ShareChat: ASK ME ANYTHING
As title says
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
Work culture?
I don’t know when you joined ShareChat, I joined SC before it got its series C funding. Things were pretty good those days, and the only challenge we were getting was from Tiktok and majorly “Helo” which copied our UI and also scrapped content from SC. Those were good days. ShareChat starting laying off people since 2020, and things have become worser.
SC’s ads machine is very bad. One of the PMs working in SC ads mentioned themselves. Currently, Ankush is the CEO. Back in 2018-19, Farid was the CEO who was later made COO.
Currently SC isn’t doing great. They closed Jeet11, which was kind of getting them money.
I just want SC to fare well. ESOPs vested hai… waiting for good buy back.
SC has a good hold in Tier 3 and 4 cities. They just need to make a good ad engine for better monetisation.
Agree with your views on ads.
But SC's health overall in general is way better than what you are describing. Revenue is ever so growing up from Chatrooms, they are targeting to inflection point after which SC in isolation can be self sufficient, which is not far off in the future. Livestream will be introduced in SC soon, making more revenue.
I mentioned about ads alone. Chat rooms with audio was developed when I was in SC, and it did take off pretty well.
Well, my bet definitely is for SC to do good. Atleast, not selling ESOPs in the previous buy back should get me some returns. 🙂
Lot of people made loads of money in the previous buy back. Some of the people from the first 30 joinees earned upwards of 50Cr. That’s a huge sun of money.
Am waiting for my turn. This a good way to FIRE.
what is the moat of sharechat? paise kaha se aata hain? kab tak aayega?
Sharechat is known for having one of the fastest shipping cultures, from what I’ve heard
Can you shed more light on how the org is set up to perform at this level?
Is it a lot of experimentation/AB testing etc built into the culture?
Asking from the POV of someone who is setting up a small engineering team for their startup
They, you will often see lot of initiatives being driven via experiments and A/B, it's invision as metrics driven development. But unfortunately the fast pace and lower QA&Product to Dev ratio means either processes are not followed or they get forgotten over time. Which leads to non consistent quality across the features within a product and platform.
But that's a part and parcel of startup, it's because of this you can drive your own dev features in free time.
The broader decision making around the product is still in question, you have to read inbetween the lines to get the hang of the org direction.
How's it going after the layoffs? I got laid off in feb from Sharechat. Did anyone resigned because they are now wfo?
Many are resigning.
But I don't feel it is primarily due to WFO. Many people are not happy with WFO, but we do not have any options. Most companies have gone to RTO Hybrid model.
People are leaving, not like 10 people a day but more like 10 a week or so, hence the new hiring is going on side by side to back fill these vacancies.
Now coming to reason of attrition, it's not because paycheck for sure, but more about RTO, lack of appreciation that happened due to layoffs and subsequent performance rating which meant harder and tight ratings even for above average performers.
Another fact is, since org is pivoting to Livestream from just a short video org, and similar changes in other verticals, people's quality of work is affected, some are over burdened due to lower product to dev to QA ratio and some have witnessed lack in quality/challenging work.
So yeah these 3-4 reasons are why people are leaving.
