KiwisMedia 2020 Year in review | #DailyBlink97
2020 has been quite a ride for us.
⚠️ the bad part: we were working remotely before remote ready. Asynchronous communication can badly hurt an early-stage startup.
📈 the good part: We are willing to learn from our mistakes and overcoming the hurdles, building a resilience mindset.
🏢 Role of college in building a startup
Because we had no other options. Building a startup full-time right after your college that too when you come from tier-3 colleges is way tough than I thought. Yes, in short, your college matters. The people you live around matters.
The kind of exposure, network, support you get is super important if you are planning to take an unconventional path right after college.
The kind of people you will meet, hangout with on a daily basis will somehow decide your future directly or indirectly.
📉 Impact of Covid on KM
- Remote working before remote ready
- Asynchronous Communication; Delayed production cycle
- Revenue Loss; impacted b2b collaborations
🧩 Team Building
Building a team of “A-team players” is difficult when you don’t have the financial resources to attract talents, worse when you got no institutional tags on your identity that will back your idea.
🎬 Here’s what KiwisMedia is all about
We are a very small team working on KiwisMedia. KiwisMedia is a portfolio-based platform for dreamers and doers, a social platform that helps you discover interesting people through their works, experience, achievement.
Individuals use KiwisMedia to create a log of all their works in a single place in order to validate their personal brand superfast.
Our mission is to empower our users to be more productive through inspired learning and helping them take part in becoming the next-gen creators, makers, and builders.
💰 Users are our real investors
Currently, we are testing our beta features with our limited number of users, so that we can improve and ship it to a larger audience.
We know almost all of the users because we want to build for the 100 users that will love our product than building for 10,000 users who will just like it.
This is when all your users become your investors.
⏳ KiwisMedia in 2020
This year we have started collaborating with colleges, sponsoring some of the global events. Built micro — products around KM with a goal: to help our user to be productive while they are doing their best works and showing it to the world. Because it helps them land opportunities they haven’t even imagined off.
A lot to come up this decade. The next 5 years will play a vital role in our growth and positioning ourselves in the market.
Credit goes to the very talented and ambitious team. They are no less than superhuman for me.
I personally owe them a lot, what tops the list is the kind of sacrifices they are making on a daily basis to build KM.
No amount of effort will be enough to payback for what the team is doing at KM, because at the end of the day it’s for themselves. They know it very well.
🧵 TLDR; Exactly what have we built in 2020?
- Introduced KiwisMedia Premium
- Launched KiwisMedia Byte — Bite-sized brain dose for fast learners
- Launched Kajookatli — Discover Smartphone Applications & Tools Made in India
- Launched Podstack — A curated list of the most productive podcasts all across the globe
- Global Events Sponsorship
- College Tie-Ups
🚀 What can you expect from KiwisMedia in 2021?
- More cool products in the pipeline
- ValueRead App for college students
- Scaling KM to a bigger audience
- KiwisMedia Skill Matrix, Analytics, Dashboard
- Organize Challenges — Design, Marketing, Tech
- Talk Events with our users [Podstack Originals] — on documenting their passion, productivity hacks, skill matrix.
- Scale Project KishMish
- KiwisMedia School on the cards
- Introduce Companies and Startups
🔥 Startups vs Businesses
Startups are way different from businesses. Startups are meant to create something new and to improve what already exists in the market.
Way tougher than we actually get to read. In simple words, you are trying to build a new universe among all other Inhabitat universes around. You have to keep iterating uncountable times with no assurance if it will be ever noticed.
I’m sure, no rational person will ever think of doing this.
🌪 Risk and courage
A lot of ideas die dreaming before even reaching to the market.
Reason? no particular.
But most of the time, it’s because of the risk and courage to go against the conventional norms. Maybe we need more success stories from unconventional backgrounds. Eventually, these all give us too many reasons why we started and to not give it up all too easily.
That’s what we all have got. Doing what’s in our control.
📈 1% more everyday
In the end, what I keep sharing with the team: we are no magicians, we have to work super hard.
Everyday.
To do 1% more than what we did yesterday.
Interested to work with us? Here’s how we onboard new superhumans into the team:
