“Focus on product, it is all that matters. Build a product that is simple and easy to understand.”

Pravin Jadhav is the Founder and CEO at Wishberg. He is responsible for Product, Design, Marketing and Technology at Wishberg

Prior to Wishberg, Pravin was Head of Product & Marketing at Ohana Media where he developed, launched and marketed its flagship product – Ohana QB, a SaaS based unified digital marketing platform. Earlier Pravin was also the Head of Product for eCommerce & Mobile at Rediff.com, the largest internet portal in India.

MO: How does Wishberg work?

Pravin: The way we look at it, Wishlists are own self-made appointments with life and Wishberg lets users build, manage and track their Wishlist for Life. We think of wishlist as a shopping cart for Life.

Wishberg is designed and built with the intention to have users maintain a single wishlist for life. People can add their wishes across multiple categories and share it with their friends and discover what their friends are wishing.

It also helps to connect with people having similar wishes and enables engagement around your wishlist. On completing a wish, users can also share their experiences with others who wish for that. We have seen that these experiences not only help others in their decision making but are also great motivators for others to finish a wish.

MO: Can you talk about the early days of launching Wishberg, the challenges you encountered and how you overcame them?

Pravin: There were multiple challenges to startup, it is not all that easy as we thought it would be. We have rewritten the entire platform for the 5th time now. Wishberg was earlier known as Tyched. After writing codes for two versions of Tyched and couple of them for Wishberg we have now rolled out the fifth one. Its nerve wrecking and you go back to the drawing board and do things all over again.

Also building the initial team was one of the other major challenges we faced. We have taken over 60 – 75 interviews to select a single team member who was passionate about the idea and believed in what we were building. We just told ourselves multiple times to be focused on building what people want and be patient.

MO: What’s one marketing strategy that’s worked really well for you?

Pravin: Startups given their constraints cannot spend marketing dollars to acquire users. We decided to reach out to people who were passionate about technology and were happy to try out the product and give feedback. Many of these users also turned out to be social media influencers. While we never anticipated, this early user community not only helped us to reach out to a wider audience but also collect useful feedback to build our product roadmap.

MO: What are some trends in your industry that you’re excited about?

Pravin: People are building interests graphs across products. None of these products are able to crack how to differentiate between interests and intents. Popular social products are trying to migrate or experiment with the wishlist approach to get better engagement. We are excited because we have built Wishberg, with single focus on wishlist and with our grounds up approach are well placed to solve this problem in a much better.

MO: What influenced your decision to use a parody of Hitler in one of your marketing videos?

Pravin: When we were launching Wishberg, we did not wish to have a boring FAQ format to make users understand what we do. We learnt our lesson during Tyche’d days that people don’t like too much text, but visuals are appealing.

It so happened that once my co-founder Kulin decided to stay over at office due to an early morning conference call. While killing his time, he stumbled across the Hitler parody videos and decided to adapt it. This particular Hitler clip has gone viral in the past in different contexts. Every action in the clip can be fitted into various situations. We spent some time to think through the scenes and finalize the message we wanted to send. It helps put the idea across in a fun way.

MO: What are some of the items on your wish list?

Pravin: Well., its all put up here – http://www.wishberg.com/beingpractical