AHG Technologies

Cofounder and CEO

TEDx

Speaker at TEDxIITJodhpur, TEDxUBS and TEDxCOEP.

TEDx Speaker

Multiple Companies

Jar App: Tiger Global Portfolio
STAGE.in: Featured on Shark Tank India

Others: TravClan, HYPD, Convin AI, Aspire UPI Pay Later

Investor

Exotel

Generative AI, Conversational AI, WhatsApp, Chat, and ChatBots.

In November 2021, my startup Cogno AI was acquired by Exotel in a multi-million dollar transaction. Post-acquisition, I ran it as an independent subsidiary of Exotel. I built and led a team of 150+ members and scaled it to over 200 Enterprise clients, millions of dollars in revenues and 100%+ year-on-year growth.

CEO - Cogno AI (Acquired by Exotel)

Cogno AI

AI-powered Customer Experience Platform for large Enterprises like the ICICI Group, Kotak Group, Bajaj Group, Axis Group, HDFC Group, Aditya Birla Group, State Bank Group, etc.

Acquired by Exotel in November 2021.

Co-founder & CEO

Technology Entrepreneur with experience in developing B2B Software focused on large Enterprises.

I bootstrapped my Startup Cogno AI to over $1M in revenues before it got acquired by Exotel in a multi-million dollar transaction in November 2021.

I also share my learnings with young entrepreneurs via talks and sessions. Here is the link to my TEDx talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dn63oW4fCM

The goal isn't to raise millions of dollars in funding. The goal is to build a business that generates millions of dollars of profits.

Profits >> Funding

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

Aman Goel

One large win can cover up for a hundred failures.

Entrepreneurship is hard. There are so many unknowns that can go wrong and they do go wrong. Your Product may not be needed by the market. Investors may not want to fund your company. That 10x engineer who accepted your offer letter might back out 2 days before joining. Your cofounder might exit.

There are just too many things that can go wrong.

When all of this turmoil is going on in your life, your friends working at FAANG companies would be enjoying their vacation in Europe and you'd feel like - "What am I doing with my life?"

There is a natural desire to quit.

I went through this multiple times at my previous venture, especially during my early days. My cofounder abruptly left. I almost went bankrupt. Customers got to know about this, so they held back their contracts with us. Things became worse. I had gotten into a downward spiral.

I too could have quit. But then I would not be telling this story here.

After a lot of deliberation with myself, I decided that I would not quit - quitting was never an option. I convinced Harshita to leave her job and join me as a co-founder. We distributed our roles and responsibilities. I took charge of the customers and spent all my time with them, talking about our Product and convincing them to use it. Harshita spent all her time building the Product and the Technology behind it.

That one decision to convince Harshita to join me as a co-founder changed everything. From an almost bankrupt business, we went to over $1M in revenue in just 2.5 years and after 6 more months, we got acquired in a multi-million dollar transaction. All of this when we were merely 26 years old.

In life and business, you will face such moments where you will feel desperate and would want to quit. Remember, you are 1 decision away from a completely different life/business. That 1 win can completely change the trajectory. The Power Law applies here. 99 of your decisions combined will not make that big of an impact on the output. But that 1 right decision will have 100 times more impact.

To find that decision, all you need to do is to ensure that you keep going and not quit.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

The key to being successful is to be lucky.

You could be lucky because you were at the right place at the right time. For instance, you were born into a wealthy family and so, you had better opportunities.

However, this is not replicable. You and I were not born into wealthy and successful families. So, how do we become lucky?

By working hard. Working hard helps in increasing luck.

Want to close a deal? If you're born wealthy, your family will have contacts and networks. But if you're not born wealthy, go and knock on 50 doors. 10 will listen to you. 5 will be interested. 1 will become your customer.

It will surely require more effort for you compared to the one who's born into a well-connected family. But that doesn't mean that you can't win the race. Keep working hard and in the right direction. It is the most important trait to achieve success.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

In my 7 years of building startups, I have learned an important ingredient for success - "there are no failures till you choose to quit".

In an entrepreneur's journey, there is no straightforward well-defined path that could be followed. You have to discover and build your own path. Naturally, in such uncertain situations, you are bound to make mistakes.

You may end up making some decisions that might lead to 0 or even negative output. And it happens so many times. The key to success is to identify what worked and what didn't and then do a course correction from there.

Built something that customers are not buying? Talk to them, get feedback and build the version of the Product that they want. Made a wrong hire? Help them find a new job and hire a replacement.

Almost always, the wrong decisions can be fixed if you are vigilant enough to spot them and agile enough to fix them.

As long as you keep moving and correcting your course, you will succeed. You fail only when you decide to quit.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

When you are starting your own business, an important thing to learn is to manage your emotions and keep calm in every situation - good or bad.

There will be days when something great will happen and you'll find yourself in the sky. The same day, in the evening, the sky will break and fall on your head. Understand that this is quite normal when you are starting your own business. Learn to be neutral in both situations.

How to keep calm in extremely negative situations?

1.) Think about the larger picture. When you are starting your business, you're doing it for the next 10 or 20 or more years. Ask yourself - "will this matter after 10 years?" If the answer is no, then no point in worrying about it.

2.) Distract yourself from the situation. Listen to a podcast. Read a book. Talk to your parents/friends. Go for a trip. Play a sport. Just avoid thinking about the situation for a day and you'd be surprised how much better you'd feel the next day.

You should not let the negative situation get into your head and cause you to be stressed out. At the end of the day, there is nothing more expensive than your mental health. Having said that, make sure to learn from the situation so that you don't end up in the same situation again.

Summary: deal with the situation with a calm mind and learn how to not repeat it.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

During the early phases of building your startup, if there is one thing that really matters, it is Product/Market Fit (PMF). I see early-stage founders spending time talking to investors, participating in events, and hackathons, applying for Forbes 30U30, and whatnot!

That's not how it works. When you haven't achieved PMF, these things don't matter. Most of the time, you don't need too much upfront capital to achieve PMF. Feedback from Hackathon judges doesn't matter. Validation from Forbes is pointless at this stage.

Talk to actual prospects and they will give you the right feedback. Their feedback is all that matters. Here is a structured process to achieve PMF (my experience is focused on B2B SaaS):

1. Fixate on a Market. When evaluating startup ideas/problem statements, avoid hopping markets otherwise all your learnings from the initial conversations will have to be dumped when you decide to pursue a different market.

2. Talk to a minimum of 10 - 15 prospects from that market and ask them for their top 2 - 3 priorities over the next few quarters. Ask them if they've finalized the Service Provider to implement these upcoming projects. This way, you'd be able to understand where the market is heading and what are the gaps.

3. Pick one of the gaps and build an MVP. Creating the MVP should not take you more than a week. If it takes you more than 2 weeks, you probably don't have a Technical co-founder. Or you need a better Technical co-founder.

4. Get feedback from the prospects on your MVP. See if they are interested in learning more and possibly exploring a pilot with you. If a few of them have shown positive interest and want to evaluate further - Congratulations! You just validated the problem statement.

5. Now heads down and iterate. Work with these early prospects to convert them into a paying customer. In cycles of ~1 week, implement the feedback you've collected; show it to the prospects and gather the feedback again. 

6. Within 2 or a maximum of 3 cycles, you should be able to get some of your prospects to sign up for a paid plan. If none of them agrees to proceed forward, then it means that the problem statement was not important for them or, you did not do a great job with your MVP.

7. Within 3 months, you should be able to get a sense of whether you should pursue the idea further or not. You will "feel" the PMF when it happens. Prospects will give you time. Some of them will call you and suggest features. A few of them might be interested in investing in your company. Some might refer you to someone else.

8. As a corollary, you should also be able to gauge that you have not achieved PMF. 3 months have passed - not many people have shown interest. Prospects who were earlier interested are no longer picking up your calls - a clear sign that you are building something unimportant to them. Time to work on something else.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship #pmf

I feel that one should take a large and concentrated bet to make a lot of money, especially when you are young (in your 20s). Diversification and having multiple streams of income help you reduce your risk. For example, if you are an employee and get laid off from your company, your passive income will help you survive the tough times.

However, remember that diversification also limits your growth potential. Lesser risk almost always comes with a lesser reward. There is nothing that has a low risk and high reward, otherwise everyone would only be doing that.

Have written an article about this concept, with an example of my own journey.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

Aman Goel on LinkedIn • 4 min read

My 7 streams of income

How to choose the right startup idea to work on? Here are my 3 parameters:

1. Unfair Advantage: In which market does your Founding team have an unfair advantage? This could be in the form of an understanding of technology, access to customers (distribution) or something else that gives you an edge over others.

2. TAM/Opportunity size: Which market is large enough so that if you succeed, the outcome is big? Startups are difficult. If you succeed, the reward better be large enough to justify the efforts. Large, of course, is a relative term.

3. Passion: What problems and markets excite you? You will be unstoppable if you are solving a problem that you deeply care about.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

All the functional heads at my earlier startup were promoted internally rather than being hired externally.

In 2018, we hired our first Software Engineer. In 2019, we hired our first Sales person, first Project Manager, and first Customer Success Manager. All of them joined as individual contributors and it was their first job which they had joined straight out of college. With time, they took on more responsibilities and proactively took ownership of Business. Eventually, they started building teams within them. As the respective team size grew, they started taking responsibility for the entire function they were handling - Engineering, Sales, Delivery and Customer Success.

In 2021, we were growing rapidly. We needed people for some of the new functions that we were planning to create - HR, Recruitment, Business Development, etc. We also needed some senior people in the Sales and Delivery Teams. We ended up hiring experienced people laterally. With the first few hires, we realized that lateral hires often come from a culture that is quite different from the culture that we were building. We figured out that this might create a lot of challenges later.

As a result, we paused the lateral hiring and started promoting people internally. The underlying thought was that it is easier to upskill an existing team member who already is aligned with our culture, rather than finding someone externally, who will be able to blend into our culture. We started nominating people internally who could be the right fit for the role and started working with them to prepare them for their new, promoted role.

It worked like a charm. People absolutely loved that the company was giving them an opportunity to grow and get promoted. They took ownership and worked hard for their new role. The company got the benefit of not having to go through the uncertainty of hiring external people coming from a different culture. The other team members became motivated when they saw their peers getting promoted and they started to work hard towards their promotion and growth. It was a win-win-win situation for all.

As a young entrepreneur, I was learning a lot of these things. Like many other entrepreneurs, I had a perception that if we need to create a new function, we should hire people externally. However, with this activity, I learned that it is better to promote the team members internally. This way, we can avoid the uncertainty of hiring someone external who might not be the right cultural fit.

Over time I learned that the best method lies somewhere in between. For some functions, promote people internally and for some other functions, it is best to hire people from outside.

This topic of team building is close to my heart and would love to get opinions from others. What according to you is the right method of team building, especially when it comes to building the leadership team?

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

Nisarg has had numerous conversations with Harshita and me discussing our Entrepreneurial journey - the mistakes we made, the things we got right, the processes, hiring principles, and many more. He has helped us create a document that summarizes our discussions and learnings. I am sharing a few of those points here:

1. Get a reliable and aligned set of mentors: Mentors from the industry can help open doors and provide general guidance on all matters. Almost half of our early clients were those with whom my Mentor helped me get connected via his network.

2. Get a professional Lawyer and CA: They can help keep your books and accounts neat and clean and protect your downside. During the acquisition of my previous startup, a Big-4 firm was appointed for due diligence. The guy told me he was quite impressed with how we had managed our books, accounts, compliances and paperwork.

3. Metrics-based management: We had clearly defined metrics for each function and obsessively tracked them daily. The entire company was aligned towards building a sustainable, profitable business rather than chasing vanity metrics.

4. Not worried about building the next glamourous tech: Our focus was to build something that solves the customer's needs. It doesn't matter if it's not the shiny thing in the market. If it solves the customer's need, we will build it.

5. Speed prioritized over perfection: This is the only way to compete with the larger players in your space. Of course, there has to be a balance. Drive too fast and you will crash. Drive too slow and your competitors will overtake you.

6. Spend a lot of time with the customers: Unlikely that you will find the problem statements on the internet. To ensure that you aren't building something irrelevant, spend time with the customers, understand their pain areas and then work backwards to build.

7. Keep a close eye on the bank balance: We built an internal portal where we tracked every single sale and purchase invoice. We never delayed a single payment for any Service Provider. We kept a close watch on sale invoices that were delayed beyond 30 days to ensure that the appropriate person timely followed up with the customer for payment. This way we avoided a pile of bad debt in the company's books.

8. First principles thinking: We were fresh out of college so we had no clue what the standard industry practice was. As a bootstrapped venture, we couldn't afford to hire experienced people. So, we were forced to think from first principles and think customer-first. That helped us build a strong foundation for our business.

#startups #business #entrepreneurship

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