Community-Driven Growth: Kanishka Thakur's Strategy for Nudge

Thank you. A pleasure to be here.

Sure. It’s been a colorful journey. I’ve been in the gaming space for the past six years now. Initially, started by playing a bit of professional counter-strike, did that for a couple of years, and then started writing editorial columns. I started writing for some columns like USA Today, and GFINITY. Did that for a year then because I always loved giving I figured that was the best way to make money. We used to be very connected to that. Then somehow a bunch of my friends started and launched a website and a mobile app, which was Klutchh, which was like an esports fantasy platform. So think of it like a dream11 for esports. Where we used to cover counter-strike, Valhalla, pubg, 3-5, and all these kinds of different kinds of esports. Then you can create your dream team and then win money based on how these players have performed. So We launched that, went live with that, and that was our side project for us. We were like, 1,000 users in a month, and we figured out, Hey, this actually works, and a lot of people are sticky to it. Somehow from there, we managed to raise a bit of smaller funds from a fund called Grad Capital, and they funded us $25,000.

Then things started becoming serious. Then we started doing this full-time, built out a new mobile app, and then launched it. In six months, we had around 50,000 users. We were growing pretty We realized that esports fantasy is relatively super niche. And a few of our most popular games, which were Cubji Mobile 3.5, I think got banned in 2023, September, and October. And those were our most popular types. So what we realized was, that even though there were a lot of gaming esports users, people were not willing enough to pay. So what struck us was our D30 retention rate was close to 42%, and we had a lot of stickiness in terms of people spending more time because we had built so much engagement stuff, which was streaks, challenges, leader boards, stuff like that. It took us a while to build that. It was like two to two and a half to build that. When we were pivoting, our initial thesis, then we built out a tool that could help product and marketing teams control user journeys and launch different kinds of experiences. Yes, that’s how we started to build Nudge. It’s been a year now that we’ve been live and we’ve been building and going pretty well.

I think for us, what worked was our communities were super strong. They’re communities on Discord, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Instagram. We got a lot of customers and users from our Discord channel and our Instagram page. We used to make these smaller groups and give out different kinds of tournaments. A lot of people should come from there. Reference was a big part. People would invite their friends. One of our customers had around 120 referrals. The pull from that was super strong. We figured out that community and distribution, I think, was the core part of what you were doing there. I think that worked out for us.

Now we’ve become a UX infra for consumer companies we usually say. Now they can build any user experience inside the app and web. That could be rewards, gamification, nudges, tool types, surveys, and everything inside the user journey. So think of it this way. Whenever you open Zomato, you might get an onboarding tool, then you might get a spotlight section on the biryani section. And then whenever you click Add to Cart, you might get a 10% scratch card. As soon as you order, you might get an NPA survey. Now, this is one flow that you’ve built out. Can you build 10 million flows if you have 10 million users and you want to personalize that without relying on engineering themes? What we realized was this was a core value proposition of us where people not just buy us for, Hey, can we build out a specific feature? We’re not doing a feature but can people build out different kinds of journeys and flows and then personalize it based on their user behavior, their preferences, and intent, if they want to increase their average order value, if they want to increase their monthly transaction. That’s what we primarily do.

Right now, we have a bunch of great customers. We are just going live with Big Basket tomorrow, one of our customers. Right now, we have Big Basket Tata, Tootas, Apna Club, Jaykisan, Senta, Stimular, and these guys. We’ve been growing super fast and putting customers very fast. It’s been going good.

A bunch of things. One of the things that we do is all of our experiences are native experiences. Everything is in real-time. We do all of our experiences and render in less than 50 milliseconds. Everything is real-time. Nothing is HTML or a web view, and we exactly look like a part of your app. If you want to say, how would it look on a big basket? It would look like that big basket has probably been put and developed within our drive. That’s one part. Second, it takes around 30 minutes to an hour to integrate our SDKs. It’s a one-time SDK integration effort with the dev teams. Once you’ve integrated, any experiences that you want to launch, you don’t want to have to show or place to update it. You don’t have to go back to your tech teams, figure out what the sprint cycle is, figure out a way to actually put it in the sprint cycle, go for a release, and then push it out. You can launch hundreds of experiments throughout the user journeys to push your different kinds of KPIs. We’re pretty fast in terms of how we integrate and everything is native.

I think one of our first customers is Aapna Club. They’re a wholesale retailer, with close to half a million users. They wanted to increase their average order values whenever someone is ordering inside their app. What they did was they introduced event-based challenges. They added different kinds of tasks. Add X category of items, and add items up to 199. Whenever you used to do that, based on the ticket sizes that they have, they used to give 5%, 10%, 15% scratch cards. Once that is done, they used to read them into a different journey using Nudge. What did their average order value increase by around 8% because of that? On a wholesale retailer where your frequency is twice every month, that’s an insane amount of average order value. Then they start doing a bunch of things in terms of surveys, everything. Then we have a bunch of other customers, which as Senta, which is a tech platform. They have also seen a lot of entries in their D7 retention rates in terms of activation of their users whenever they complete, in terms of the completion of the course or what they’re doing. They recently went live with one of our features, which is Streaks.

I think one of their users had around 120 days of Streaks. I had messaged them saying, Hey, Streaks have made me change my habit behaviors in terms of my daily routine. We’ve seen a bunch of things work in terms of the entire tech stack. Now people are looking at it as, how can we build more personalized user journeys across platforms so that people think that, Hey, can we build more personalized UX? Can Harshit have a different UX when he’s using an Xomato a Swiggy or a Zepto? Then, yeah, That’s what we enable them to do.

I think we were a very lean team. Right now, I have a team of nine people. Out of that, eight people are engineers. I have another, me and Gaurav, who’s my co-founder. Gaurav handles the product and tech, and I handle the sales in the market. But I only have one person, Sachi, who heads the marketing with me. What we primarily did was, initially, when we launched we didn’t build out the product and then started selling it. It was the other way around where I spoke to customers, tried to sell them what we were doing, and then got a customer and then started building it and then productizing it on a larger level. What worked for us in terms of, I think in the past 8, 9 months product hunt has been a good lever for us. I think we went live on the product hunt six months back. We came first of the day, second of the We had around 1400 uploads. We had beaten Adobe on that same day. My pipeline was full. My demo calls, and my sales pipeline were around 60 calls in two, three, or two weeks. These had customers like Gopuff, GoDash, Fanatics, and customers like that.

Then it was insane because we didn’t have a lot of engineering resources to actually. Product Hunt was great. Now what has also worked for us is we’re doing a lot of content. I SEO in terms of articles, glossaries, because it’s a new category which is UX. In some cases, we have to also make them understand that this is more than just features or more than just camping. We’ve done a lot of content SEO. We’ve recently started doing a lot of outbound, which is through email, LinkedIn, and stuff like that. Channel partnerships have also worked for us. We’re doing a bunch of channel partnerships with very similar companies. A lot of marketing agencies, a lot of analytics tools, a lot of omnichannel tools. A lot of adjacent tools because the ICP is very similar. For them, it’s like cross-selling, like a different part through their own experiences, and that has worked for us.

I think it did work for us when we were building Klutchh, which was a consumer company. For us, I think why we haven’t done that is also because our motion has always been sales-led, which is to top-to-down approach. We’re not a PLG motion because we primarily sell to mobile-based consumer companies. It’s not that we’ll find us on a Reddit thread and you will go to our dev docs and get it installed on a mobile SDK because you will always have multiple gatekeepers while putting in a third-party SDK on a mobile app. That’s also one of the primary reasons. We’ve till now not explored a lot of the community things. But I think in the next couple of months, we have planned a bunch of things with some product and growth communities. Some collaborations, I think will be coming out pretty soon.

I think for us, my co-founder, and I,aurab previously led the product at Klutchh and I have been a gamer. What our approach initially was when we started building this course, can we create habit loops inside the consumer app? The first feature that we had built out was just a game of things. Just share streaks and challenges and a reward distribution system. If X does Y, give him Z. So you can distribute him on a larger level. We had already seen companies doing just that. Companies like TALON1 just do loyalty systems. Yotco, who does loyalty for D2C is like 50, 100 million dollar companies. We figured out that, Hey, if this works for just specific consumer companies and creates habit loops inside their app, I think we can do more. Then we expanded to building nudges. Can nudges help with onboarding and activation? Can surveys help you understand user feedback? Can you build out different kinds of stories to help them watch a story, swipe up, and go to a specific category page? We started with just gamification because we understood the game mechanics part of things, where how people behave, and how our habit loops usually form.

We started with that and now we’ve expanded to a bunch of other things.

I think primarily for us, it becomes three primary industries and consumer companies also. That is, one is Fintech, one is D2C e-commerce, and one is EdTech. Three primary categories that we have seen in terms of our customer base coming from. That’s where we also intend to focus because, for us, it has always been consumer companies that have a higher natural frequency of usage. That’s more where you’ll find a lot of D2C e-commerce players coming in or a fintech company or a tech company where people are coming in to learn or get courses. So three categories, primarily.

But for those two- For us, it’s been an In terms of experimentation, we haven’t been building for three, four years. For us, our data site is very small as well. I wouldn’t say that we have 100 customers and that’s where the data site lies. But for us, the data site has been well and we’ve been fortunate enough to have We have some customers trusting us and then we’re finding out patterns that, Hey, we have four customers that are in the fintech industry. We have five customers who are in tech e-commerce. That’s how we’ve picked up patterns where We found out more use cases. We found out what the key KPIs are. For example, on a D2C e-commerce, you will always want to increase your order value or the frequency of transactions or the number of transactions that you’re doing or your card abandonment decrease that. At tech, you will always try to increase your completion rate or your lead 30 rate. In a Fintech, you might try to increase how many times you deposit money inside your account or how frequently you pay your bills on time.

Can you incentivize that? We have always figured out use cases that fit well inside our customers and could fit well with our potential people. Then we’re, Hey, we’re getting these core three industries that we’re going after.

I think primarily someone like DoDash, Goopoff, Uber, India, or I would say somewhere like Zoomato and Swiggy because I think they have such a vast UX. In terms of it, they’ve been iterating so fast in terms of how people are changing, how consumer behavior is changed, that we would want to play There’s a big role in that in terms of, can we personalize it and can we iterate it regularly based on how consumer behavior is ever-changing? Or then can we become a core stack of it where their product and marketing teams can iterate on a larger level throughout the user journey? I think these five, six companies.

I think we’ve recently gone live with one of our features, which is page builder, which is you can customize the entire page and the design of that entire page by adding different kinds of blocks of components, and you can design everything with our given templates. When we started launching a bunch of features with our customers, we realized that a lot of people would want a challenges page or a rewards page very similar to how their app looks currently. Then we realized that, Hey, we need to customize the make that. What we did was we created a page builder where you have different templates of how 10 sneaks design would look like or how 10 different tool tips would look like. Now you can customize everything on that in terms of the components. They want to put a countdown, they want to put different kinds of images, text, everything like the horizontal way. You can do that very easily, and it would look exactly like a part of your app. What we have done is have font size as one of the major key components, but it should exactly match what the app looks like.

We will now start taking that on our dashboard through the LDK integration so that everything is very intact and it looks exactly like a part of their app. Our core value prop is that everything would look exactly like a part of your app and nothing would open in HTML. So you won’t look like that. Hey, on Instagram, I’m opening a link and it opens in a new window and it looks like I’m going outside the app. When you start opening a lot of the external links on LinkedIn, it will start giving a disclaimer saying, Hey, you’re going out of the LinkedIn website. You would want to appear exactly like a part of the app or the website while still being a third party. That’s what we’re trying to do with the page builder. We got a bunch of other things planned. I think in the next two, three months, we’ll be We’re doing that. Now we’re more moving towards hyper-personalization of experiences. Now in the next three to four months, we’ll start recommending these flows and journeys of what would these experiences look like or what would affect an average order value in a big basket.

We would start recommending these journeys and these flows inside consumer apps. That’s what we’re aiming to do.

I think we usually work Monday to Saturday, we haven’t done specific work, or work hours for the entire team, everyone comes whenever their first morning stand-up. I think usually on Saturdays and Sundays, I used to go to play futsal with my friends, a bunch of friends in Bangalore, or I spend time playing games I have my friends online. I play Valorant, really, but it’s mostly just on Sunday. But for, work-life balance, I don’t see it that way because for me, it is like what I do every day is very fun and I’d like to do it. I hope I like to do it for the rest of my life because life is never monotonous for me every day I get in the office and start speaking to people and doing my stuff. It is everything is new in terms of sales or ops or business or anything, I’m speaking to customers and that’s very exciting for me.

For a very long time, I’ve just maintained a sheet, like a notepad sheet on my computer, which says tomorrow. I’ll keep on adding to that. However, the rest of the team uses Jira and Roshin to manage everything day-to-day. But for my stuff, I just maintain speed, which is just maintaining that, adding tasks to that intent. During that, I would not be the ideal person to recommend any production.

I have a constant tomorrow list which has been the same, which is the same file for the past one and a half years. I’ve just kept on updating that in terms of the things that I include.

I think one person that comes to mind is Pallav Nadhani, who’s been our mentor. He was the co-founder of Fusion Charge started in 2003, had around 25,000 customers including Apple, IBM, the US, democracy, and a lot of bunch of folks, and then sold it for a very large amount. It took some time off and now has joined Presentation as their co-founder. Pallav has been a very integral part of what we do regularly. He’s made me understand what it means to run a SaaS business and connected me to a lot of bunch of very relevant. I usually sit with Palau, understand, and give him an update on what’s happening, and then he helps me understand what is going on in the business, and who are the right people. He has connected me to a lot of bunch of folks, very relevant, and specific to what we’re solving. He made me introduced to a lot of bunch of folks who could help me sell enterprise. There’s a first-time selling on enterprise software and used to understand what the playbook looks like, how to close bigger customers, what the sales cycle looks like, and how to negotiate when you’re doing a larger one-year deal.

That’s been fun for me. Pallup is also one of our investors, and I think second, I would say, Balakrishnan, who’s the country head of Shopify, is one of our initial first investors in the Klutchh. She, along with Grad Capital, has spent a lot of time with us. When we pivoted from a gaming, and e-sports app to now building a B2B core SaaS software. Super grateful to have people around these. These are the people that are part of the mind.

Yeah.

LinkedIn, because you get a lot of resume people connected there.

I think for Product Hunt, we did a lot of growth experiments. We had a database of users who had upvoted in the past 30 days to all the products in Product Hunt. Then we reached out to them manually to help us upvote. We reached out to around 800, 900 people, and we got a bunch of 70, 80 upvotes from there. That worked out because, in the product, Five, or six people were sitting. From the start of the launch, we were sitting together, and then we were just, till the next 24 hours, complete I started to push out that upvote. I think that worked pretty well for us.

Again, lot of facts.

The weirdest place I’ve come up with a brilliant idea. I would say, I think football. I got a bunch of ideas for some while playing football because that’s where mostly I’m off work I’m not thinking consciously about what I have to do in my day-to-day. That’s why I have a bunch of things that I’ve naturally gotten ideas of what we can do.

Okay. Now, coming to my very last question, what’s your last Google search?

My last Google, how I gave my presentation. That’s my last Google.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.