u/mined_it

Share the location, what made it special, and how much you paid!

It has become hard to find the 'steals' from 'OK-OK'/'good' places on airbnb, hence the question. Posting it here because I am sure there will be others who will like it as well.

My mother's got MEDISEP, probably my father will get covered in that - but I keep hearing concerns about MEDISEP. Also, my FIL has MEDISEP, but MIL is not covered in that. I am thinking of taking an insurance plan for them. FIL, MIL and my father are 70+ - FIL is 77. My mother is 58.

Please share your personal experience, the premiums you paid etc.

@ admins - this is an askKerala post, hope you will keep it. Once I get a few responses, I will delete myself. thanks in advance!

TITLE.

Whether it's LinkedIn, Naukri, Indeed, Glassdoor, company career pages, referrals, recruiters, or anything else - What's the most frustrating part of the process? Is there something that is working well for you?

For me, it is the absence of stage and reason at which my CV got dropped - did it pass ATS, did it get shortlisted? Did it get rejected because of my expected CTC etc.

Curious to hear from both job seekers and people who've hired before. If you could fix just ONE thing about job hunting today, what would it be?

day 6 of trying to understand why technical founders struggle with GTM/distribution even when AI has made building dramatically easier.

quick context about me: i’m not an engineer. i worked at a startup through scale, mostly around systems/workflows/operations and i am currently planning my next move.

didn't speak to any new founders today.

instead, i spent most of the day reading Deploy Empathy and trying to build a simple framework for customer interviews. one thing that's becoming clearer:

a lot of founders jump straight from: "i have users" to "how do i get more users?" or "how do i get these users to pay" without first understanding:

• why existing users signed up
• what they were hoping to achieve
• what would they do if your product did not exist

if you're a technical founder trying to get your first paying customers, feel free to reach out. i'm not selling anything. i'm simply trying to understand the patterns that separate products people try from products people pay for.

day 5 of trying to understand why technical founders struggle with GTM/distribution even when AI has made building dramatically easier.

quick context about me: i’m not an engineer. i worked at a startup through scale, mostly around systems/workflows/operations and i am currently planning my next move.

a surprising number of conversations today eventually converged on one thing: founders did not speak with their users because they did not know how to initiate that.

ended up recommending Deploy Empathy to a few of them. i'm only a few chapters in myself, but it feels highly relevant to the kinds of problems founders keep bringing up. read up if you are planning to build something -will def help.

another realization:
founders often ask for help with marketing when what they actually need is market learning.

before scaling acquisition, it helps to understand:

• who gets the most value
• who leaves
• who pays
• and why.

still learning.

day 4 of trying to understand why technical founders struggle with GTM/distribution even when AI has made building dramatically easier.

quick context about me: i’m not an engineer. i worked at a startup through scale, mostly around systems/workflows/operations and i am currently planning my next move.

coincidence or not, both of today's conversations revolved around one thing: founders understanding their product mechanically, but not understanding how buyers mentally categorize it.

both of these where extremely passionate technical founders - one built a social media platform that was anti doomscrolling. we discussed about how the ICP has to be further narrowed down. second one built a review-management SaaS for local businesses. my original reaction was - 'google already does this', and the discussion that followed kind of made us both understand that he had to work a lot more on positioning, and speak to a lot more users.

big pattern i’m noticing - nothing ground breaking really: technical founders explain products through features/workflows and they do not realise that buyers think in:

• outcomes
• trust
• saved effort/revenue impact

day 3 of trying to understand why technical founders struggle with GTM/distribution even when AI has made building dramatically easier.

quick context about me: i’m not an engineer. i worked at a startup through scale, mostly around systems/workflows/operations and i am currently planning my next move.

working closely with the tech team at my start up made me notice one pattern: technical teams often keep improving the product fractionally for existing users while avoiding the much messier question — “why is the rest of the ICP not buying?”

spent half of my day speaking with founders. 2/n conversations went beyond initial exchanges. one promised to come back after properly scoping/narrowing their ICP, and the next figured he was not sure what metrics he should chase to understand traction.

have dm-ed some more tech founders who had questions related to gtm - will share more as i speak with more people.

quick context about me: i’m not an engineer. i worked at a startup through scale, mostly around systems/workflows/operations and i am currently planning my next move.

working closely with the tech team at my start up made me notice one pattern: technical teams often keep improving the product fractionally for existing users while avoiding the much messier question — “why is the rest of the ICP not buying?”

yesterday was interesting. i made a post on some of the relevant subs on how AI made building easier, but not making money easier — and ended up speaking with a couple of technical founders who had the same problem:

1. a founder building reddit monitoring tool (sector - b2b bd/client acq)
2. a founder stuck between signups and revenue (sector - upskilling)
3. a founder building ready to use demo videos

what was common - technical founders rarely struggle with effort. they struggle with market-learning loops. something i can never do.

with the founder from upskilling specifically, we ended up discussing:
- why “better organized learning” may not be painful enough positioning by itself
- why people pay for outcomes (“get interview ready”, “switch careers faster”) instead of structure
- how to speak separately with users who completed onboarding vs users who dropped off

the interesting part: i didnt make money from any of these conversations - that was not the intention.

i did get honest replies, and a couple of thank yous and promises to come back after trying based on our discussion. one of the founders was ready to move to linkedin - not to buy but just to follow each others' journey.

i think that is the validation right now. my current goal is not to build a scalable AI GTM platform immediately. it’s to understand the pain a bit more, and learn how founders think.

i am hoping to notice repeated emotional/operational bottlenecks and to help solve these manually first before trying to productize anything.

i am starting to realize that distribution problems are often much more psychological/systemic than technical. still learning.

Basically the title - trying to understand how recruiters search so that I can try to be present where you are looking. 😄

Was just going through a post that said 'I built 15 projects using emergent. 12 failed, 3 made money'. Now the thing is - I am not sure if it is real or if the person just put up a post so that people know they can do such stuff with emergent. In the second case, 'learnings' are mostly meaningless because those are not actual learnings but hypotheses.

I have set the flair as "Startup help" - I am not sure if that is the correct flair - but before you start reading, I want to be very clear -

1. This is not GPT (or any other tool) written/reviewed.
2. This is me trying to put some structure to my thoughts based on what I have seen up close working in the core team of an early stage startup.
3. This assumes that you have validated (to whatever depth possible) that your startup solves a real problem/tries to capture a real opportunity, and is not just a 'brilliant/cool/flashy idea that popped up in your head'.

1. Always have clarity on what you will see, and what you will not.

Get to the bottom of things that you have decided that you will see, and ignore completely the things that you have decided that you will not see. Create a document and write down extensively what you will see, and what you will not. Follow this doc as if it is a rule book, and keep adding things to this document if necessary - but only move things from one bucket to another with detailed justification.

2. Do not monitor anyone beyond your DRs.

Figure out your business metrics (not operational metrics) - could be revenue, could be count of happy clients, could be active users - I dunno. Make sure that there is someone directly reporting to you, and directly driving these metrics. It should not be your duty to drive these metrics - you have to find someone else to drive it. You can define these metrics, you can review these metrics, ask questions, grill - but never own these metrics.

And do not look beyond business metrics. Talk to your users, keep listening to the market but do not get involved in improving/setting/owning operational metrics. Your DRs should be capable enough to defining operational metrics, and their DRs in turn should be owning and driving those metrics. Do not look at day-to-day learnings - your DRs should be ready to help their DRs productise those learnings, and make sure mistakes do not repeat.

3. Read up on Principal-Agent problem, and Goodhart's Law.

Goodhart's law talks about how extreme focus on metrics lead to everyone gaming the system to drive metrics without real business output. This ties back to point 1 and 2 - be very clear on the very few business metrics you set - you should be able to look at those metrics and figure out how well you are doing. Also, know that at each level, there is a person who wants the job to be done, and another person who does the job - and that these two will always have different immediate goals.

4. Your job is to be the person who works the least in terms of volume, and the most in terms of impact.

Imagine if the captain of the ship had to keep rowing as well. Think of Premier League - you are the one who decides to bring in Klopp. Do not be Salah who has to get past defenders. Do not be Klopp who has to deal with Salah's and Mane's egos. Be the person who manages Klopp. Do not count dribbles completed, or goals scored. Count matches won, lost, drawn. And most importantly - watch every match not because you can guide Klopp better, or coach Salah better. But because you want to enjoy what you have built.

Sorry if that was preachy. Cheers.