Startup’s today have biggest priority is creating a culture and finding people with the right mindset. “We want to work with creative mindsets that keep the ethos at the top and see solutions to the problems. But to find such individuals and form an environment which becomes a breeding ground for ideas and innovation is a challenging task,” says Aman Sharma, CoFounder & CTO of twimbit.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Aman Sharma.
Brief our audience about your journey as a business leader. What challenges have you had to face to get where you are today?
I was fortunate enough to have a very basic upbringing. My dad was a soldier in the Army and my mom was a homemaker. With some guidance from my teachers, I found what I wanted to be, an IT guy. It all sounds stupid, but back then, that’s what I wanted to do. Over the course of my college tenure, I did a lot of freelancing, hustling, internships, research collaboration abroad, and more. Fast forward, I had to choose between further education, a stable job, moving abroad with a startup or the toughest choice, working on my startup.
In the beginning, I wasn’t clear about what I was doing or what we were supposed to do. But after working with a brilliant team at twimbit, I think I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to continue doing for the next few years at least. Thinking BIG, but acting small for now, CTO and co-founder. Along with that, I am working for other organizations as well for noble causes. I am an Honorary technology advisor to Udayan Care, which is India’s biggest and internationally recognized childcare NGO. Also, I am working on finding breakthrough science in genetic donor matching using ML. And what’s a tech guy without opensource? I have founded and lead Mobile-web. dev, which is an open-source community for mobile web technologies. Meanwhile, I am also a member of Google AMP, Open-Source Initiative, Deeplearning.ai and a few others.
Describe twimbit’s offerings that address the needs of your customers.
twimbit is a platform for everyone, and we call it a place where the world discovers and shapes research. We realized that the research industry was highly fragmented and siloed. This led to only deep-pocketed companies funding research and getting insights, hence leading to a huge void for individuals and small businesses accessing insights.
twimbit helps in getting all the insights you need in just one place for all industries and brands. twimbit is personalized for your needs, so the right insights get to you instead of you finding the right keyword to find them. We see building a fair ecosystem for consumers and thought leaders to come together and grow with each other.
Enlighten us on how you have made an impact on this industry through your expertise in the industry.
A fresher perspective on the research industry has helped in revolutionizing things. We can trace back to the foundations of this industry and see if there is a better way of doing things. Moreover, we believe the world could be changed with combined efforts, which can only come through openness. Hence, we are opening our platform to all thought leaders and brands. Instead of building technology from the ground up, they can focus on their core and let us handle the rest.
What are the challenges you and your team at twimbit come across in your day-to-day operations?
We want to break free from the norm of individual efficiency and focus on system efficiency. A lot of companies don’t see this, which could eventually lead to a spiral of wasted engineering hours creating useless stuff that nobody uses. Hence, we focus on moving fast and experimenting instead of waiting for the perfect solution. Any day, experiments are running in each segment that gives us vitals and steers the team in the right direction. Like an Autopilot.
Taking into consideration, the current pandemic, and its impact on global economies, how are you driving your organization to sustain operations and ensure the safety of your employees at the same time?
Moving to a remote environment helped us see new ways to organise teams, but I am confident that we did far better than the counterpart in-person setup. Even before the pandemic, our focus was to have a digital-first and agile setup, so when things were remote, the system worked, and our productivity was boosted. Work-life balance for the team is still a critical area that is hard to manage, but now and then we try to focus on their personal needs and captive healthy balance.
Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drive twimbit.
I recently graduated from college and that is what is reflected in our culture as well. We promote a volunteer-driven environment where everyone has free will to work on any problem they want, and we are here like professors to guide them through the vision and help them at every step, but the final work is theirs. Keeping our prime focus on customer experience and product quality, and nothing else, lets the teamwork as creatively as possible. Open culture like this promotes ownership and more innovation while keeping beaurocracy aside.
Where do you envision yourself being in the long run and what are your future goals for twimbit?
In the future, we could see economies of scale in various domains using our platform as a fundamental fabric of the research ecosystem. While we are building twimbit, we are also creating other breakthroughs like the instabit format (bite-size research content), personalization (NLP based topic identification in content), a modern web stack that builds products every week, automation at every step and many more. But what’s even cooler is that we are opening these breakthroughs to others as well. We want to continue doing it and become a key vertical to be looked at, whether it’s technology, culture, research, or business. In short, keeping ourselves worthy of saying “where the world discovers and shapes research”.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs?
Focus and invest in your team and that’s what gets you to achieve what you want. For folks who have been in industry, I think a shift in mindset in how we distribute responsibility is needed. It shouldn’t be based on how much experience a person has, but how much impact he is bringing to the startup. Try to make a decision based on technical insights, not market insights or opinions. That’s what is closer to the customer and what one should be building for the market then follows.
