All about Startup Growth with Lomit Patel on the HackerNoon Podcast

Lomit Patel is the Senior Vice President of Growth at Together Labs and a bestselling author 🏆 He is the author of the book, Lean AI, which is part of the Lean Startup series by Eric Ries. Amy chats with Lomit about his experience around joining early-stage startups and what a growth role at these startups looks like. They also go over his writing style and how Lomit thinks about the feedback loop for his writing. 💁‍♂️

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[00:00:00] Amy: That's right. The noonies are back. And I would love to thank our sponsor for this episode. Avast, who is a global leader in digital security and privacy, as you very well know because they have over 435 million users. And the AVG brands are those that protect the people from threats on the internet and the ever-evolving IoT landscape.

So thanks to Avast for sponsoring this episode and I hope you enjoy. Hello hackers. Welcome to another episode of The HackerNoon podcast. I'm your host, Amy, Tom. And as always, I cannot wait to chat with you about what we've got going on today. We are recording a noonies episode with Lomit Patel, who is the senior vice president of growth at Together Labs and a bestselling author, which we will get into in a minute here.

But first I wanted to let you know. That Lomit is nominated for two noonies awards. The first is a HackerNoon contributor of the year award in the lean startup category. And the second is another contributor of the year award in the motivation category. So before we jump into it, I will let you know that I'm putting those links in the show notes and you can vote for Lomit for his noonies nominations, but anyways,

Hi Lomit

welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:34] Lomit: Hey, Amy, how you doing?

[00:01:37] Amy: I am doing great. You know what? This is my first podcast recording, where I am sitting down on a couch and it has changed my life. I feel like a real host now. Like I'm about to host like a real proper, like good morning America kind of thing.

I don't think I will ever host a podcast sitting on a regular chair anymore. This is great it's

[00:01:59] Lomit: amazing. The sort of things we come to learn. For me, I would say, generally when I do podcasts, I like to go to different places , in the house and it sounds like you're doing it from an exciting city that I'm pretty familiar with as

[00:02:11] Amy: well. Yes. Yes. Today I am podcasting from London, which as a personal milestone, this means that I have podcasted in over four countries now, which I'm very excited about.

But anyways, it's not about me. Not everything is about me. I want to talk about. So tell me first, before we get into your book about what you do at together labs.

[00:02:37] Lomit: Yeah. So get labs I pretty much responsible for all of our growth, so that encompasses everything from user acquisition to retention, to monetization across all of our different properties and our most popular social network gaming app.

M U I M B U. And we have millions of users, but I've been at the company for just over five years now. And it's been a great ride. So far,

[00:03:04] Amy: five years is a long time, a very long time. What were you doing before?

[00:03:10] Lomit: So previously I've worked at a number of different startups. So my role has always been around the area of growth.

And generally I work with startups pretty early. Usually when they have a product or service out and my role coming in is really to help identify once you have the product and service, how are we going to. Customers, how are we going to generate revenue and ultimately help, every startup talks about that hockey stick growth of getting to millions of users.

And my role is generally to help children shout out the power on, on, on how to make that happen. So it's a fun time you keep coming in when you join companies around. Is that there's a lot of like green space ahead, right? So you can get super creative, you can try a lot of things and there's always the there's a lot of upside cause ultimately nothing's been tried for.

So you can generally try to, if you keep trying and experimenting with enough things some of those things are gonna start sticking and could end up becoming a flywheel.

[00:04:10] Amy: Yeah. Okay. I've two questions for you then. Number one is what do you consider early in a startup phase when you're joining?

And a number two is why startups.

[00:04:24] Lomit: Good question. My definition of early is generally a startup that usually is raised a series a, or is in the process of raising a series B and generally companies do that once they've reached product market fit, which a simple way to define that is, you've figured out a product that actually.

Um, A real problem. And there's going to be some demand. And so then the idea is to validate that and start driving demand for it. And in terms of why a startup I've always been fascinated working with startups from a year, from a young age, I used to look up to all these tech companies and was just curious how do these companies come from nowhere and they end up disrupting.

The way, uses behave and act. And for the most part, I always look at startups as being an underdog, which is the way I've always been perceived myself in life. And I, yeah, I have that empathetic way of looking at the companies the way most people have kind of looked at me.

And the great thing about being an underdog is, most people just underestimate you. Right. And so working in a startup, what I found personally, Is that you get a lot of opportunities because all startups are pretty much under the gun when it comes to proven that they're proud that their businesses viable.

And it requires looking to scale up growth and try to. Ensure that the business is going to survive and not run out of money. And joining these companies early, You generally get to work with a lot of smart people. It's the teams are smaller. So you get a lot of visibility to work with founders and investors.

But beyond that you get the ability to really go and try a lot of things that and there's a lot of there's a huge appetite for taking risk and trying things. And there's low appetite for playing politics which kind of works well for me. You hate so, so you get to try a lot, learn a lot.

And in the process you get to get to know. People who end up becoming a really big part of your network because you continue to grow and evolve in your career.

[00:06:24] Amy: Yeah. Okay. A lot of what you just said just resonated with me too, because hacker noon is the first startup that I've really worked for.

And it's my favorite part is the visibility of like, I would do. I remember when I first joined, I would do one thing and it was like something that I would just was like a very regular part of the job. Never considered it in previous roles, whatever. And then people would be like, oh, slow clap for you.

You've done it. Great work. And it's oh, I'm really valued here. Like the things that I do really matter. So yeah, as I reminiscent of what you're saying,

[00:07:01] Lomit: Yeah, another word for that, that I use is the feedback loop is so much quicker, right? So ultimately, whatever you do, especially in the startup, if you're doing something good or if you're not doing something good, you're going to get to know about it pretty critically.

And for the most part, if you work in the right startup in. Hacker noon obviously has a great culture. The idea there is not just about, what you can do for hacker noon, but how hacker noon can set you up to learn and grow in the process. So you codependent on, on each other where you both are going on this journey together, where you're growing personally and the business has grown and benefited from your growth. Yes.

[00:07:38] Amy: Yeah, definitely. So take me through more of your startup journey, especially at the beginning. Was there a period of time where you worked for bigger Corp and then you transitioned to realize that the startup life was better?

[00:07:51] Lomit: So I what I will say is I, I come from a family of small business entrepreneurs. My family I want to own some small retail stores. So I started working and I was pretty familiar with kind of what goes into being an entrepreneur from that perspective. But in terms of my startup journey, I was always fascinated by companies that bent on technology and what I found.

In terms of the companies that I ended up getting into and the truth was, I didn't really know anyone in yeah. Worked in startups or whatever. So I was in London at the time and I was seeing all these technology companies coming up. And my dream was to build. Come to the us.

And the idea was put myself in an environment where a lot of these things are really happening in, in the nineties. And so I came over for business school and after business school, I just applied to as many different startups as they occurred in it. And I think it's the same for most people, right?

If you really want to get into something, you have to put yourself in an environment where w where those. Things are happening. And so for startups, mostly that's in Silicon valley now that's not necessarily true today, but at that time that's generally where, where all the startups were really coming up.

And I, what I would say is. That I ended up, I was fortunate to get into a number of startups pretty early. Generally what happens is once you get into one in, in, in you end up doing a really good job then it gets a lot easier to get recruited and get into another one.

So some of the ones that I've worked at for the most part were companies like Like Roku's one that most people probably are familiar with and it's become a huge company, but, I joined them as employee number like 30, but I was like the first sort of head of growth and marketing there.

And that was really fun. Cause at the time we, we're trying to create a whole new category around streaming that nobody really knew about. And the, that the fun part of that. Just getting to work really closely with a lot of smart people in and in the process, just learning and growing personally myself by, by, by helping to really play a role in, in helping that company get off to a really strong foundation and get to millions of users initially, before I moved then, and then I ended up joining another company after that called next issue media, which was a con, which was a collaboration between all the big publishing companies.

At the time saw the future being more in digital and nobody's really going to subscribe to individual magazine. So they wanted to collaborate and create a subscription offering in mobile where people could get unlimited access to all the premium magazines and. Long story short, that, that ended up getting acquired by apple and became part of apple news premium, which most people know about today.

And then after that th there's been a number of different startups, but what I would generally say that the big pattern has been, I generally try to identify different verticals that really interest me personally, because if I have an affinity for it, then I'm more likely to be passionate and excited work on it.

Yeah. And, I wasn't a huge gamer, but I joined IMCU just over five years ago but it was an area I was really interested cause it, cause I know there's a lot of people that were spending a lot of time on, on gaming and in the course of learning that vertical, I, I joined this startup.

This was probably more of the late, the latest stage startup where there was close to about 90 employees. When I joined now with. Probably closer to over 300 but what we did over that last five years, was to really take a product that was more heavily focused on desktop and web, and really turned it into a mobile first business and a big part of that, that driving that whole growth strategy can, fell in, into my teams focus.

And that was fun to really. See the company transition into mobile and really turn mobile into a huge growth channel. And now I can proudly say that were generally in the top three of the most highest gross in social apps in the app stores. So it's been a huge huge achievement doing that, but generally.

What I will say in startups is it's always good to continue to evolve yourself. And whatever job you're doing, always be flexible about, what's next, what's new. Try to I think ahead of where user behavior is going. And when it comes to drive and growth, it's all around identifying, what are channels, where people are spending time.

And a good example of that is social media. I was really heavy into social media before people started even spending money on things like Facebook and Instagram. And when I joined to get the labs that I MBU. We were one of the first early beta tests to get into growing advertising with Snapchat and Tik TOK, which today are huge, but, at that time there weren't.

And it really gave us a huge competitive advantage to really get access to all these millions of users that were using that platform to get them to convert into becoming customers for IMB.

[00:12:50] Amy: Okay. So you've alluded to a lot of this already, but what is involved in growth?

Like when you are a leader of growth at a startup, where do you start? What's involved. What's going on in your mind? Tell me more about that.

[00:13:07] Lomit: Really good question weed growth, ultimately, it's all about really understanding how you define success. And so generally, at least most startups that I've worked for success has been defined as acquiring customers, driving revenue.

And potentially wants to cost to acquire a customer. And what's the return on investment on on, on the money being invested. So once you know what your success is, and then it's then sort around understanding, who's the best customers that data potentially going to be using the product and.

And then figuring out what's there the best way to get in front of those customers, ultimately and what's the right places to either be spending. Advertising money or making tweaks within the product or around the onboarding flow and the customer around all the different points of the customer journey to really be able to optimize the entire customer funnel to acquire customers, retain customers and to monetize customers.

And what I would say is, outside of knowing how to define success. A big part for me, that has really helped me in my role is just being curious. I've been curious from a young age, But it works well, especially in Israel, because in growth, you always got to keep asking, you got to keep putting yourself in the shoes of the users and the customers, and try to look at things from their point of view.

Ultimately it's not about. How the product benefits you, but it's about how it's going to benefit others. And how can you solve that problem and how can you reinforce that value to them so that ultimately, if users find value in what you offer and then the more likely to stay.

But beyond that, they're more likely to tell it they're free. About it as well. So you end up getting that viral growth that goes with it,

[00:14:56] Amy: right? Yeah. Okay. So you're at the end of the day, what you're saying though, is that as someone who is in growth, you have to put your hands in all of the pots.

Like you have touch with the product team. You have touch with the marketing team. You've touched with the sales team to help you to increase those metrics. Then.

[00:15:16] Lomit: Yeah. So that's actually the fun part for me in the job is that you get to work cross-functionally with so many things.

Other teams, it's not really about one individual team or one individual person it's really about stepping up and becoming that cross-functional leader because ultimately you're the cheerleader and the motivator for many teams. Cause everything that that you work on or your impact really impacts how other teams prioritize what projects that, that day and at work.

As well. It's it's a great way to get visibility if you like that. And the company.

[00:15:52] Amy: Yeah. So as you work in growth, what are you doing day to day? Is it a lot of researching on what to do next? Is it a lot of just like liaison between teams?

[00:16:04] Lomit: It's a combination of all of those things, but primarily it all starts with looking at the data and the metrics every day, like how we're tracking, to, to the goals that we need to hit.

And from there different folks on the team that are responsible for the different areas of that entire funnel to really understand, what's working what experiments are we run in? What are we learning? Cause ultimately it's all around increasing the velocity of learning.

At least that's the word that I use internally because I don't expect us to know the answers but to at least follow the process and to try and figure out, What those potential answers are to not only what's working today, but also to keep an eye on the future.

So always trying to think, like 12 to 18 months ahead, in terms of what could be the next new thing that we want to start experimenting with today based on where use user behavior and trends are going. And that encompasses really just talking with a lot of people internally, but also talking with people outside of the company to talking with customers, talking with other folks in the industry to see what they're doing, what's working.

And being active, I would say in the industry at different events and. And speaking at those events, it's a great way to, to learn and share our knowledge that you can bring back in to your company as well and continue to keep just putting ideas out there and keep trying stuff.

[00:17:29] Amy: Yeah. How do you, in your mind simultaneously look at individual points of data while still keeping connected to the overall picture of things that you're doing? Cause that sounds like a lot of like high level and granular detail.

[00:17:46] Lomit: Yeah, it's all about trying to connect the dots and, I think just like anything we need to do something many times you start to build more experience and, and a lot of people don't talk about this but there's some intuitive.

Nature to it as well, where you intuition starts to get better at identifying, because ultimately it's about, look looking at that huge priority of lists and figuring out what are we going to focus on today this week, this month, and this year and prioritizing ruthlessly is really important but the best way to do that is that.

The entire pressure on yourself but make it collaborative, especially internally what I find is when other people feel that they're part of the process of what gets prioritized, they get more excited to work on those things versus being a top down command.

Hey, I woke up today and I feel we need to go and do this. So let's just do that.

Yeah.

[00:18:45] Amy: Yes. And that I think also comes from like the startup vibes of things, right? Like you'd, that's not really a thing in big Corp. It's more of the top down approach. And then startup culture it's really involving everybody in the process.

[00:18:59] Lomit: Yeah. And Amy just to close the loop on that question you asked earlier. So I haven't really worked in a huge big company, personally, the biggest company that I worked early on when I started to me, it seemed like a big company and I think we had four or 500 employees, but what I found was generally, I haven't been in companies that have grown to become big but generally as things get bigger, you tend to find that your role tends to at least the responsibilities and the impact tends to get smaller and more specialized.

And for someone that wants to have less bureaucracy and have more More of an outlet to be more creative and learn and try more things than generally, at least in my experience, the smaller the company, the more you get those types of opportunities.

[00:19:44] Amy: Yeah, I think so too.

Yes, definitely. Okay. So tell let's get into a little bit more about your book. Tell me more about your book. It's called lean AI. When did you write it? Tell me everything. I must know.

[00:20:03] Lomit: Yes. So my book lean AI It if it's part of the Eric Reese, the lean startup series and most people that at least in business and startup are really familiar with w with the lean startup.

Cause it's been one of the best selling books ever. And your offer is Eric Reese, the way I the backstory on how I wrote the book what most people don't realize is the company that I work for right now together labs, but I MBU pacifically. That's where Eric worked when he actually came up with the whole idea around lean startup.

Cause, cause it was a methodology around. Test learn and iterate and instead of trying to put the best product out there and taking so long, try and put the minimum viable version of that product or service in disordered use real time customer data to iterate and try to get it to to become the perfected.

But the idea is that there's never anything that's perfect and everything needs to iterate and pivot as needed. And so he, he applied a lot of that methodology at IMCU. And so I was always fascinated with that book. And that was when, w one of the things that I've enjoyed working here, because, it's still the methodology that we apply.

But what I came to realize, when we were trying to make that huge shift in the mobile. You have to just move a lot faster and quicker. And there's just so much more data now that you get that you have then than ever before. And what I was doing prior to writing the book, I was able to.

Champion the whole area around artificial intelligence, really applying how to use AI to really help us to get better, faster, and smarter using data to really grow a business around user acquisition and retention and monetization. And so what I noticed is. That there's at least at the time, this was like five years ago, 5, 4, 5 years ago.

Only a handful of companies are really doing this. And these are the sort of companies that most people know about, like the Amazon's and Netflix and Uber and Lyft's, but it's something that most people just weren't really doing. Pretty hard to do. And so what we ended up doing was to stitch together a couple of different like platforms that kind of existed in and made it work.

And then I started telling that story at conferences, I got, I started getting invited to speak and the more I started speaking about it and I used to write a blog post and. The more positive feedback aside to get

The more that, that feedback that I ended up getting, the more I came to realize is that this is something at least for a lot of companies is pretty early and something that a lot of startups aren't doing and going back to my, my. Philosophy around why I work. The startups is because they're underdogs and I felt it, this is the kind of knowledge that should be openly available.

So more and more founders that start coming out there can at least be able to apply this to help. Validate. And the idea is that they have floated business as well as be able to at least get more smarter around using the data for growth. And so that, that was the sort of the background.

So I was writing a lot around, is speaking a lot about this and the feedback was positive. And then I got to speak with. Obviously being at being a founder and he knew a lot about the success that we're having at the company. And I joked with him that, maybe this could be a good as part of his the lean startup series, cause they've come up with a number of different blocks and he said, yeah, I was surprised.

He said, yeah. And he said, maybe you should write it. That's when the seed got planted. And he said, you should come up with a book proposal and had no idea what. Proposal is so I Googled that. I acted. I yeah. I will Google it at night, but basically a book proposal is like, it's like a business idea where outline the big idea about what the book's about, what are the different chapters.

That could potentially go into the book and map out the flow in terms of what the book is and what the different parts would be in the book as well as do some competitive research. Is this something that's that's unique or how's this going to be different from what, whatever else is out there.

And fortunately, I I wrote a book proposal, but Eric connected me with We don't Riley media, which is a huge publisher. And, I spoke to them about the idea and, I had an editor that, that was assigned to help me at least put the book proposal together and to pitch it.

And they generally don't pick up a lot of books every year. And I think this was in 20. 18. When the whole idea came to me or 2019 and I was surprised, but, they ended up picking up the idea and he got approved as being part of the lean startup series. W once they approved it, it was a matter of Hey, here's a contract.

Do you want to do it or not? And so at that stage, I was like, do I jump in or do I sit on the fence thinking about it? And I and by then I fought, you know what, I want to just jump in and try and write the book. And I've never written a book but what I will say is that writing, I've enjoyed writing and writing.

A lot of like content on blogs is really helped me, to at least warm me up. And so what I ended up doing when it came to writing the book, once I had the book proposal in place, w it was a lot easier to organize my thoughts around where do I own a focus in terms of chapter one or chapter two.

And what I came to realize is when it comes to writing a book, it's best to write on things. That you feel inspired about at that given moment? So an example being, I tried to start writing about chapter one and I sorta did chapter one, chapter two, but then chapter three, didn't really interest me at the time.

And so I jumped out to inside writing, like chapter six and then started writing about chapter eight. And then I said, so it it wasn't following the traditional route of going. In, in, in a linear fashion. So I started writing them at different things and.

And F for me, writing a book was a lot easier because I was actually practicing what I was preaching. So it wasn't like I had to really go out and do a lot of additional research and research. It was more around validating what I was writing. And then I was actually putting the content out there on the blog and I was getting more real time feedback.

So that was able to help me refine the content for the book by just putting things out. Yeah. And working with a publisher was really helpful. Cause then you have a timeline and when you need to deliver the book and you ideally get like a year, but I ended up writing the book cause I was just so fired up to get it done as quickly as possible.

I wrote the first draft within six months, five to six months. But the way I ended up doing that was. We ended up creating my own personal schedule. So I was writing like six days a week and my writing schedule was to pretty much right at night. That's when I liked writing the most.

I'm not really a morning person. So I was generally writing between 10:00 PM and 3:00 AM . And so my sleep took a hit during that time.

[00:27:04] Amy: I was going to say three in the morning. I know.

[00:27:08] Lomit: I know. It's like anything in life, you pretty much, we all have 24 hours. The question is, if you really want to achieve certain goals, then the question is, what's the trade-offs and where those going to happen.

And so for me to trade off, had to come out of my sleep. So I was sleeping a lot less, which is tiring. I will say. Having said that, what kept me going was w what was the idea that I could actually be, I'm actually writing a book that can really help, so many people.

And that's, that was ultimately to go for writing a book, which was to put a a. Ephesus out there that other startups and founders can use to really help them in their journey to to grow their business. Yes.

[00:27:54] Amy: Okay. I have some questions about your writing style and how you structured your day, but first, let me just get into this for another second here.

The scheduling of your life. Do you have fun times scheduled or are you just oh, a working machine?

[00:28:10] Lomit: Really good question. I early on in my career, I was just the working machine. Now what what I try to do is work a lot smarter. So the idea isn't about, I do work hard, but what I do is I intentionally put blocks in my calendar to, to prompt me to actually take mental breaks.

Cause that, cause I don't want to get burned out on that. I work and generally for me what I try to do in terms of rewarding myself, I like working out. I try to break out part of my day where I can eat to eat, to go to work out for awhile. I was really into the yoga scene.

So I was doing yoga that was really helping me. And then beyond that I like self care in terms of self care things outside of working out Eating and cooking. I also like. Getting massages and stuff too. So I always try to get some spot treatment in there as well. So I try to reward myself for working hard, because ultimately what I feel is for me to show up as my best, I have to make sure that I'm taking care of myself.

[00:29:06] Amy: Yes. Because that overworking, like culture is like a recipe of, for disaster of burning. Like not being able to do anything. So yeah, I guess taking that time to quiet your mind with the yoga, with the working out with the massages, to just not think about things important.

[00:29:27] Lomit: Yeah. Very important. And, one thing generally, at least in, in startups that is this whole finger around the.

The hostile culture of just booming, working hard, long hours and stuff, and I've been fruit out, but what I've come to realize is ultimately, there has to be a balance, and especially as as I've moved up and become more visible as a leader, you have to set that example or else.

Feel that they that they just need to be, just burning themselves to around work in. And what happens is no one wins at the end of the day. If your people aren't happy.

[00:30:02] Amy: Yes. I think for me prior to global pandemic time, I definitely more so subscribed to the hustle culture of like always go doing all of the things working 24 7, and then over the pandemic as my mental health has come up in town as everyone else's, as it's more of this oh yeah.

If you want me to do anything that I have to do with. Things less work sometimes so that I can be my best self to continue working because this mental health is such an important piece of culture of work that we always forget to incorporate into our lives. I think,

[00:30:41] Lomit: yeah, the, I would say the two powerful words that people can use ultimate.

Is the word. Yes and no. And early on in my career, and what I find with most people was everybody wants to say yes to everything. Cause

[00:30:55] Amy: the part I am a yes girl, a hundred percent.

[00:31:00] Lomit: I was like that too. I'm a recovering yes addict, but it was. At least for me, it was just getting validation from what other people would think about me and what I've come, as I've gotten older and a little bit wiser is that I've started to use the word know more than I used.

Yes. Because ultimately it's not about the quantity, but it's about the quality of what you can provide. And and by saying no, it's enabled. And the teams and the people that that I get to impact to to really focus on doing less things, but doing it so well, that has a much bigger impact than trying to do too much and not doing it as well.

And in the process, it, it provides more more of that balance where, people are able to ultimately, that. Life. Doesn't just revolve around work all the time.

[00:31:58] Amy: Yeah. I absolutely agree. And I think the pandemic, if anything, has taught me more so that life does not revolve around work.

I can't, I'm not a machine anymore. Maybe I'm just getting older. Maybe the pandemic has incited the great resignation in everyone. But yeah, I think uh, mental health and working is so hand in hand and so important. So I'm glad we chatted about that too. Okay. This brings me back to. You're writing styles.

So when you sit down to write what goes is, are things going through your mind that are different when you're writing blog content versus like book content?

[00:32:35] Lomit: So what what I was saying in terms of writing style in terms of book. It really depends on which audience you're writing for. And generally I try to put myself in the shoes of a, who's going to be reading this.

And I would say my writing style has been pretty consistent for the blog, as well as the book, in terms of, I try to write things as simplistic as possible. So I don't try to use a lot of jargon and complexity to try and make points. I try to. Keep it as simple so that more people can really understand exactly what I'm trying to communicate, because ultimately my goal isn't to keep this to a niche where only a few people are going to read my content it's to try and keep it as broad as possible.

So I can impact more people and more people can learn. Grow and potentially adopt the things that I'm writing about. So my, I would say my blog and my book content is pretty similar. And the benefit of what I found is using a blog content.

And as a way to test out content for the book, at least when I was writing the book worked out because the feedback I was able to get from that was a lot of the feedback that kind of went into the

[00:33:50] Amy: final. Can we talk about, more about your feedback loop of your writing? Because this is something that I think that you do really well and something that maybe you can help share with other writers in the hacker noon community or people who write in general, how do you get feedback on your writing from people?

[00:34:06] Lomit: Yeah a lot of times when I publish articles for example, if I publish articles, On hacker noon. After a couple of weeks, I would put that article on LinkedIn with a large number of followers on LinkedIn. And generally when I put things on LinkedIn, I always have some kind of prompt please let me know what you think in the comments and In generally people have been pretty open, w when you, at least for me, when I've asked for that feedback, I always get people writing comments.

And I always love to read that, read the feedback on the comments and incorporate that, eh, as well as the other thing that I try to do is I, I have a. A number of people that, that I trust in my network, who I would send my content to as well, and at least have them sort of review and give me some honest feedback.

I'm always looking for feedback where people can just be as as transparent and raw as possible. I'm not looking for feedback where, Hey, this is great, good job kind of thing. 'cause that doesn't really help you get better at eating. It's nice to know that what you're writing, but I always feel that there's always room for improvement.

So I always try to share my content internally to, to a small network of folks to get feedback. And then externally I always asked for feedback on social media as.

[00:35:23] Amy: Yeah. I think that you are a master of LinkedIn. So what else do you post on LinkedIn, other than things about your stories?

Are you using like the polls features at all or, and other things that you post or what else is going on your LinkedIn?

[00:35:39] Lomit: Yeah. I've tried to create this sort of cadence where I want to try to post a one or two times a day on LinkedIn. And this sort of started probably four years ago.

And for me It, what it really came down to is I generally get up pretty early in the morning I love to read early in the morning. So I'm always reading what's trending, what's new, what's going on in the industry or different things that I'm really interested in, which is generally areas around leadership and startup management and just business trends in general.

And so what I used to do is I used to re read a lot in. And then, try to send an email to my team or folks in the company that, Hey, this is something interesting. Check this out, whatever. And I started getting a lot of like positive feedback in terms of Hey, thanks for sharing.

This is great because ironically, a lot of people don't share internally either. And so w what came out of that was like, I'm wondering if people on LinkedIn might find this helpful to, and generally what I do is, like even if I read something that's a pretty long article, I sorta just try to summarize it into a paragraph or two.

So I really can just put my spin or my point of view on, on what I think is happening. And so I started doing that. As I mentioned, I usually post pretty early in the morning when I get up and that post late at night. And I, what I found, not that I was really looking at this as a signal, but I started finding people not only engaging on the post, but they're actually writing back to me that, Hey, thanks for sharing.

It's just been so helpful in following this. And my company did this know, I shared this with my manager and. I was just getting, what I ultimately, what I found is that people found that content valuable. So I've continued to do that. And in the process, I went from, I think when w when I started that I probably had maybe about a thousand.

Connections now it's getting close to about 44,000, not that I'm looking at it as a signal but a lot of that has really just come from word of mouth where people have started sharing or resharing that content. And, ultimately, you know what, the value is really that I'm helping people.

And yeah. And so in LinkedIn, I generally, I'm always reading a lot around all of those areas around startup leadership management in business. And I generally eat usher articles that are right around that content. I'm happy to even ch share content that other people are writing around that I tried to put my own sort of, a spin on it so that, people don't want to read the entire article.

They'll at least get like synopsis on.

[00:38:14] Amy: Yeah. Okay. Wait, one to two times a day is a lot.

[00:38:19] Lomit: I it's ironic. It's like anything, cause I enjoy doing it that I don't really see that work as work. And for me it's actually, it's become more helpful because now I don't necessarily share as much internally.

I just tell people just look at my LinkedIn, that's my team and other folks and you get, the things that oh, that's kinda tough of mine.

[00:38:38] Amy: Okay. Yeah. You have built this like very strong community of people who trust you as an industry expert in like startups and growth and management.

So that's. Definitely. And then it helps with when you continue to build content and write and be able to share that on a platform. So I think that's something that you've done really well, that I think a lot of the listeners and Hawker new contributors can take a page from your book on.

[00:39:07] Lomit: Yeah, you got to think that I would say is from personally helps me to cause could, cause I feel, the hardest part about anything.

It's taking something from your mind and communicated it. And people have different ways of communicating and, for me, writing's been that outlet where I can take these forts a Delaware in my mind and put it into a place where it helps me to better understand.

What I'm thinking about in, and in the process of putting it down, it helps me to go and edit and then be able to communicate that more effectively to other

[00:39:45] Amy: people. Yeah, definitely amazing. Okay. Lomit. Thank you for joining the podcast. I thought this was a great, I had a great time chatting with.

If we want to find you and what you're working on online, where can we look?

[00:39:59] Lomit: Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me, Amy. I've been listening to your podcast for awhile. So I've been a fan for a while, and then now I get the pleasure of being on it. So thanks. Thanks for the opportunity.

I would say the best way to get getting in contact with me and I encourage anyone, if you have any questions around all of those topics that I write about, feel free to reach out, I'm always happy to share. Anything that I know that could potentially help somebody else, but the best way to to get in touch with me, my LinkedIn is reactive.

So if you go and connect with me on LinkedIn, pretty much my name Patel connect with anyone who reaches out to me on LinkedIn, as well as I have a blog, which is pretty much my name lomitpatel.com. That's another place you can reach out to me and. Beyond those two. If anybody's interested in checking out the book it's still doing well on Amazon is actually Amy, I didn't, I don't know if I mentioned this, but now it's been translated into a number of different languages.

So it's in Korean as well as Chinese as well. So it says it's doing really well in Asia. It's picked up there as well. But the book is available. Easiest place to check it out is on Amazon. If you search for. AI you'll be able to find it there. And if anything, you know that there's a website, you can check out for the book and it's called theleanai.com.

[00:41:19] Amy: Cool. Okay. Yeah, that is a random, what a fun time, a little, a number one bestselling author in Asia. Okay, cool. So don't forget that Lomi is pre. Wow. Okay. English don't forget a Lomi is nominated for the hacker noon contributor of the year award in the lean startup category, as well as the motivation categories.

So you can go over to new news.tech to vote. Don't forget to do that. Another thing that you can vote for, if you have forgotten, which I'll just remind you is startups. So the startups of the year campaign, we are also running. So you can go to startups.hackernoon.com to vote for your favorite startup of the year.

And yeah, you can find hacker noon online at hacker noon on all of the socials, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, you can visit hacker noon.com to read all of your favorite tech news. And as all. Stay weird. And I'll see you on the internet by.