is driving results.”
“Of course, I’ve failed at a few experiments, but that’s only taught me to run them at scale. I have a bias for action; execution is the most important thing. This inherently makes me nimbler to deploy rapid iterative tests and evaluate results based on analytics.”
A FlyWheel Himself
“I am only satisfied when the product becomes a FlyWheel, reaping network effects,” concludes Pratik. The good to great transformation of any start-up is a cumulative process undertaken step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn to finally achieve multiplied results that are highly sustainable.
Pratik employs this transformation in his work too while surpassing self-set goals, quite a FlyWheel himself. He carries his knack of networking, an agile mindset and connections he has previously built as an enriched ocean to draw from, wherever he goes, climbing faster.
Amidst global lockdown, Pratik continues to work remotely and unite a variety of experts for a real-time virtual exchange under his new passion project – ‘Lockdown Conversations’.
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Words: Pratik Gandhi, in conversation with Nikita Vhora