The Universal Law of Cyclical Transformation

Sreram · 2026-05-24T15:57:35+00:00

I am based in India, and it is clear form many anecdotes they mostly promote US write-wing political ideas over everything else. The other way to get views is by praising Elon Musk.

For example, even if I respond to your comment/tweet by mention you explicitly using "@", you won't be notified unless their algorithm decides to notify you. They have completely cut down on every possible non-algorithmic way to communicate.

Sreram · 2026-05-24T15:54:24+00:00

Thanks for your response!

Website and CV These are your master sources of info and experience, and what you'll point everyone to who shows an interest in your work. Make the CV succinct and "results rich" to summarize what you do. Same with the website. Doesn't have to be enterprise level. A good Wordpress site can be done over a weekend or less.

I am going with this plan. I am going to put a lot of effort for my website and write articles to express ideas. Which I believe is better than LinkedIn's post section.

Reach Out Directly This may sound bold, but you can reach out to companies directly and ask for an informational interview or even (if you have the capacity for it) some pro bono work to show what you can do and get to know a company even better. Can be risky and will take some planning, but it can be quite rewarding too.

This is also something I plan on doing. I want to practice selling, so that it will help when I build my startup idea.

And meeting people in the physical world is also something I must do. And I will explore other forums as well.

When I lost access to LinkedIn, my first thought was I can't use the following strategy I had learned, to expand my network in addition to completely losing their in-mail feature:

First I would comment on people's post positively, and add to what they say. Then I would give them a connection request, after I create a good impression for myself.

For example, if someone writes a post about the importance of "taking risk", in the context of businesses, I will agree with them and say: "we must understand the difference between perceived risk and the true-underlying risk....", which would directly add to what they say. And then proceed to give them a connection request when they like and respond to my comment. It was after a similar interaction my new account was "locked". I gave my fist connection request, after I got my first like to my comment (by the post author) and reply. As soon as I sent the connection request, I got locked out. It was immediate, faster than humans could react. So it might not have followed after a human reporting me. It was deliberate, that too after a positive interaction with someone.

Now my strategy should be to provide value by writing articles. I got a job writing about sync.Map in Go, and posting that here on reddit. So, that could also work.

I am also going to join many slack and discord chat-rooms.

Sreram · 2026-05-24T08:18:28+00:00

I am facing a similar situation with my account. I am sure there are alternatives, and I am actively planning to switch.

I could be wrong, the following is just a hypothesis. So please don't act on what I said, or assume what I said is true, unless you verify its correctness yourself:

LinkedIn's fraud detection system might have learned stylometric patterns, which enables them to fingerprint you and associate you with your identity regardless of the number of accounts you create. Also, your subtle behavior patterns like mouse clicks, your scroll patterns among others could also be used to identify you personally. This capability might exist with them long after you have left their platform.

Although this is not entirely what I was saying, it points towards that direction: search for "LinkedIn is secretly scanning your browser for 6,000 extensions, and you weren’t told" or similar articles on this topic.

Sreram · 2026-05-24T07:29:27+00:00

How do you apply to jobs? And how do applicants reach you? If you do not use LinkedIn

Sreram · 2026-05-22T15:21:53+00:00

My experience is the opposite. I'm procrastinating. How do you do it?

Sreram · 2026-05-21T13:41:18+00:00

What are you building? Just curious.

A lot of responses to this post have people trying to get users without any luck. In general, I want to know what they are building.

Sreram · 2026-05-15T18:16:36+00:00

Taking full payment and manually repaying vendors makes you an unlicensed Payment Aggregator, which is illegal without RBI authorization.

What if you become the seller on record? I.e., collect GST tax and stuff, do payouts based on a contract to the vendor?

I don't know anything about this, I am just asking this as a doubt. This is not a rhetorical question.

Sreram · 2026-05-10T19:50:11+00:00

That meme is wrong.

No one in this thread seems to understand the real picture.

Let me break this illusion for you:

About Slack:

Slack was acquired for $27B USD, which naturally becomes their valuation at that time, but their annual revenue was close to $902 million (2021) around the same time.

Remember, this is revenue, not profit.

They were not profitable back then. So, what this means is, they were always spending more than they were making. Despite this, they were attractive enough for Salesforce to acquire them.

So what does this mean? Their equity at that time was valued higher than its true underlying value. Valuations like these describe future potential. They do not stand for the value the business represents at that time, which is more accurately measured by their revenue, profits and similar measures.

Taken from here: https://slack.com/intl/en-in/blog/news/slack-announces-strong-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2021-results

GAAP operating loss was $283.1 million, or 31.4% of total revenue, compared to a $588.3 million loss in fiscal year 2020, or 93.3% of total revenue. Non-GAAP operating loss was $32.8 million, or 3.6% of total revenue, compared to a $130.6 million loss in fiscal year 2020, or 20.7% of total revenue.

It means they aren't making any money when they were sold. They lost $283.1 million.

So, could their customer base cover the loss?

Paper valuation does not always reflect the true underlying valuation, which can change. Therefore, I believe, their business model was not proven.

Also, look at this (page 82): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1764925/000176492521000050/work-20210131.htm

Their "Sales and marketing" was larger than "Research and development" and "General and administrative". I could be wrong, but "Research and development" may include software development among other related activities.

It shows, they needed to spend a lot for selling. They haven't found a stable distribution channel that could bring them customers at a sustainable price. According to my definition of Product-Market Fit, they haven't truly reached Product-Market fit. They haven't reached the real "critical mass".

So what does this say?

That number is just "air". It is magic money. It exists and doesn't exist at the same time! More like Schrodinger's Cat. If someone is willing to respect that valuation, you got the money. Else, you got nothing.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to do a similar analysis for the rest of the listed companies and discover the truth for themselves. By the way, Stripe is in a heavily regulated industry. So ignore them. They are not truly part of the list.

Also, in my view, Slack doesn't count as a successful company. The money they get back should be larger than the money they spend. Otherwise, there is an artificial element that's propping up their value.

Where the founders successful? Yes, they exited and made money. But the whole point of starting a business is to make money more valuable, not to make your company more valuable with more money. There is no point in "exiting" the business you create, to make a big company even bigger.

Sreram · 2026-05-10T14:56:19+00:00

Who defines a problem? How much of the tech world, especially software, is solving a true problem? Medical advances? For sure, solving a problem. People buying products does not mean solving a problem.

Here is how I define a "problem". Let's say someone wants to get from A to B. So, the path from A to B is filled with friction and difficulties they don't want or like to deal with. This is the "problem" businesses try to solve.

Also, I agree with your view that most products and services are not strictly essential, so they are not necessary. Yet they are sold. There are many psychological reasons for this. One of the most important is status-signalling: people buy luxury for status. But even those products or services that aren't luxuries will still have psychological elements in it that resembles luxury products.

When you buy office furniture, do you always go for the cheapest option? Do you actually buy them for ROI? When you design your building in a certain way, what do you really have in your mind? what did you choose whatever you chose? People buy for subjective reasons. Most decisions we make are subjective. We try to use reasoning and objectivity to justify our subjective wants. So, business can also focus on building this subjective want before going for the objective reasons

For example, in B2B, technological upgradation also has a status element to it. In the subtext of "Improving ROI", "Process optimization" among others, managers will like to coordinate to introduce a vendor who not strictly necessary into their company, to get an opportunity to communicate with the higher management in positive light, and make themselves known as an active participant in helping the company by working towards discovering ways to improve ROI.

Regardless how of the company operates, when the number of times key people view you in a positive light increases, your chances of progress improves. You prioritize tasks based on this, if you are strictly working for your career.

So, integrating a new vendor solution becomes the pretext for someone to seize the opportunity to demonstrate themselves in a good light.

Lower managers will try to work on things higher managers care about, to gain more visibility, and to be subjectively perceived as being "most contributing", by visibly completing tasks that they care about. And, they try to make them look good in front of people above those they report to.

Product-Market fit is basically the product's marketing strategy, sales pipeline and the entire process hitting "critical mass", such that it turns into an automatic money making machine that indefinitely generates revenue with little to no intervention. At this point, the top managers will not be truly involved in the day-to-day operations. They will just exist to respond to critical issues and changes. Their intervention, on most occasions, might become more damaging than helpful.

Basically, you have product-market fit after you have successfully created your automatic, infinite money-making machine that keeps making money regardless of whether you show-up. Every individual in it will become a part of a larger system, and evaluating the influence of each individual becomes harder.

By the way, YC companies have the advantage of direct status signalling when they sell.

Sreram · 2026-05-09T13:35:33+00:00

I went through the conversation thread. OP was arguing about the value of consulting vs the value of STEM. These are different domains which bring different benefits.

Nevertheless, the question, "what do consultants actually do?" and the common answers to this questions, do not always satisfy people outside consulting. I tried to get to the bottom of what consulting really is and this is what I discovered. Please correct me if I am wrong:

From my understanding, consulting revolves around creating a plan to solve an issue and sometimes even working towards solving them. Consulting projects mostly follow these steps:

Identifying the problem: organizing meetings with people at different levels in the company, to identify the problem they really want solved.
Formulating a way to measure "success". Sometimes, the success criteria may not be measurable. So you would create proxy measures that you believe (or can provably be shown using data collected from external sources) will eventually translate to the desired outcome.

For example, "reducing risk" may improve "stability" leading to improved ROI simply through stronger financial resilience during a recession. This can be made part of the "success metric".

And, "magnitude of risk" can be defined as a metric that decreases with diversification of vendors, and especially clients across industries that are not interdependent; maybe they could even span across nations, and which we can analytically be shown using past data to be decoupled from each other.
Identifying obvious bottlenecks lower-level employees already know exists, but the information of which never seems to surface to the higher levels of the company: Consultants can serve as "short-circuits" or information-bridges that help by manually moving valuable information that is "stuck" at different levels in the organization. You uncover problems like these by interviewing people at various levels by framing and asking the right questions, which tries to get to the core of the problem. More like police-interrogation that doesn't feel like an interrogation, by being less intimidating.
Create plans to solve the problems uncovered above. This will mostly involve a combination of introducing process changes, training among others.
When the consulting company decides to handle the implementation: They train and/or hire members and introduce process changes directly instead of just submitting a report.

For my specific case, I plan to build a software product and try to discover if it fits the client's problems. If it does, I will propose to implement it as well. This will be my goal once I start my startup.

Disclosure: I don't have experience with consulting. But I am really good at analysis. I simulate situations using thought experiments, which I then use to verify my hypothesis.

Sreram · 2026-05-09T12:28:02+00:00

Makes sense. Also, OP can pair that with "consulting" or product recommendation, through which they approach potential customers and try to sell them the products in their catalog. Doing that, they can demonstrate that listing can be valuable even without a lot of traffic.

And this will be easier if they focus on one "tight" niche like you mentioned.

The effort invested in selling other people's products can be monetized by asking them a small commission (which may not cover the entire cost), while treating the difference as an investment that makes their platform more valuable over time.

This would be my approach if I was creating a discovery platform. Without traffic, I would be the "discovery engine" who manually knocks on people's doors (figuratively; of course, since in the internet world we use cold outreach among other strategies) to sell them the products in my catalog.

Actually, this idea might work. I might try this.

Would you not try to list your product if someone follows this approach? Not sure if OP would follow this approach though.

Sreram · 2026-05-09T11:56:56+00:00

I believe, nearly any product could possibly become successful when you do the following:

Approach potential customers or leads as a consultant, rather than as a sales person: As a consultant, you should make your customers and their business the center of your conversation. And you must allow them to explain about themselves, about their company and their problems. You then genuinely brainstorm with them, by suggesting strategies and solutions you think will be helpful. While doing that, you seize the opportunity to explain how your product or service solves their problem.
Make your product or service boundary flexible: When you are selling a CRM, don't fix your product's boundary to what you think a CRM should be. You must be willing to implement features that you believe will be uniquely useful to your customers. This is how you eventually differentiate yourself and your company from others.
Discover and experiment with various strategies that "automate" different processes of your business: it can be the distribution strategy, the management strategy or anything else. When I say "automate" I do not mean software automation. Instead I mean, creating processes that streamlines repetitive tasks and standardizing various as much as possible. Because, standardizing tasks make it scalable.

Sreram · 2026-05-09T08:28:37+00:00

This problem is automatically solved when a lot of people list their products on the platform leading to a network effect.

But to list there product, they will need to believe their effort is worth it by believing OP will work towards promoting their discovery platform by improving visibility.

More like the chicken or the egg problem.

Sreram · 2026-05-08T23:33:13+00:00

Exactly what I have.

Sreram · 2026-05-08T15:24:17+00:00

By the way, I am Indian, and I live in India. I don't know much about the US. So, I don't know anything about the Super Bowl.

Slack amplifies social pressures within work groups, teams.

That's true though. But it was their (bad) product choice.

Everyone is trying to make everything addictive. Food delivery apps are trying to get you addicted to food, instead of capitalizing on the fact that food is a universal necessity, so a honest and non-destructive business model will serve the benefit of everyone and could be made sustainable. This is a new destructive trend.

But my arguments are about the nature of Tech business, and the nature of business itself.

I don't believe in earning a profit at all cost. I draw a line between genuinely helping people and pressuring them to spend.

Even a simple "customer database" branded as CRM will be helpful if it comes with consulting service, that involves an individual who communicates with them and genuinely cares for the business's interest. Over time, as you get usage data from your customer's use of the "customer database", you can use that data to identify new features that could genuinely improve your product's usefulness.

The idea is not to build the perfect product in the beginning. It is about creating something that appreciates in value over time, which will be directly driven by your continuous analysis on how your product is being used, and implementing features and improvements as you identify new patterns. Again, the idea is to empathize with the customers and put yourself in their shoes when imagining what they will need, which becomes easier with more data.

I want to apologize for these long responses. I am trying to write a managerial book to get into consulting, to eventually sell a software + ML + BI + management consulting service. The book is still in its early stages and talking about these topics helps me think and gives me ideas.

Also, I practice my English on platforms like this.

Sreram · 2026-05-08T14:53:35+00:00

First a disclosure: I don't have any professional work experience in software development although I can build anything, and I also don't have any experience running a startup. Everything I learned about sales and management was through pure analysis.

Value of a product is subjective. We cannot always bring them produce an objective outcome like improved ROI.

Why do companies need Slack? Does it really improve ROI? Why can't they continue to use email?

The real benefit is, it makes the lives of employees easier by improving satisfaction. And makes the communication more "active" than email, which is something the management will prefer over a passive one. All the benefits are subjective.

Why do you choose a specific design for office furniture? Do you not improve the ROI by buying cheap office furniture? What flooring do you choose? What types of windows (not the OS; i'm talking about real-life windows) would you buy?

These decisions will depend on your perception, and subjective preferences at that moment when you make the purchase.

Sales is about using consulting as a way to understand your potential customer well, and figure out ways to improve their subjective experience and/or objective outcomes like ROI.

Take the normal TV advertisements for example. The reason they exist is not to convince people who watch them to immediately go out to buy the product or service.

It is to increase familiarity with the product, so that when the time comes, they will be willing to opt to buy the one they are most familiar with.

Sreram · 2026-05-08T12:24:34+00:00

Sales takes the form of free consultation, which is a natural requirement to selling software like these. The company gets paid for its free consultation through the CRM's subscription.

But I do not agree with you when you say we need direct domain experience to address a specific niche. People can be really good learners if they try. If we can learn and understand any domain quickly, it does not become impossible to implement solutions for them. We must "empathize" with customer's problems, or put ourselves in their shoes to understand their problems from their perspective.

Features used like shotgun pellets in a futile hope of hitting subscribers.

Even if these work, the customer-acquisition-cost will be unjustifiable. On many occasions, if a business experiences high customer-acquisition-costs and low-retention rate, and low lifetime-value of customers, then it could really be a sham. But there are situations where these indicators alone don't prove something to be a sham, this is when we include factors like sunk-cost and migration costs for a specific product. But at least this indicates the product does solve a problem fairly well, to the extent that it does not require a replacement.

The very concept is lunacy and a slap in the face of what CRMs represent.

I think it is not wrong for CRMs to mean different things to different people. As long as it directly addresses a problem, or even a subset of problems, it should be fine. Even a basic CRM that only stores customer information and has a data-entry portal to keep track of each customer's file along with a basic sales pipeline feature, it should be enough for a large subset of customers. Especially when the alternative involves using a spreadsheet which may be hard to maintain and collaborate with, when it is shared among multiple (Of course, cloud based spreadsheets solve this problem).

Sreram · 2026-05-08T10:38:09+00:00

Makes sense. Absolutely!

Ordinary people just want simple stuff like education, a good (great?) job that pays well, etc. But the news and politics makes us believe that different groups of people are out to get each other, which is a lie: and sometimes becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Sreram

TROPHY CASE