#1 - Neil Gandhi

Neil Gandhi - Highlights

He’s started dozens of companies, and his framework for building those companies + the heuristics he’s created, place him in a league above almost any LinkedIn guru you’ll find out there.

I’ll open by saying that Neil is a shockingly cool guy. **Inserts cool guy meme

Shockingly? “Jordan, why are you shocked?”

Here’s why: because the more founders you meet, the more you realize that a lot of people are either

1) Really really sociable

OR

2) Really really technical and sharp

Most founders are one or the other. And it’s incredibly rare that you find people that exhibit both. Neil’s a unicorn in that way. Both incredibly sharp, intellectual, and a guy I’d love to have beers with.

Neil’s currently building a company called Send.co

The company is Neil’s best hit yet from a revenue standpoint, and is the culmination of trips to San Francisco to meet with users of his previous company, Paage.io.

This company seems to be crushing by every metric out there.

So here are my 5 takeaways from my conversation with Neil on how Send.co came to be, the mindset and learnings from previous company failures, and how immigrant parents are a godsend if you wanna be a founder.

1️⃣ Build something that has a high frequency of usage

Neil’s first company was an app called Call Me. Think like Zoom before Zoom. The premise of the app was a video based chat app for consumers. He tried to sell it to consumers (friends video chatting), but realized that college kids don’t do video chat. Maybe once every few months, but it wasn’t a common thing. People wouldn’t use it a lot.

He later met a VC who told him about a team in Santa Clara building video chat for enterprises. Neil kinda shrugged it off as “selling to enterprise? pshhh that’ll never work” That wee little app was called Zoom.

A near miss indeed, but the lesson there? Build something people will use every day, preferably every hour.

2️⃣ Simplicity

Send’s tagline is “track any document”.

Seems simple enough right?

Correct! That’s the point. And one that a lot of founders have to unlearn - if you can’t describe your product in three words, your customers won’t take the time to understand it.

Neil’s entire framework for building companies is fckn awesome. I asked him what his superpower was, and he answered “I can look at a screen and tell you exactly what the conversion rate is going to be. I’ll see a startup that just raised money and think, yeah, that’s not gonna work. I just know customers won’t go through all those hoops.”

Which I think is Neil’s way of saying to not be a midwit aka just build something people want.

3️⃣ No competition = Don’t even try bro

This one is simple but really hard to wrap your brain around. If there’s no competition in a market, it’s probably a sh*t market.

People will read the Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson and believe that their goal should be to invent an entirely new market.
Like what Henry Ford did with the car

Or Steve Jobs did with the Iphone

Or Brian Chesky with AirBnB

But there’s zero doubt in my mind that these people are the exception that proves the rule. Plus there’s HUGE survivorship bias here. You don’t see the 10,000 other Brian Chesky’s that gave up on their industry-creation dream to fall back into a corporate job.

If your competitors aren’t winning, don’t start a business in that market.

If your competitors are winning, then make something that’s 10% different than theirs, and eat up some of the market share.

You don’t even have to be better. You just have to also exist lol

4️⃣ Immigrant Parents

We talked a lot about risk. The concept of risk that you and I have is completely different than the concept of risk that someone has who just moved from South India or a shtetl in Eastern Europe.

Risk of ruin to me, you, and Neil looks like going back to live with our parents. Demoralizing? Maybe. The end of the world? Surely not.

However, think about what risk looks like if you’re Neil’s parents. Risk of ruin for them looks like having to go back to India after immigrating to the USA. And by any stretch of imagination, is pretty much impossible.

As an immigrant, you literally don’t have a choice BUT to succeed. Because there’s no other option. And being the son or daughter of immigrants helps you to realize that you were given an opportunity that your parents didn’t have. You can build whatever the hell you want without risking your entire livelihood.

I think having the contrast between these different concepts of risk is really powerful, and one that Neil recognizes on a daily.

5️⃣ Network Effects

Neil launched a company called paage.io, which is actually how he and I got connected. I was an account executive and he was building digital salesrooms for people like me.

When Neil launched paage.io he realized that he realized that sales reps were sending these personalized pages to prospects, and the moment the buyer opened it, they were exposed to the company.

This is what I mean by network effects - basically the idea that other people will hear about the product just simply by using it.

And Send.co is the same sh*t. And it has a beautiful combo of being

1) simple - the tagline is “track any document”

2) A product that sells itself - “sent by send” is at the bottom of every doc so people hear about the product automatically

3) In a competitive space - they’re competing with docsend. Which means there’s obviously winners in the space.

And according to my calculations, that’s a recipe for creating one kickass company.

Neil is also a god when it comes to LinkedIn and personal branding. So check him out on LinkedIn and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Hope to see ya next week

Cheers

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Till next time,

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