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TL;DR

You can build and publish an iOS app without knowing how to code:

• Plan it with Claude: Pressure-test the idea, define the first version, and create a milestone-based build plan.

• Design it with Claude Design: Turn the requirements into screens and prepare the files for development.

• Build it with Claude Code: Give Claude Code the plan and design files, then let it create and run the app.

• Test it: Open the app on your iPhone, test each milestone, and fix problems early.

• Ship it: Build the production app, distribute it through TestFlight, and submit it to the App Store.

The basic workflow is simple: plan → design → build → test → ship.

Steps to Build and Publish an App

Note: This guide is written for Mac users publishing to Apple’s App Store. The same process works on Windows, but a few setup steps, like opening and using the command line, will be slightly different.

The distance between “I have an idea” and “it’s on my phone” feels enormous. Claude closes that gap enough for anyone to ship a working app to the App Store. This playbook walks through the process step by step, with each step designed to be practical and easy to follow.

What you’ll need

Set these up before you write a single prompt. None of them require coding. It’s just clicking through onboarding flows, and getting it out of the way first keeps you in flow later.

Step 1: Install Claude Code

Here are the steps to install Claude Code onto your computer.

1. Install Node.js: Go to https://nodejs.org/en/download and click the macOS Installer (.pkg) button. Run it like you install any other software on your Mac: double-click, click through the prompts, done. (Node is what the Claude Code install command below runs on.)

2. Open the terminal: Press Cmd+Space, type “Terminal,” and hit Enter. A plain text window opens.

3. Install Claude Code: Paste this and hit Enter:

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code 

If you get a permission error, point npm at a folder you own, then install again:

npm config set prefix ~/.npm-global 

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

If you used that second version, run these two lines once so your terminal can find the claude command:

echo 'export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.zshrc 
source ~/.zshrc

4. Type claude --version and hit Enter. A version number means you’re set. If it says “command not found,” close the terminal, open a fresh window, and try again.

Step 2: Develop your strategy (Claude chat)

Before any code, run a real analysis on your product idea, then turn it into a concrete list of what the app actually has to do. Open a fresh chat at claude.ai and treat Claude like a skeptical strategy consultant you’ve hired to poke holes in your idea.

The sequence that worked for me:

First, the pitch and the pressure test. Describe the idea in a few sentences, then ask for a full, skeptical analysis: who the customer is, who the competitors are, what the market looks like, why now, and what would most likely kill this.

Then, attack your own assumptions. After reading the first pass, push back on yourself. Ask what you might be wrong about and what the strongest version of the case against the idea looks like.

Next, pin down the requirements. Once you’ve settled on what you’re building and why, get specific about what the app actually has to do before you plan how to build it. Ask Claude to write the requirements for a first version: the core features, the screens the app needs and what each one does, the data it stores, and the rules that govern it, such as who can do what, what happens on sign-up and how the app works.

Finally, turn the requirements into a plan. With the feature list agreed on, ask Claude to turn it into a build plan that takes you from nothing to a real iOS app you can put in front of people, broken into three milestones. For each milestone, have it list the screens to build, the backend pieces, and the tests to run. Milestones are useful because they break a large app into smaller, testable stages.

Together, the requirements and the plan are your master spec. Copy the whole thing into a document you’ll keep returning to throughout the build.

Step 3: Design (Claude Design)

Now you turn your requirements into screens you can actually see.

Open Claude Design at claude.ai/design (or the palette icon in the desktop app). It’s part of your paid plan. Start a new project, separate from your Step 2 chat.

Then, one screen at a time:

1. Give it a style reference. Drop in some mobile design examples so Claude knows what good design looks like. Figma’s Community has plenty to pull inspiration from: https://www.figma.com/community/mobile-apps

2. Paste in your milestone plan from Step 1. This tells Claude which screens to make and what goes on each.

3. Ask for the designs. Describe your brand, colors, fonts, and overall mood. Ask for a few versions so you can compare.

4. Refine. Tell it what to change (spacing, headline size, fonts) until the screen looks right. This takes a few rounds. That’s normal.

5. Repeat for every screen (welcome, onboarding, main view, paywall, settings).

6. Ask for the handoff. Once the screens look right, tell Claude Design to package everything for Claude Code: “Now create a prompt I can use in Claude Code, along with the downloaded files, to build these screens.”

That handoff will usually give you a downloadable folder with everything inside:

• PROMPT.md — the prompt you’ll paste into Claude Code to build the screens.

• README.md — the full spec: layout, components, colors, fonts, and copy.

• The design files — your screens as an HTML file you can open in a browser, plus the stylesheet.

Before you leave Claude Design, download the folder and unzip it.

Step 4: Build (Claude Code)

This is where the mockups become a real app on your phone. It all happens in the terminal, where you’re talking to an AI engineer that can read, write, and run code on your machine.

Getting started:

1. Open a terminal: On a Mac, press Cmd+Space, type “Terminal,” hit Enter. A window with a blinking cursor appears.

2. Make a project folder: type mkdir myapp, then cd myapp to step inside it. Nothing visible changes, but you’re now “in” the folder. (”myapp” is just the folder name. Call it whatever you like.)

3. Take the files you unzipped in Step 3 and drop them manually into your new myapp folder that you just created, so everything sits in one place.

4. Launch Claude from inside that folder: type claude and hit Enter. It greets you right there in the terminal. Then give it this:

"Read PROMPT.md and README.md in this folder, then follow PROMPT.md to build the app."

Claude Code runs the actual commands in front of you, installs everything, builds the app, and stops.

Step 5: Get it onto your phone

You don’t really know what you’ve built until it’s in your hand. Here are the steps to test the app on your phone.

1. Install Expo Go from the App Store. It runs your code on your phone in dev mode.

2. In a new terminal window (Cmd+Space, type “Terminal,” hit Enter), run:

npx expo start --tunnel

It prints a QR code.

3. Scan the QR code with your phone’s camera. Expo Go opens with your app inside it.

That’s how you test the app as you build.

Step 6: Ship it to TestFlight and the App Store

This is the final stretch: moving your app off your computer and onto a real phone—first through TestFlight, Apple’s testing platform, and then through the App Store.

Before you begin, make sure you have the two accounts listed in the setup section:

• Apple Developer Program: $99 per year. Approval may take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days, so register early.

• Expo account: Free.

Most of the technical work happens through EAS, Expo’s cloud build service. EAS builds your iOS app on Apple hardware in the cloud. Let EAS manage the certificates for you. Signing is one of the most confusing parts of iOS development for beginners, and EAS handles most of it automatically.

Building and uploading your app. Run these commands from inside your project folder in Terminal. In Terminal you use the cd command (”change directory”). Since you made your project in the myapp folder back in Step 4, you go there with:

cd myapp

• Install EAS and log in: (this is your Expo login and password)

npm install -g eas-cli 
eas login 

• Prepare the project:

eas build:configure

This is a one-time setup that tells EAS how to build your app. It’ll probably ask you for a bundle identifier during setup. A bundle identifier is a unique ID Apple uses to tell your app apart from every other app in the world. It looks like a website address in reverse: com.yourname.yourapp. You set it once and it’s permanent, so pick it now.

• Build the app in the cloud:

eas build --platform ios

It asks you to sign in with your Apple account, handles the certificates, and hands you a finished build.

• Send the build to Apple:

eas submit --platform ios

After ten to thirty minutes of Apple processing, the build appears in App Store Connect under TestFlight.

Testing on TestFlight. TestFlight is Apple’s tool for trying your app on real phones before it goes public. The quickest way is to add yourself and a few people as testers by email. You all get the app right away, no waiting. To share more widely, TestFlight lets you invite up to ten thousand people through a public link. Then actually use the app, and get a few others to use it too. This is where you catch the things that only show up on a real phone in real use: the sign-up that fails, the screen that loads blank, the button that goes nowhere.

Submitting to the App Store. TestFlight only tests, it doesn’t publish. To actually go live, you fill out your store listing in App Store Connect and submit it for review. Here’s the whole path:

1. Go to appstoreconnect.apple.com and sign in. Click Apps, then the blue plus button, then New App.

2. Fill in the basics: platform (iOS), your app’s name (it must be unique across the entire App Store), primary language, the bundle identifier you set earlier, and an SKU (any short code you make up for your own records, like app001).

3. Add your screenshots. Apple requires them at set sizes, the 6.9-inch iPhone size is mandatory, plus iPad sizes if your app supports iPad. These are your storefront, so make them count.

4. Write the listing text: a description, keywords, your category, and a support URL (a webpage people can reach you at, even a basic one).

5. Fill in privacy details. You must provide a privacy policy URL and answer a questionnaire about what data your app collects and why.

6. Set the age rating by answering a short content questionnaire.

7. Attach your build. The one you uploaded with eas submit will be waiting under the build section once TestFlight finishes processing it. Select it.

8. Click Submit for Review.

Then you wait. Apple’s review usually takes one to three days. Once approved, your app will be published on the App Store.

Don’t panic if you’re rejected. Most first submissions bounce once over something small: a missing permission sentence, a support link that doesn’t load, or placeholder text left in by accident. Apple tells you the exact reason. Fix what is needed and resubmit. You don’t have to start over.

The gap between an idea and a real app on your phone is smaller than it looks. It mostly comes down to doing things in the right order: pick the idea, argue it out, design it, build it screen by screen, and get it in your hand early and often.

A dinner is a forcing function. You can't swipe away from a table. You can't ghost someone passing the bread. Two hours, five people. Whatever happens, happens in person. Available in Bay Area, LA, Chicago, and NYC.

Backend matching that does the work for you. Onboarding is answering a short personality questionnaire, sharing your interests, and connecting your social accounts so we learn more about you. You never write a bio.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞. Two dinners per month for a small subscription, plus the cost of your meal. Each Monday our matching engine runs city by city and notifications go out, so you always know whether you're seated for the next dinner or waiting in the pool for a future seat.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨. Once your dinner is finalized, tap I'll be there on the notification. Show up. After dinner, group chat unlocks within the app. Keep the conversation going if it was a good night, or let it be a good night that doesn't repeat. Your call.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐝𝐦𝐢𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐥. Where the operation actually runs. We match strangers, set up dinners, and keep a running waitlist of people who are interested but couldn't be seated this round. From here we see every attendee and every RSVP.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐏𝐌𝐅. Post-dinner chat, deeper matching with LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook signals, a map view of the restaurant, post-dinner ratings and feedback, user verification, email notifications, and more cities.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤. Expo + Supabase, built solo with Claude Code and Claude Design.

Product management is a career built on decisions—when to launch, when to cut scope, where to invest, and what to shut down. The job gets hardest when the stakes are high and the path is murky (which is most of the time). Great PMs aren’t just great builders; they’re great deciders who can move teams forward without perfect information.

Below is a decision-making playbook you can reuse for anything from “Should we tweak copy?” to “Should we spin up an entirely new product line?”

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1. Calibrate Effort to Importance

The goal isn’t 100 % certainty—it’s momentum with acceptable risk.

2. Map the Option Space: Frame → Expand → Distill

The toughest part of any decision is defining the right set of options. Skip this and you either miss the winning idea or drown in analysis. Use this three-step loop:

1. Frame – Draft a rough problem statement and two or three straw-man options yourself.

2. Expand – Pull in thought partners, criteria, and every messy fact until no new surprises surface.

3. Distill – Collapse everything back to three or four viable choices, each scored in a “traffic-light” table.

2.1 Frame

• Write the first skeletal doc yourself (goals, constraints, 2–3 options).

• Circulate to a small core of thought partners for fast feedback.

• Avoid the empty template trap—show up with a rough draft, not by asking everyone else to fill in the blanks.

2.2 Expand

Unearth everything that could bite you later:

• Start with criteria. Articulate the outcomes that matter before naming solutions.

• Qualitative inputs. User research, customer interviews, competitive scans.

• Quantitative inputs. Experiments, logs, benchmarks.

• Risk canvas. What could sink us, and how would we mitigate?

• Close gaps. Design experiments or prototypes to answer open questions.

You’re done expanding when feedback shifts from “Have you considered…?” to “Given this data, I lean X.”

2.3 Distill

With the full mess in view, prune ruthlessly:

• Re-frame with your instincts. How would you explain the choice to a new hire?

• Sequence decisions. Handle the key question first, break any complex spin-offs into smaller parts, and postpone anything that isn’t urgent.

• Spot one-way doors. Prioritize what can’t be undone.

• Skip throwaway options. If an option is obviously bad, park it in the appendix.

Example traffic-light snapshot

Recommendation: Option B—max reach, low complexity, easier to build, quick to market

3. Drive to a Decision

1. Right-size the room. Only people who can change the outcome attend; everyone else gets the summary. Use frameworks like DACI to assign roles up front:

   Driver – pushes the decision forward

   Approver – makes the final call

   Contributors – give essential input

   Informed – stay in the loop afterward

2. Single decider/approver. Name the approver in bold at the top of the doc.

3. Durable outcome. Capture inputs, rationale, and revisit triggers so the call doesn’t unravel three weeks later.

4. Operationalize

1. Broadcast the verdict. Share what was decided, why, and next steps.

2. Assign Owners & ETAs. Every follow-up gets an owner and a date.

3. Link back. Reference the decision doc in future specs to keep context fresh.

5. Decision Hygiene Boosters

1. Over-communicate critical dates. Everyone should know the hard stop and the last responsible moment for changes.

2. Plan the change, not just the choice. Ask “What breaks Monday morning?” before pressing Go.

3. Track opportunity cost. If you wouldn’t start a project again today, consider killing it.

4. Shrink the circle. Use DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) to avoid decision-by-committee.

5. Ditch silver-bullet fantasies. Trade-offs are the norm; frameworks make them explicit.

6. Pre-mortems & contingencies. Stress-test your option before reality does.

Final Thought

Decisions are bets. Your leverage as a PM comes from placing enough of them to create real momentum—and from learning fast when the odds change. Use this playbook to keep the option space clear, the process tight, and the team moving even when the data’s fuzzy and the clock is ticking.

(Originally published on LinkedIn, March 16, 2022.)

You’ve no doubt experienced the impacts of the Great Resignation. Several colleagues have likely left your organization in recent months, maybe you are thinking of leaving as well. The pandemic has given people the headspace to think more deeply about their lives. Where are we going with our careers? What skills do we need? What are we good at? There are many questions to answer.

A few decades back, it was commonplace to have the same job throughout one's life. Not only was this a societal norm, there was much less knowledge available about other careers. Knowledge in the past was guarded by those who had access to it; now anyone with an internet connection has access to more knowledge and information than many experts of the previous generations. If you’re interested in having multiple careers, now’s a great time! That said, changing careers is much easier for those with the resources and means to do so. But read on, for ideas that might help anyone looking to think about alternate career paths.

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Are you a rockstar or a superstar?

Let’s begin by exploring career trajectories in the modern knowledge economy. They often take two forms. Figure 1 is an example of someone finding their calling early and moving up the ladder with each new role in a given field. You can also call these type of people the “rockstars,” a term Kim Scott in Radical Candor uses – rockstars are experts in their field, or specialists. I must say I am envious of those who have found their calling and have built on their strengths in one domain. For many, you might fall into Figure 2, which has a lot of loops and setbacks, but ultimately can lead you to where you want to be. These types of people are the “superstars” per Kim Scott – they have different passions and like trying out different jobs and careers. The world needs both rockstars and superstars, so it is a matter of finding out what interests you most. Also, you might not want to climb the career ladder; and that's fine too!

Figure 1: Rockstar Career Figure 2: Superstar Career

How to make choices for the long term

The clichéd term of “your career is a journey, not a destination” is true. We need to think of our careers long term. There are so many skills I have acquired that I didn’t know I was good at and others I thought I would like but did not in practice. Annie Duke talks about the 10-10-10 framework when making a big decision. We can use the same framework when making a career decision. How will you feel with the decision 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now and 10 years from now? When making hard decisions or moves, it might be painful and difficult for you in the short term but if you think it will take you where you want to go 10 years from now, then probably you have made the right choice.

That said, your vision of a certain career might be completely different from the reality as you might have painted a wrong image in your head. To counter this, I recommend talking to as many people as you can about a certain path to learn if that career is right for you. Try to understand from them about how the organization is in reality and not the buzzy branding that you will usually find on the internet. Glassdoor is a great platform to find out more about the organization. One might argue that only those who dislike the organization or love it a lot will usually review the organization on Glassdoor. The actual truth of what the company is like is probably something in between. Use it as one lens of many to look at the organization. At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself, while keeping in mind that no job or career is perfect: Will you enjoy doing what others in the company are doing day in and day out?

As you try to reach your goals, enjoy the journey. It will probably shift and change and maybe you will find something completely different than what you set out to do. Be open to change and have a growth mindset.

Finding flow

So how does one find a perfect career? Daniel Pink, speaker of a famous TED talk on career and author of many books, talks about how we work best when we have autonomy and mastery. In his recent LinkedIn course on motivation, he puts our careers in four quadrants as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Pink says that we perform our best when we have control of our jobs and find it challenging at the same time. We are in the top right quadrant and are in FLOW. If our jobs are challenging but we don’t have a lot of control we might hover into BURNOUT. If we have control but the job is not challenging, you might hover into DRIFT. The worst is where you neither have control nor challenge, which leads to MONOTONY. It’s hard to be in flow mode all the time and there will be aspects of your work that will hover around all the quadrants but one should try to work with your manager to carve a position where you have the most flow.

We can expand further into the topic of FLOW through psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work, which focuses on how we can use challenge and skill to achieve flow. If you have a challenging project in which you are highly skilled, you will be in a state of flow. When we are over ambitious, the work might be challenging but we might not be as skilled in an area, which leads to ANXIETY. Explore Figure 4 below to see where you stand with your current projects and work.

Figure 4

Finding work you want to do

Then comes the question of what work do you want to do? Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in their book Designing Your Work Life explain how everyone works for Money, Impact and Expression at different levels. Your focus on each of these three levers will vary by who you are and the point in time in your life. One has to figure out what combination works best for them.

Let’s look at a few examples in Figure 5 of how the three levers are calibrated for different job profiles of an investment banker, a non-profit employee, and an artist. If a non-profit employee is dissatisfied because they are not getting paid like a newly minted investment banker, then their lever and perhaps career is not calibrated properly: one works at a non-profit mostly for its impact and not for the money. Similarly, as an artist your sense of expression is probably very high; money and impact not so much. If you have the levers calibrated properly and are conscious about it, you can substantially reduce your source of unhappiness at work.

Figure 5

Multiple ways to measure impact

Money and expression are easy to measure but what about impact? In my opinion every job has some sort of impact but how can it be measured? I suggest looking at it from three angles.

1. Is the job internally or externally focused? Within a large organization some departments are internally focused, like IT, HR, and Accounting. Some are a combination of internal and external like marketing and communications, and some are externally focused like the Corporate Innovation Arm or Business Development. Figure out what kind of roles you prosper in. You can create an additional lever for how internally and externally focused the job is like shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6

2. Is the unit where you’ll be working the cost or revenue making center? For example, when you are an accounting specialist working for one of the top auditing firms like KPMG or PWC you are generating revenue for the company; however, if you switch to a corporation like Microsoft whose bread and butter is not accounting, you fall out of the cost making center. Figure out from the level below where you stand in the spectrum.

Figure 7

3. Burnett and Evans talk about how your point of impact can be far (global) or near (personal), and the type of impact of your work can be focused on what is new or what needs to be renewed (repaired).

Let’s look at a few examples as shown in Figure 8 below:

Figure 8

• As a startup founder of an innovative healthcare company that helps with curing cancer, you fall in the quadrant of creating something new, and your point of impact is global as the startup may impact thousands of lives if successful.

• As a Product Manager working on a new feature in WhatsApp, you can affect billions of lives with a single tweak of a feature. You fall in the category of New/Far.

• As a professor at a university if you are creating a new digital marketing course, you are impacting probably 50 students at a time, so you fall in the category of New/Near.

• As a general physician you are not creating anything new and working with one patient at a time, so you might fall in the category of Renew/Near.

• A program manager at the Work Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC who is working on an education project in Bangladesh. You are managing the program from afar but there are lots of resources working with you on the ground in Bangladesh to implement the project. Your role is at a high level making sure the millions of dollars being disbursed are being used properly, which falls into renew. Here, you fall in the category of Renew/Far.

Every role can be mapped in these 4 quadrants and your job can traverse many of these quadrants at a time. Try to figure out what kind of impact works for you.

When you choose a career path, remember you are saying no to many other things. In addition, what might work today, might not work for you in the future. Be judicious and conscious about your career path taking into consideration your finances and personal circumstances. I would recommend trying out many things when you are younger to see what works best for you. Small conscious changes will ultimately lead to your goal.

In Summary:

1. Figure out if you work best as a rockstar (specialist) or a superstar (generalist).

2. Use tools like the 10-10-10 framework and Glassdoor and talk to people in the field to think long term and find roles that fit.

3. Aim for a job that has challenge and control, i.e. that puts you in flow state.

4. Calibrate your money, impact, and expression levers with the type of field you choose.

5. Determine how you want to measure your impact through the angles of internal/external focus, revenue generation, and point and type of impact (global/near and new/renew).

The beauty of career mapping in the modern age is that there is no one right answer. None of the quadrants or levels are necessarily good or bad. Figure out what works best for you – it’s your career and no one else’s.

In closing, let’s remind ourselves that career is only one dimension of our multi-dimensional lives. Health, family, friends, hobbies…there are so many things to live a fulfilled life. It’s your individual journey and best to not be bothered by what others are doing and to compare yourself. We need to define what success means to each of us personally. Happy career mapping!

(Originally published on LinkedIn, March 12, 2020.)

We have all heard of India’s rapid development in the past few decades. Its GDP per capita, PPP (in current international $) has grown from $1,237 in 1990 to $7,763 in 2018. I left India in 2002, and every year during trips back home to Delhi and Kolkata I would witness the transformation. While the development in my new home, the United States, was more or less static, the changes in India were constant and “in your face” – new malls, new consumer brands, massive increases in car and mobile phone ownership, to name a few. There was a sense of almost endless growth.

As India has developed, the opportunities for tech start-ups have grown significantly. As of last year, the number of tech start-ups in India clocked in around 9,000. According to Goldman Sachs, India is home to 560 million internet subscribers, 354 million smartphone subscribers, and the cheapest mobile data rates in the world (1 GB for $ 0.26). By 2025, 60 percent of Indians are projected to have internet subscriptions and smartphones.

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How will technology advancement impact India in the coming decades?

To capture the full potential of technology, India’s national and sub-national governments will need to bridge the urban-rural digital divide by addressing barriers such as limited telecom infrastructure, language, slow internet speed, and low computer literacy. Nevertheless, the impact of technology will be undeniable.

While most of India will be connected in the coming decades, India is diverse beyond our imaginations. Start-ups should be careful of one size fits all approaches, as Indians fall in very different income segments than the West.

How do India’s income segments compare with other major players?

Hans Rosling’s work divides the world into four income levels based on household per capita income:

The image below gives an idea of how people in the different parts use transportation, cook, eat and sleep. People in Level 1 live in extreme poverty whereas people on Level 4 are the richest. Most of you reading this article are probably in Level 4.

To give us some perspective, let’s compare India’s population and earnings in 2019 with China, which has a developing story like India, and the United States, the most developed part of the world.

Most of India is still on Level 2 (earning between $730/year to $2,920/year), whereas the majority of China is on Level 3 (earning between $2,920/year to $11,680/year) and the majority of United States is rich on Level 4 (earning $11,680/year and above). Above $11,680/year might not be considered rich to many reading this article, but it gives you perspective on where you stand with respect to the rest of the world.

The population on Level 2, where most Indians fall, are the rural laborers, the rural landowners, the urban blue collar and migrant worker segments. Whereas, the Indians on Level 4 are the rich class of around 2.6 million households, a tiny percentage of didddIndia’s total population. These folks have white collar jobs, are small and medium size business owners or are corporate big shots. Most Indians in Level 4 are concentrated in the $11,680 to $30,000 annual income range.

How do India’s income segments impact tech start-ups?

Most tech start-ups in India have targeted their customer base to the Level 4 consumers and the richer Level 3 consumers (earning above $5,500/year). These two groups represent a population of close to 45 million. This demographic is probably the one watching Netflix, using ride hailing services, shopping online, or ordering food through delivery apps. While these customers are more likely to have disposable income, they represent just a small slice of India. Once this market is capped, start-up founders in India are likely to find it difficult to expand into the “bottom of the pyramid” markets, which by their sheer volume merit greater consideration.

Where should start-ups and VCs focus in the coming years?

As the graph above indicates, it will take another 20 years for most Indians to move towards Level 3. For comparison, most Chinese will remain on Level 3, with a significant portion moving to Level 4. In the United States, nearly 100% of the population will be on Level 4.

Given that start-ups do not have 20 years to wait, or they risk going under, VCs and tech start-ups should deepen their focus today on Level 2 consumer and the lower end of Level 3 consumers in addition to their focus on India’s richer segments. However, Level 2 and 3 consumers’ dreams, aspirations and incomes are very different from the consumers on Level 4. Only a few start-ups in the last decade have been able to reach a wide segment of society —Whatsapp, Google and Youtube are examples.

Start-up founders should focus on the right businesses and consumer segments and not create copycat models from the United States or other Western countries, which are too rich to serve as effective models. Indian start-up founders will need to be creative about how to expand their customer-base. One source of inspiration may be to look at how Chinese start-ups address Level 2 and 3 consumers currently and how this could be adapted to the Indian context.

The growth potential in India in the coming decades is huge. While India is a unique diverse market, with its inherent challenges, if tapped properly, the upside is tremendous.

(Originally published on LinkedIn, July 7, 2020.)

The question has plagued many, especially the millennial generation. When we think of startups, we may conjure up images of successful tech startups like Facebook or Apple that propelled their way to mega company status. In reality, the road to a successful exit is often bumpy and not for the faint of heart.

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To know whether a large corporation or a start up is the better fit for you, I like to use the analogy of steering a big ship as opposed to a small canoe. Big ships are more complex and require more expertise to steer but when the waters are choppy, they can weather the storm. Small boats on the other hand are easier to maneuver but during a storm they are more likely to go down under.

Large corporations are like big ships. Change is harder, takes time and requires many approvals and people to steer the ship. Startups on the other hand are like small canoes. Making change within the startup is easier, takes less time and less people to execute. Big ships can travel long distances without need for supplies; startups have a limited runway to execute and need constant cash injection at every point.

Then comes the question of which water do you want to ride on. Some waters are choppy to begin with and the risks of going under are higher. The choppy waters are analogous to the support and ecosystem for building a company in a particular context or country. Large corporations (big ships) can most of the time weather the choppy waters as they are not dependent on external funding. Not so much for startups.

To illustrate this point, the graph below shows the number of startups which have received funding at different levels since 2001. (Note: the data does not cover micro-businesses, information for which is not publicly available, which make up a large percentage of businesses, especially in emerging markets; however, the data represented here is for scalable businesses.) The USA is by far the most entrepreneurial friendly country. The chances of getting funded and having a successful exit is way higher in America than other countries. The water there is relatively calm. That’s not to say that you should not open up startups in other countries, just know that the water is choppy, as the risks are higher there.

Adding to the analogy further, the Angel Investors, VC funds, private equity, large corporations and governments are like the kings and emperors of the olden times that funded explorers like Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus to set sail on the sea; whereas the explorers are the startup founders in today’s time. They are high risk takers. They will challenge the status quo to invent new business models and start entire new industries.

Explorers relish the challenge of creating something new, while their counterparts, prefer the safety of big corporations. To be clear, change also happens in big corporations, but it takes a long time for it to be put to practice.

So what kind of organization do you want to work in? Do you get seasick in choppy waters? Do you prefer the safety of big ships? Or are you ready to explore what awaits you in your nimble canoe?

It all depends on what kind of mentality and risk taker you are. Happy sailing!

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