pragatiE
Founding PM
COVID killed the event industry for over 2 years. Expos, exhibitions, company retreats, award functions, everything came to a halt and impacted multiple businesses and the industry was bleeding dry. So we came up with pragatiE, a virtual events platform that had a 3D environment and resembled a real event with features like an active marketplace, galleries, and the ability to conduct conferences. We built one of the best tools in the market.
The gap in the market
The events industry needed someone to pick them up and so we did. We realised that events that attracted 10s of thousands of people were being canceled left right and center because companies could not figure out an alternative, so we actively figured out who these players were, who were their decision makers and what were they looking for. We reached out to them, pitched our product and sold!
We also ran multiple ad campaigns for inbound leads catered mostly to small ticket buyers mostly corporations looking to do their annual events or schools looking to do the same.
Building in waterfall
pragatiE was a nascent product when I joined and it was barebones, but our clients wanted functionality and they wanted it quick. We also wanted to build the best product in the world and after analyzing and vetting feature requests, we built what we felt would give us most leverage in the long run, ensuring happy clients and a superb product being built in the process. Every new client we onboarded gave us more runway and the opportunity to build a truly outstanding product.
Selling dreams and using them to our advantage
When we were building pragatiE, if a new client came onboard and had an unusual request, we wouldn’t say no, or say that the feature doesn’t exist, instead we’d do our research and a feasibility check and come back with pricing to facilitate that. We basically sold dreams and used them to better our product in the process all on the customers dime.
Wearing every hat
At pragatiE, I learned the ropes of product management. I did everything for the product, I built the website, the pitch deck, the marketing material, the sales pitch, I understood the nitty gritties of technology, what we could offer and what wasn't possible, stack overflow became my friend and SDKs gave me hope. I learned to work cross functionally across development, design, marketing, sales, and data and brought in $200,000 in sales in a year, and managed all client expectations single handedly to the T.
The downfall and reasoning (pricing, management)
After covid restrictions were lifted, people went back offline and in hindsight, we should have pivoted. The problem was that our ticket size was too high, the management was misaligned and being my first product role, I did not have the authority to build it into a B2B2C SaaS that had a cheap entry price so we all went our separate ways.
