Mesh

Reached out within my network to onboard our first set of trial customers. One is a 200+ member digital marketing agency that relies a whole lot on WhatsApp, another is India's most critical tech industry body, and yet another is a development services company and another an alumni association. We're hoping to prove that the app works way better than having to use Whatsapp for Work and that its mobile-first UX makes it a Lite Slack for Emerging Markets :)

Finally went live with the basic must-have MVP. Fully functional large group chats with Channels within groups, Relevant for filtering messages relevant to you, City wise message filtering, basic analytics & insights, silent notifications, no unread counts and several other made for sanity features useful for a large community on IM.

When we started out we thought we wanted to build a B2C product mashing up WhatsApp & LinkedIn. Unfortunately there was not much excitement about the concept when we went thought YC Start Up School and we thought we needed to change direction. So we moved focus to have Mesh as a platform to help manage communities over IM.

This led us to building a web interface which so far we hadn't and then covid lockdowns happened and we realised that as a remote team we were ending up using a ton of tools to get work done. We used WhatsApp for communication, Asana for product planing, and Google docs for product notes. Paid versions of these put together would easily cost us $25/user per month.

I also came across Notion during this time (yes I know - only just found out it existed) and was really impressed by their story of how they built an awesome collaboration tool that will surely be amongst the many other tools to beat Google Docs and Microsoft Word etc. That they moved to a 2 bn valuation in just two years was phenomenal. That triggered a "if they could do it so can we" thing.

That's when we decided to make, what we hope, is our final pivot - towards Remote Work. With a focus to build a tool that deeply integrates communication and collaboration on a single platform.

There is one difference though, we are not sure about Venture Capital, somehow inspite of selling two co's I have not been successful in raising. I also came across a story on IndieHackers of how a Personal Notes / Notes to Self web application had 4000 paying users at $5 per month. That is crazy good money to run and build whatever you want. We don't know if we can do that too, or whether or not we'll raise VC - for now we're keeping our heads down to get our first paying user.

I had moved to the UK in 2019, so by the time we started work on Mesh we were already operating as a full-time, bootstrapped, "globally distributed", remote team :)

In March 2019 I was endorsed by the UK's TechNation as an Exceptional Talent in Digital Technology and secured the Global Talent Visa.

Post this we registered our co in London.

We saw a ton of opportunities for bringing professional communities together so thought of building a WhatsApp + LinkedIn mash up.

LinkedIn groups didn't work right and WhatsApp wasn't great for professional communities.

Launched a light MVP while attending YC Start Up School Winter 2020 cohort and got 100 odd early test users.

My co-founder & I go back 13+ years of which we've worked together for 9. We built our first co - one of India's first full service mobile advertising agencies - way back in 2009 and were acquired in 2012. Post our acquisition lock-in I went to start another co and as did he. My second co, in the hyperlocal offline to online space, was acquired in 2017, while Alok' second co was in the adtech & big data space; subsequently in 2019 we decided to come together to build out Mesh.

With a full time team of 4 we started developing Mesh in January 2020.