jobs
The Backstory
In mid-2021 just after the Covid pandemic, and I was looking to work at:
- A startup with real impact, early-stage, with pre-seed funding secured and visionary founders
- A startup with real impact, early-stage, with pre-seed funding
- A startup with real impact in early-stage
- A startup with real impact
- A startup
Exactly in that order.
Working in a startup was what I wanted, anything above that was a big red cherry.
So I searched all the Naukris and Indeeds that India had to offer and quickly understood that these were the places where dreams go to die. LinkedIn wasn't of much help either. That's when I found AngelList, now renamed Wellfound. It's a directory that lets you look for startups and startup jobs around the world—think of LinkedIn for the startup world.
After speaking with several that I found interesting, I was interviewed by Fernando and Enric, founders of Vermut. They needed someone to take on the product from an external agency and bring its development in-house.
It was a match made in heaven - A startup, with impact, in the early stage, had just raised funding plus the vision was there. And most importantly we three clicked.
Initial Beginnings
After all the formalities I joined. Remotely, of course, I working from Pune and the rest of the team from Barcelona.
At that point, my job was basically this:
- Take over the MVP-style web app as a solo developer
- Rapidly iterate to achieve product-market fit
- Build an engineering team
The way it was set up was that an agency in Latam was supporting product development. The idea was to bring it in-house to move the development faster and cheaper. When I reached out to them for KT, I discovered that none of them spoke English. So KT was out of the question and in the end I had to comb through the entire codebase line by line. This was pre-chatgpt era and copy-pasting to quickly get up to speed wasn't an option. However, I have to mention that they'd commented the code well, so that helped.
Once I grasped the situation, I teamed up with our lead designer and we implemented several improvements. Within a couple of months, it became apparent that I couldn’t accelerate the pace alone, so I started building a team.
I brought on two additional developers, and together we began working on the development of our current app. We built the necessary backend, developed the app itself, and continued to support the existing production web app. After four weeks of development and another of testing, we were ready to launch the app on the app stores.
But the app store overlords took their time and after one more month, at the end of November 2021 the app was finally live. At that point, we had couple thousand users on web in Barcelona. Today we serve more than 100k users across entire Spain. And bear in mind that these are not the people born with a smartphone in hand. They come from the age of landlines and phone operators.
Our Moat
We have and still start from a point that we might not know our users. Every day we are building tech for people who are 30-40 years older than we are. So we try not to foster any preconceived notions about what they want or need. This has allowed us to build our products counterintuitively, like making our login funnel longer, not shorter. The way we reach such decisions is by constantly talking to users (every week for almost 200 weeks) and measuring a lot of stuff. The very second thing I did once I took over the project was to create a tracking plan and set up our data stack (Segment + Mixpanel at that time).
Moving Forward
I am inspired by the problem we are solving at Vermut. Its long overdue that people see the impact that social isolation has on mental and physical well being, especially in seniors. Loneliness is worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It raises the risk of dementia by 40%. Finally the world is now understanding that social prescription is a viable treatment plan for healthy aging and we’re on a mission to make social connection a standard part of healthcare.
Although India's unemployment has fallen since the peak during Covid, it is still higher than that of the United States and probably also that of neighbouring China (although I couldn't find metrics on that).
Assuming the numbers I am looking at are correct, it means in India you are fighting harder for the same jobs vs your counterparts in these countries. That is also what I have seen from the significantly higher number of applications I receive when looking to hire someone in India vs here in Spain.
From the hundreds of CVs I read, I saw that candidates in India are making their task of finding a job significantly difficult because of how their CV is done. Looking at that made me sad because some of them do have potential but their chances of getting a shot at an interview are low.
So here are some of my pointers on how you should build your CV. You'll notice that some of them have already been said before but I continue to see candidates make the same mistakes over and over. So I am going to say it again anyway.
Starting from the basics. When uploading your CVs, always use pdf. It not only helps you to maintain the formatting but it's also the most widely used format.
For each experience you mention in the CV always mention a couple of points on what you worked on there. And don't use generic lines like "Completed all tasks in a timely manner". That gives recruiters zero insight on whether they should schedule an interview.
Your marital status is not important for evaluating your professional skills. Plus you probably don't want to work at companies where that's an important hiring factor.
Mentioning personal details like the name of your parents or your spouse or your passport number (have seen that a couple of times) is not important and does not help.
If you have some gap in your work history, don't worry. Employers want clarity on the reason more than the gap being there in the first place. Most employers will be okay with it if they see efforts during that time. If you can, try to mention those in the CV itself.
Your aim needs to be to transfer your eligibility to the person reading your resume as fast as possible. So it's better if you skip unnecessary things like your hobbies unless those are relevant to the job profile you are applying for. For example, a social media manager applicant could be running an Instagram page on the side as a hobby.
Don't go for quantity when applying for jobs. Optimise for quality. More so if you are applying for SMEs or startups where more often than not your resume will be read by an actual person rather than a software. In that case, every personal touch you add to your CV will increase your chances of getting a reply that much more.
Something that has been said enough but surprises me on how many applicants still do it is... spelling mistakes and formatting errors. There is no excuse why you cannot get your resume checked. Heck you can just upload your resume to ChatGPT and ask it to fix errors.
Marks, grades, GPA. Only mention those on your resume if they are good. A simple rule of thumb would be above 80% until the 12th standard and above 70% during graduation.
Lastly, don't include your profile photo in the resume. I have to be honest here that I don't have any real basis for this recommendation. But in most cases, it'll work against you if recruiters judge you too quickly on things which are not relevant due to their prejudices about how you look. And in cases where it does work in your favour, it'll be for all the wrong reasons and you most likely don't want to work at a place where they hire you based on your looks.
Having said all this it's true that finding a job in India is a difficult endeavor and there will be times you feel like accepting whatever job you get. But be cognizant of the fact that the job you currently accept will be a stepping stone for another one down the road. So make sure you are stepping on the right stone.
