How I make $18K/mo with a niche podcast (STEAL THIS)

1. 0:00 – 1:21

   Exponential Growth Finally Happening

   1. AGAakash Gupta0:00

      I've now filmed over 80 podcasts with product leaders like Marty Cagan, Elyssa Perry, and Ravi Mehta. In today's episode, I'll break down everything I learned from filming those 80 podcasts, reaching 11,000 subscribers on YouTube, and reaching over 50,000 average listens per episode. Let's get into it. The first question is from my team: How is the podcast doing now? So I think in my 50th episode Q&A special, people were shocked to hear that I hadn't made much profit on the podcast yet, because I had advertisers, I had YouTube AdSense, I had money from Twitter. So the idea was, "Oh, you're probably making a ton of money on this podcast." But actually, my approach to growing almost all new businesses is to invest upfront so that you experience that Jack Butcher chart of nobody's listening, nobody's paying attention, to suddenly exponential growth. And that's what we're starting to see. We're at the very beginnings of the suddenly exponential growth on the podcast 80 episodes in. So that's how... Last time I filmed at 50 episodes, we were at 4.66K subscribers. At 80 episodes, we're at 11.1K subscribers on YouTube, and that's due to a couple different things. How did I grow this podcast, right? That's the question you wanna know. Number one,

2. 1:21 – 4:25

   How I Grew This Podcast

   1. AGAakash Gupta1:21

      consistency. Everybody says it, but publishing two podcast episodes a week is starting to create that habit within my readers. To do even better, I could publish on the same day of the week at the same time of the week, and the reason I haven't been able to do that is on the editing side. So I've been working on the editing side to increase the resources and team there. The second thing that's grown this podcast is improving the trailers. So if you looked at the trailers in our first 50 episodes versus the trailers in our last 15 episodes, we've substantially increased the investment in visual effects, in sound effects, and even in the clip choice. So I've gotten much more involved in what clips we're using, iterating with the team three or four times on what's in the trailer. So that has helped as well, is vastly improving the trailers. And the third thing is backing off from quality. I used to think that everything was about guest video and sound quality and my own video and sound quality, so I was making investments in that. Buying microphones for guests, buying cameras for guests, sending them to guests, working on the quality of my own setup infinitely, buying better and better equipment, more lights, different lights, better sound equipment, upgrading my mic again and again. That all plateaus off in benefit. I'd say it's kind of like a logistic chart. As you keep spending, each amount that you spend reduces impact until it almost flatlines. Now, I'm not at the point of the curve where it's flatlining. There's still a lot more I could do. I could have a producer. I could have a camera guy. I could have all of my cameras being at the quality of my highest camera. I could improve the lenses that I'm using to be prime lenses for the focal lengths I need them. So there's still a lot I can do and, in general, I can learn a lot more about lighting and set design. I just spent 52 minutes with ChatGPT iterating on what you guys are seeing here. So if you look at what you're seeing in the back here, all this lighting, some of that stuff should look better than the last episode, and that's my personal approach. I took this advice from MrBeast and other YouTube creators. Make each video 1% better, but try not to do it in a way that's so cost-intensive. So my big shift has been that I've been focusing on profit, and I'm excited to say that this podcast is now generating significant profit for me every month. Because I've been able to grow the podcast, I've been able to attract better advertisers, and I've been able to tap into much more YouTube AdSense money. So the podcast is doing way better at 80 episodes. Thank you guys so, so much for listening. And the final thing I'll say, although it's not one of the key factors for my growth, is that I have been improving interview guides. I've been im- improving podcast style, podcast topics, podcast recency, and my own skills as a podcaster. My team has gotten more involved in the research before we have a podcast episode, so there's still a lot of growth for me to do there. If I compare myself to other podcast hosts, I think that a lot of them are further along this line because they film more episodes and perhaps they were naturally better at it or they had a better team around them. I still need to continue to do what I can on the curve that I am to improve. The next question

3. 4:25 – 8:47

   Learning From 80 Episodes

   1. AGAakash Gupta4:25

      is from our second most popular podcast guest, Pavel Hern, my good friend. He asked, "What have you learned from doing 80 episodes of the podcast?" And this is an interesting question. What have I learned, right? So there's a couple dimensions we could talk about. There's the product management dimension of how... what I've learned on product management. Then there's the careers, growth, job searching dimension. So both of those dimensions really could actually club those together into the content dimension. Then there's the building content side of things, and then there's life and how this podcast fits in with my business. So let's talk briefly about dimensions one and three, and since we did a lot on d- two, we won't do as much here. So the first dimension is, what have I learned in product management? The very thing I've learned is that there is a lot of changes happening in 2025 in product management compared to 2020 or 2015 when I was in product management, even 2010. The rate of change of product management is actually increasing, and that's because of increased focus on efficiency, the introduction of AI, increased scrutiny on what the PM to engineer ratio should be, increased scrutiny on whether product management, project management, technical program management, product owners, agile coaches are delivering the ROI they promised over the last 20 years. All those things have meant that PMs have had to pick up new skills like AI prototyping and AI evals top amongst them. They've also have to figure it out how to write good AI PRDs and AI strategies. So from a technology point of view, AI is one of those platform shifts like mobile or cloud. It's actually changing product management.Then there's the dimension of content, and we talked a little bit about, in the last question, how that's doing. But I will say that what I have firmly learned is that talking about what's new... When you're in a podcast just talking about totally timeless stuff, you know, I have some episodes that I thought would do amazingly well, like a timeless interview with the author of Decode and Conquer, Lewis Lin. That's one of the lower viewed and lower listened to episodes out there. On the other hand, episodes like Pavel's, who asked this question, the complete course for AI product management, are soaring. And so I've learned that recency and talking about what's new in a podcast really help. In my newsletter, I do a lot more timeless stuff, and people tend to love that. And so over there, I've kept more timeless stuff. The final question is: What have I learned in terms of my business? Like Pavel, he runs a paid newsletter, for instance. I run a paid newsletter as well. Does it make sense for a paid newsletter creator to set up a podcast? For me personally, I think it does make sense, but the question is, A, will you be able to hire a team around you that'll be able to support the newsletter and podcast? Because a podcast is almost 50% of my time now, so I need to be able to have great efficiency with the podcast and newsletter so that the quality of either of those doesn't go down. The second question is, you know, do you have that desire to build more businesses, build more platforms, branch out, or do you wanna be that singularly focused person? And it's really a fundamental question. You know, we have Levels.io. He's creating tons of startups. On the other hand, we just had on the podcast Brett from DesignJoy. He's focused in on one startup. So you can decide, do you wanna do one or do you wanna do a bunch? And in my case, I like doing two things. I think two is probably the most. I sort of have a third and fourth segment of my business, too, 'cause I have coaching and sponsorship. So I kind of have four segments, but the way I think about coaching is I price that really cheaply below my normal revenue, and I use that as feedback for what to talk about in the newsletter and the podcast, and I also use it as research for the newsletter. So that's how I think about the coaching component of my business. And then the sponsorships component of my business, frankly, I would love to have zero sponsorships. No sponsorships whatsoever. The reason I need to have sponsorships where I'm at in my current stage in life is I am talking to you guys from Venice, California. This is three to four times more expensive than where I was living in Durham, North Carolina. So to generate the lifestyle I want right now, it makes sense for me to continue accepting sponsorships. So that's how podcast fits into my overall business. In terms of the profit I'm generating for the podcast, the percentage it's driving is increasing, and my forecast is that it could become over 50% of the profit I'm generating two to three years down the line as I really grow this thing and improve my skills. The next question is: How can a podcast earn you money? Another

4. 8:47 – 10:03

   How Podcasts Make Money

   1. AGAakash Gupta8:47

      one from my team. I think that podcasts, they can primarily drive revenue through YouTube AdSense and sponsorships, as well as potential exclusivity contracts you sign with people like Spotify. So those are the three main areas. In terms of sponsorships, you can do paid ads and you can do paid guests. I personally don't do paid guests, and the reason is I don't want to decrease my loyal subscribers. But I do do paid sponsorships, and those paid sponsorships for me, the way to think about it is what type of quality do you wanna start off with from the get-go? Some people, they want to edit the podcast themselves and use free Riverside tools, and that's completely fine for them. Then they might be able to start off without any sponsorships, and eventually when they get the YouTube AdSense, they can then afford the editors, et cetera. For me personally, I wanted to be generating money on something because if I invest more time in my newsletter, I make a lot more money. But if I'm then taking some of that newsletter time and putting it into the podcast and not making money, that doesn't seem like a good win for me financially. So based on my life circumstance of needing to provide family of two young kids in Los Angeles, for me, I wanna make money on the podcast. So I've had sponsorships, and I almost think about this as putting a link in your LinkedIn post. That's gonna decrease your impressions. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro.

5. 10:03 – 11:55

   Ad

   1. AGAakash Gupta10:03

      Let me ask you something. How many tools are you juggling just to get a single project across the finish line? One for brainstorming, another for planning, something else for tracking tickets. That's where Miro comes in. It becomes an all-in-one collaboration workspace. Whether you're consolidating user research from several interviews, developing and synthesizing product briefs or a wireframe, or project managing development, Miro brings everyone into the same space. It's fast, intuitive, and fully loaded with features like project templates, two-way Jira sync, and integration with software like draw.io and PlantUML. Miro's AI features can be used to synthesize elements in a board to develop a ready-to-review product requirements document in seconds. If you're tired of tab overload and scattered workflows, try Miro. Head to miro.com and see why over 90 million users choose Miro to guide from idea to outcome. AI evals are one of the most important skills for PMs, and I know you know they matter. The question is, are you doing them right? Most teams are winging it with basic metrics and hoping for the best. Meanwhile, the teams that actually ship reliable AI, they've cracked the code on systematic evaluation. Today's episode is brought to you by the AI Evals for Engineers and PMs course by Hamel Hussein and Shreya Shankar. This live Maven course will teach you the battle-tested frameworks from Hamel and Shreya, who are the engineers behind GitHub Copilot's evaluation system and 25-plus production AI implementations. Four weeks, live instruction. Next cohort starts July 21st. Start shipping AI that actually works.Enroll at maven.com with my code ag-product-growth for over $800 off. That's ag-product-growth

6. 11:55 – 15:48

   My Dream Job: OpenAI

   1. AGAakash Gupta11:55

      But it's gonna increase your click. In the case of a podcast, it's gonna decrease your growth rate, but it's gonna increase your profitability at the beginning. So do you want to invest at the beginning, in which case potentially don't have sponsorships early on, or do you wanna make money from the get-go, in which case have sponsorships, which is what I do. The final thing I'll say is that I actually created this podcast because I had so many people reaching out to me saying, "I wanna sponsor you. I wanna advertise with you." There was so much demand for advertisement that I couldn't meet, and so the podcast played that role of filling that demand gap. So that's how you can make money from a podcast. Okay, I love this con- question. This is from Atheer Abdul Raoof, who is one of my great friends, also one of the podcast guests that came on recently. He said, "If you had to drop content, not make money from content anymore, and work for one company, what company would it be and why?" I think for me, this is pretty much a no-brainer. I would wanna work at OpenAI. And the reason I would wanna work at OpenAI isn't even because I think OpenAI is the model that I use the most. I actually, to be honest, don't use ChatGPT that much. I actually prefer working on Grok or Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude 4 Sonic for the most part. Although my workflow these days is that I'll drop my prompt into all four tools, and I'll just look at the answers for all four tools, and I'll kind of blend together the answers from all four tools. So that's my current workflow, but I'll say that of those four tools, ChatGPT is like 10, maybe 15% of the time what I choose. What I choose much more often, actually these days, is Grok. So a lot of people don't know that because they don't pay for a Twitter subscription, so they don't have access to Grok. But Grok is really fast. It's really good at searching the web. It's pretty good at not hallucinating. It's good at talking in a tone I like. It's good at not engagement baiting. So overall, I think it's a pretty good product right now. And when it comes to writing, I'm often using Gemini 2.5 Pro. So I had filmed a video a couple months ago about how I shifted a lot of my workload from ChatGPT to Claude. Now I've shifted a lot of that Claude workload to Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok. And so the model situation is always changing. But the reason OpenAI is so exciting is, number one, they are the market leader, so they have all the consumers when it comes to AI. And I particularly like consumer growth problems. I know Claude is doing well with developers, and so is Gemini Nano and different products like that. But for me, I think that what OpenAI has with consumers is gonna give it the type of data flywheel where it could win with enterprise and business if needed as well, because it has such a far lead. Like when you look at ChatGPT versus Claude, it's like a 30, 40Xing. Same with Grok and Gemini. And so I'm not sure that those products can really come up and win against Claude. And Claude is really a great product, but it's not getting distributed. So overall, I think the real winner is gonna be OpenAI in AI. They also, number two, have so much investment. So all those dollars that is coming in, and Sam Altman's ability to be a visionary leader and invest ahead of the curve, I think gives them a strong leg up. And finally, I think it's a really, really cool place to learn. I feel like they have a really high talent density. I love a lot of the people who work there. Bringing in Jony Ive, it just shows me that they could become the Apple of AI, the $3 trillion behemoth that really is pulling the S&P 500 up for years and years. So the type of PPU return that you could get, profit participation unit, which is what they pay you there instead of RSUs, I think would be extremely high financially. So I think it can make a huge impact on the world. I think I could learn a lot and have a lot of fun and make impact on the company, and I think I could have a fantastic financial return for myself at OpenAI. Now let's do a question that I got on a podcast I was recently on, the "Everything Product" podcast hosted by Sid Saladi. How AI can leverage, help optimize resume and some of the cover letters too? Yeah. If you want, I can show you how this

7. 15:48 – 21:21

   AI Resume Transformation Demo

   1. AGAakash Gupta15:48

      is done. Let's just show you- Yeah ... a live demo here. So- That could be awesome ... what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a look at a resume here. So I just went to my ultimate guide for PM resumes. I pulled one of the resumes that I had there, okay? And what I have done is I've actually tested all the models. As of publishing late May 2025, this is gonna blow your mind, guys. Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best at this. Not Claude, not Grok, not ChatGPT, not DeepSeek. It's Google Gemini 2.5 Pro. And so what you'll do is you'll go into AI Studio and you'll pull up Google Gemini 2.5 Pro. You'll take your resume, you'll copy it. Interestingly, Google Gemini can also just hook straight into your Google Drive, but I just prefer the simple way. So I say, "Hey, I'm Sally. This is my resume. I want to apply for the job description below my resume. I want to create a totally tailored resume for that job." I know, and let's take a look at that job now. This is a job of director of product management at Epic Games. What do we know about Epic Games? They only like to hire people with gaming backgrounds. I actually worked there, so I know that. Um, she, Sally, she worked at Spotify Smule Shazam. She worked in music. So she is qualified for this job because it's music. However, she has no gaming background. So she's gonna also let G- Gemini know, "I know that Epic Games really values gaming experience, and I don't have that. Although I did work at Smule, which makes music games. We need to make my resume scream in every bullet, 'I'm qualified for this role. Don't ignore me just because I don't have gaming background.'"Please share back a version of my resume totally customized for this job. With this extra people are also learning prompt engineering. Yes, you need to write a good prompt. The better your prompt, the better the output. If you just do a l- bad prompt, good luck with you. I even will say something like, "I really need this job. It's my top job. Act as a professional resume writer who is an expert, e.g., Aakash Gupta." Right? So if you put that in there, now you do your resume. So you copy and paste your resume, pull out this part, and then job description. Well, we don't actually need this part. Um, yeah, there we go. Only put in the relevant stuff too, 'cause you don't really wanna confuse it, right? And then I usually like to add again, "Now share my updated resume," right at the end. 'Cause we had so much context, you don't wanna get it confused, right? And so the cool thing about Gemini 2.5 Pro, unlike the other AI models, is it's not gonna just quickly go. It's actually gonna do a really nice job. It's actually running like 15 prompts in the back end, where it's figuring out exactly what it needs to do, creating a new prompt, creating a new prompt, creating a new prompt. So it's gonna keep working. It's gonna take like-- It usually takes like 80 seconds, but that 80 seconds is a lot faster than it would've taken you. So it would've taken me, Sally, you know, used to take me 15 minutes almost to customize a resume. Watch this, though. We're gonna cut that 15 minutes into about a minute. And so you can see it's finalizing the resume now. It's also telling you all the things it's doing. It's optimizing the narrative. It's connecting the dots. It's reframing for impact. It's reframing the narrative, and boom. So it's come up with your new resume. Let's take a look at it, and let's see if it's any good. Immediately, her summary talks about music and interactive entertainment. It emphasizes Mule because that has the gaming. She talks directly about directly aligning with Epic and Fortnite. And then in her things, if you look here, orchestrated a company-wide user retention workstream. It's very different from what we had before. Every single bullet has been customized for what this job description was asking. This company w- this job description was asking for a company-wide retention workstream. So what's her very first bullet? Now it's not data-driven strategy, it's company-wide retention workstream. Every single bullet here is now totally customized for that job, and within one or two minutes of editing this version here that Gemini Pro has, she's ready to drop the resume. So that is the power of AI and good prompting, is you can go from generic resume to a highly customized resume that screams to the A- AI applicant tracking system and the recruiter and the hiring manager, "Yes, this is the right person." Now let's do another clip from a podcast I was on, this time with David Pereira, "Untrapping Product Teams." How you, Aakash, use

8. 21:21 – 31:17

   AI Prototyping Revolution

   1. AGAakash Gupta21:21

      AI. How do you recommend people to do it? Yeah, let's do it. So I think we gotta start with the sexiest use case- Oh ... people haven't been doing it yet, is AI prototyping. And I think that the AI prototype is fundamentally changing what it means to be a product manager. Before, we lived in the world of documents and creating some detailed PRDs. We weren't close enough to the pixels. And I'm gonna show you in a second why PRDs are important. PRDs are gonna help you create a great prototype. So what we're gonna do actually is we're gonna say, "Okay, we wanna use bolt.new for our prototype." What's the role of a PRD? I think before you might spend two weeks writing a PRD. Now, I think you and I, we can write a PRD in two to three minutes. And what AI do I recommend? I think people might be surprised, but I think today, as of publishing in early June 2025, the most powerful AI model for this is actually Gemini 2.5 Pro. So what I think you should do is you should think about two key elements to your prompt engineering as you're building a PRD, right? So let's choose a very common product so that we can create a nice product prototype. So let's say we're building, uh, video podcasts for Apple Podcasts. As people may know, right, Apple doesn't have video. So I'm a PM at Apple. Um, now what you wanna do is say, "What is the context that the AI does not have, and what is the output format that you want?" These are the two key elements. So the context, let's start there, right? We haven't built video for a few reasons. The number one reason is scale, right? We're gonna have to host way more content and supply that on phones. Podcasts would take up way more space. And right now, people use them for offline usage, right? For when they're driving and there's less service or on the plane with no Wi-Fi, right? That's what people are using podcasts for. They're used to zero latency. So we need to build itWhere we can load low quality pretty much quickly, and then upgrade over time if we have a good connection. So that's like one area of context. And then another area of context might be, hey, Spotify, Spotify, our main podcast competitor, they actually have been focusing on video more, right? Video and podcasts more. So this is a competitive move for them. Um, we need to come up with a full version for the next WWDC, right? At Apple, we don't really do like MVPs, right? So this is like really important context. And I would say if you can add even more context here, potentially adding meeting notes. Let's say you met with some of the key execs. One of the key execs at Apple who would have a say in this, his name is Craig Federighi. So you would say, "Okay, I met with Craig Federighi," right? And, um, Craig Federighi, and he said Tim would be on board, the CEO, if we can figure out the space issue. Um, and then, you know, you want to add, continue more, add more things like, you know, the metrics that we really care about at the Apple Podcasts team are-- And what do we think? You know, for me, I think, what do you think? But I'm guessing it's more like, you know, MAUs- Mm-hmm. Podcast listening time, um, total, uh, MAUs versus Spotify, right? Those are probably like the key things that they really care about. So then you-- That's given your context. Now you say like output. So like I want this output to be really good for Bolt.new [chuckles] to create a prototype, first of all, right? So it needs to be specific on the user stories. And then let's say, you know, you have a template. Um, we have a template at Apple for PRDs as well, you know. Um, we always include guardrail twip-twip- tripwire metrics. We include, uh, relation to the strategy, and we have an impact si- estimated impact sizing maybe, right? Those are the interesting things. All the things are standard. So now we have a good prompt. And then finally, we want to add in some bonus. [chuckles] So I call these incentives. Um, please develop a champion-level response as if you're the number one PM in the world. I really need this to keep my job. I'll give you a $1 million bonus, and if you don't do it, I'll hurt you, right? If you come up with all these incentives for the AI, it actually helps. So now let's go ahead and see how Google Gemini 2.5 Pro deals with this, you know, prompt that we wrote together pretty fast- Yeah ... off the top of our head. And so it's cool to watch it happen, actually. It's gonna like tackle the space issue. It's gonna develop detailed stories. It's gonna formulate the user stories, expand core user stories. So it's gonna prioritize video features. It's gonna be very interesting to see like how it develops the onli- offline consumption. And what I love about Gemini 2.5 Pro versus some of the other models is you don't get this chain of thought reasoning, because as we go back to this PRD, we're not gonna accept the first version of the PRD that it gives us. We're actually gonna iterate and improve. And so that thinking is gonna help us. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make this a little wider so it's easier to read. All right, so we've got an introduction. This is good. Seamless offline experiences. Relation to Apple's strategy. This is nice. So we asked it for this relation to this strategy. It's talking about services growth, empowering creators. We got the target audience, goals and objectives. These are the user stories that are gonna be really interesting, right? Mm-hmm. And we want-- Because we want to build an interactive prototype, because I think that the days of this just having a PRD are over, right? Who's gonna read this huge, long thing, right? So I think when we look at this, we want to give it a little bit more feedback, right? I think, first of all, it has metrics in two places. Um, it's not really clear what the prototype should be. It's probably a little bit wordy. Um, and then I think the impact sizing should be with the metrics. So let's go ahead and make those changes. Good. Now make a specific one for Bolt on creating a prototype to visualize this for my team to get buy-in. Focus less on all the fluff. Have just one section for metrics and include impact size estimate right there. Um, focus mainly on some specific user stories to include in the prototype, not a hodgepodge of everything, right? So now we give it this feedback, and I always recommend you keep giving it this feedback, not just accepting that first version, like we said. You want to add your own taste in here. You could add even more, but here it's selecting the prototype stories. It's slim- streamlining the narrative. Now, this looks way better, right? How you people are gonna identify video content, how people are gonna see the playback initiation. So we have these different journeys. We may want to fixate on one or two for the prototype. Intelligent downloading.Yeah. So we can then ask it, "Hey, hey, for the PRD, we want to include one prototype. What journey should we include to get the buy-in from Craig and Tim?" Right? Those are the two execs that we want this prototype to drive buy-in for. So it's gonna think about that. It's gonna define this core journey, right? I think in playback controls and flexibility makes a lot of sense because that addresses the space issue that they wanted, right? So now we got it. So it's got all these-- It's got a very clear idea of what these different screens are gonna be, what this journey is gonna look like. Okay. Create the final instructions for the AI prototyping tool based on this that are super specific and clear. And that's the last step with our PRD. So if you look at this, it probably took us like six, seven minutes to create a very tight PRD with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Now we're gonna go ahead and copy this into bolt.new and see how it creates a prototype. Because what I say is like a picture is a thousand words, a prototype is 10,000 words. [chuckles] That's awesome. Hey, let

9. 31:17 – 33:04

   Ad

   1. AGAakash Gupta31:17

      me take a quick break to talk about something that's completely changed my product management workflow: Linear. As a PM, I was drowning in tools, one for planning, another for issue tracking, roadmaps and sheets, and jumping between Slack, Intercom, and app reviews just to piece together customer feedback. Sound familiar? I was spending more time keeping systems in sync than actually building product. Every time development kicked off, my carefully crafted plans would immediately need updating. I was the human API between all our teams, constantly chasing updates and translating between tools. That's why I love Linear. I can capture customer feedback, shape product ideas collaboratively, quarterback cross-functional teams, and monitor development progress in one place. It cuts through the maze of disconnected systems that were complicating my life. Product teams at OpenAI, Vercel, Brex, and Cash App all use Linear. If you're tired of spending your days keeping different tools and teams in sync, check out Linear at linear.app/partners/aakash. That's linear.app/partners/aakash. Today's episode is brought to you by the AI PM certification on Maven. Run by Miqdad Jaffer, who is a product leader at OpenAI, this is not your typical course. It's eight weeks of live cohort-based learning with a leader at one of the top companies in tech. OpenAI just doesn't stop shipping, and this is your chance to learn how. Run along with product faculty and Mo Ali, the course has a 4.9 rating with 133 reviews. Former students come from companies like OpenAI, Shopify, Stripe, Google, and Meta. The best part? Your company can probably cover the cost. So if you want to get $500 off, use my code AAKASH25 and head to maven.com/product-faculty. That's M-A-V-E-N.com/product-faculty. Issues. Ooh. All right. Uh, so I'm gonna paste in our prototype here, maybe remove the 16.5 seconds that it took.

10. 33:04 – 40:42

    Live Prototype Building Demo

    1. AGAakash Gupta33:04

       I'm already signed in. All right. So now you can see that Bolt is creating. It's gonna think for a little bit. You can actually watch Bolt think too, which is cool. Um, we told it a little bit about the prototype instructions. It seems like it got a little confused, actually. Uh, here we go. Now it got it. There appears to be a long set of instructions. So now it's figured it out. Took a second. [chuckles] And yeah, now it's creating an active prototype with a clean iOS-like experience. It understands the features, so it's-- You often wanna reread these back when you're using these tools, just to make sure while it's building. So episode list, perfect. Interactive download model, modal, storage management. Right, 'cause storage management is the key feature that we- Yeah. ... wanna really talk about here, right? We don't wanna just show video podcasts, so that's good. Default preferences. Okay, so it's, it's kind of ambitious. So if we need to, we might need to have it pull back and not build all of that, just build one thing at a time. But it's gonna get started, and so what's cool to see also is you can actually watch this coding in action. So you can see it's building all these pages. So it's building a settings screen. You can see it's built... It's gonna build download progress. It's build download options modal, episode item. Episode list is what it's building now. It's gonna build settings screen. So one of the things that we talk about, right, in terms of what are the skills you need to become an AI-powered PM, reading code is very important. So if this code that I've been showing you is really scary, that's not a good thing, right? You wanna be able to be very flexible with this code. So cool. What does it got here, right? So it's created an interactive prototype that simulates the download management experience. So that's the storage issue that Tim and Craig were worried about. So if you download, you get to see, okay, do we want it standard? Do we want it audio only? Yeah, maybe the person only wants it audio only. And then this one, you know, maybe they actually wanna go high definition. And then here, maybe they just wanna say, "Ah, I'm tired of that. I wanna set a download preference standard." Perfect. It takes you into settings, and then it lets you do that. So now it's downloading them, and it's really clever because it's addressing kind of the key concern. Now, we might say, "Okay, let's edit this." It doesn't look like the Apple Podcasts app right now, so we need to make it look like that. And I think one of the things that helps actually is to go ahead and search, like, Apple Podcasts and let it see also what that looks like, you know? Um, and so here, uh, let's go ahead and open in Podcasts as well. So I'm gonna open thisIn my own app. It looks the exact same there, but I'm gonna go ahead and use that screen, right? So I'll use my screen here from Apple Podcasts, and I'm gonna paste that in as a screenshot. So I'll say, there-- This is what mine currently looks like. We need to figure out how to integrate download settings there, as well as show what quality was downloaded automatically and make it easy to change setting automatically if you want, right? So that's like where you edit the thing. You give it a little bit more guidance. So let's go ahead and see, and it's fun to watch it think here. I know this... add a sidebar, create a proper header, update the episode cards. So now it's gonna go in and it's gonna start to work on some of this. I'm not sure exactly what this is. Failed to resolve import. Looks like it solved it, that issue itself, so sometimes it will just solve those issues itself. Other times, you need to do a little bit more reading. But look, this looks so much closer to-

    2. SPSpeaker37:28

       Mm-hmm

    3. AGAakash Gupta37:28

       ... an Apple Podcasts app now, right? And so it's quickly updating these things. Sometimes it's also good to look at what it's updating. So you can see, okay, it's creating some video cards, created some episode cards, episode list. All right. Then you can go back into the preview. Boom. So now it's actually looking like a podcast app, right? Something we can actually put in front of Craig and Tim. So if we click Download, we can see that. Um, good. So probably one thing that's wrong with this is, like, some episodes should auto-download, and it should show whether they are audio, SD, HD as a tag, right? Kind of under where it says the episode name in a sort of icon. Um, not every should be manual download. So you give it these feedbacks as you're improving your own prototype. And one of the best ways to use one of these tools is actually to investigate multiple different prototypes. So sometimes what I'll do is I might even open up another AI prototyping, like lovable.dev, which is a good competitor, and say, "Hey, uh, let's keep-- Let's give it the same instructions here." So I might need to log in. So I'll also paste this into Lovable just to compare a little bit. Another good tool is, uh, V0, so sometimes I'll even put it into that. But let's go back to our Bolt. Okay, so it's kind of added in that we have a video instead of SD audio, and then this one is audio auto, and then this one you can choose to download, and it has some options. So I think this is a nice PRD, right? So this is suddenly that really long PRD item that we had. Now it's much better. And so what you can do is you can deploy this. So you can deploy this to Netlify, and then it'll create it as an app that other people can also use, which is really useful. So now if you see here, you have our site that we can just include. And so if you have a PRD format that we originally-- If you remember, the original PRD we created was so long. Here it is. If you add in this prototype now, how much better is your PRD, right? Everybody is able to immediately understand, okay, he's solved the storage management issue. You can go into a product review with Craig and Tim and say, "Hey, we're gonna build something like this," where it automatically shows you this is audio automated downloaded, this is a video downloaded. It's gonna have these smart systems to handle video. And so that's the type of AI-powered PMing that you can see. Before, PMs were never into the pixels, but here they've been able to actually get in and help influence things. All right, guys, so let's move into the roadmap to becoming a product manager section of this with a couple Q&A questions from you

11. 40:42 – 48:33

    Why 2025 Great For PMs

    1. AGAakash Gupta40:42

       guys.All right. This question is from Moksha Shah. "I'm currently pursuing my master's in information systems. I have over five years of experience in data and analytics. I'd love to understand the opportunities available for emerging product managers, especially as AI continues to reshape the industry. I'm feeling a bit uncertain about the next steps in my career." I think this is a really important question that people new to product management, people with four to five years career experience, they're looking at the layoffs in product management. They're looking at the headlines that AI is gonna replace product managers. They're looking at the headlines that AI is gonna allow developers to do everything or design engineers to do everything, and they're looking at the lay- headlines that lay- entry-level jobs aren't doing well, and they're saying, "Gosh, I don't know if product management is a great long-term career." So here's my hot take. I think 2025 is a great time to become a product manager, and I think the outlook for product management in mid-2025 is like doctor or lawyer or engineer. It's one of those careers that I would say those tiger parents or those parents requesting, like Indian parents like mine, requesting that you become a doctor or engineer really add to the pantheon of, "Okay, this is one of those careers that people could succeed in and make a huge impact," and here's why. The type of work when you look at a product manager's calendar that takes up their day, a lot of that work, 75% of that work is what I would call people work. You are in meetings aligning stakeholders, understanding partner teams' requests, explaining to sales and marketing what you've built so that they can market it, working with customer success to understand bugs and customer support feedback to improve the product. Most of this, while it has a component of each product manager and customer success could create its own data API where it sends the data to an AI agent which comes up with the product requirement, most of this is actually people-level coordination where you need to be sending Slack messages, you need to be hopping on a Zoom call or joining up in person for an in-person meeting or whiteboarding session to understand how do we solve this problem together. There is the factual basis of things, but more importantly, right, on this side, there is the shared understanding that different stakeholders come. That part, that people work, I think that's gonna be the last thing to be taken over by AI. So as long as people are working in company, we're going to need product managers to help build the product work around it. And in the future, if AI coding tools really become so good that you're just prompting them, and AI design tools really become so good that you're just prompting them, then a product manager will be the perfect person to prompt those. So in my opinion, it has really good job security. From the fundamental first principles of what does this job spend time on, how does it deliver positive value to the company, why is the company hiring it, right? Some of the derogatory things that you hear about product management from executives are they're kind of our highly paid MBA secretary, making sure that they execute on our idea. Well, if that's a derogatory thing that you hear about product managers, it also shows that that thing needs to exist, right? And it's a people job around that. So that's the first reason that I think product management has a really bright future. The second reason is that the people themselves in product management, so the 400,000 people in the US, the 2.2 million people globally who are product managers, these folks are generally very high performers. They went to top schools. They performed at the top of their class. Or if they didn't, once they got into a work environment, they performed really well. Maybe they were a strong engineer with strong product thinking who got into product and got promoted into product because they're good at that, or maybe they're a customer success person who is really ambitious and diligent, and so they got into product. Like, these are the types of people who make it and stay in product management. There are a lot of, you know, low-quality people who come in, but then they get rifled out of the industry. The people who manage to stay for 15 to 16 years, the people who are helming the industry are top performers, and you can see that today. You look at people like the CPOs I bring onto this show. Look at Jeremy Epling, the CPO of Vanta. That man is razor sharp, top performer for his whole life. Those are the types of people who are in product management, and so they have proven themselves very adaptable. Uh, if you look at it, product management recently has just adapted from being a little bit more product metric focused to business metric focused, right? It did that very quickly and seamlessly over the last couple years. Same with AI now. Product managers are shifting from PRDs to evals. Product management people are picking up AI prototyping tools. So there's this fundamental shift that product managers constantly willing to make and constantly willing to pivot to where is the ROI in the business for my high salary. So I think they'll be able to adapt into the future. And then the final reason that I think product management has a really bright future is the early signs from the data. So if you look at the data, of course, you know, we had tons of product management openings at the end of COVID, and that was honestly zerped overinflated. But now if you look at the metrics, we are 50% up from the low. And so we're seeing a strong and steady growth back to the field. And when you look at the field as a whole over the last 20 years, it's only been growing at 3% per year. It's one of the slow-growing fields, but steady, and that's what I predict for product management. The amount of money spent on product managers might even be growing faster than 3% because their salaries have been growing so fast. So overall, the market size of company spend on product management is high and growing fast. My opinion, product management has a really bright future. So now the question becomes, "I am an emerging product manager. I'm a career switcher. I have five years of data and analytics experience. How do I take that and find a product management job?" Of course, there's so much we could break down here, but the most important thing to see is what do you have as a unique edge compared to other people who are pursuing this product management career. And-... as career switchers. So typically, there are two forms of edge. The first is that you're at a particular company, and I think this is a very powerful one. You should try to join a company in what you're an expert in. So if they're an expert in data, I would say get close to product and become a product analyst. So you're a product analyst, and then you prove out while you're working with the PM that you're doing great PM stuff, customer discovery, evals, those types of activities, and you eventually get transferred in. That's one really good edge. The other second good edge is, okay, I'm really good at data and information systems. Maybe, um, you even used Tableau as a product when you were a data analyst. Think about becoming a product manager for Tableau or a company trying to build the next Tableau. That can be very, very effective because you really under- you are the customer. And in fact, when it comes down to discussions as a product manager later, you can say, "As a customer, this is how I thought about it." And people will say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, you were the customer. You were the buyer." That's super interesting feedback. So it gives you a lot of authority to stand on, so it's a really good edge. So those are the two opportunities. Obviously, as a career switcher, you're generally gonna take a level down, which is unfortunate. So let's say you're a senior product analyst, you might become a product manager. And I think that that, unfortunately, is just the entry cost of career switching these days, and you should be willing to take it, even if it is a slight hit on finances. And if you can't handle that slight hit on finances, try to go to a bigger company because they very often will match what you're earning now. So that's how you can break in as an emerging PM. All right, so this next question is from Abhijeet Chaudhary. "What skills should new grads develop to keep themselves relevant in the fast-paced changing landscape of AI?" Okay, so here's your roadmap to the top skills that we need to think about when it comes to AI PM, and I'll target this to new grads at the end of it. So for AI PM, the top

12. 48:33 – 53:17

    AI PM Skills Roadmap

    1. AGAakash Gupta48:33

       skills right now are AI strategy, AI basics, AI PRDs, AI prototyping, AI evals, and now the latest, AI agents. So on the five of these, I have specific newsletter articles that you should go read which have next steps built into them. And on AI agents, I'm currently writing a newsletter article, which will be out in like two weeks. So check out these resources, and they are going to help you understand what this AI product management is as a new grad. So let's go to this new grad life, right? I think you should build a business right now. So you should go to V0 or Lovable and create a prototype, and then export that into Cursor or Windsurf and start building out this product. Um, I even think choose a red ocean market that you think has a lot of products, but one that you personally pay for a product for. So maybe you are really into weightlifting, and so you pay for the Renaissance Periodization training app. Go create a better training app. Think about, "What are my user problems with this RP app?" Think about every single one, then create the RP app, but solve those user problems one by one. And each new feature you release, solve new problems, and get new users, and market the thing so that you get even more customer feedback and start responding to customer feedback, and then start understanding, "Okay, how do I prioritize these bugs and errors versus these new features and new user problems? How do I reduce the bloat that my product is facing over time?" Those fundamental product exercises are gonna teach you so much. And try to build AI into your product. So then think about, "Okay, what are the AI things that I would do?" You know, right now everybody's trying to build an AI agent. How do I build an AI agent into the RP app? Okay, maybe the AI agent is going to go and automatically fetch data from my Whoop, my Apple Watch, and it's going to create a training plan that it's gonna text message me. Awesome. So you create this workflow, then you work backwards to, "How do I create this agent?" And you're gonna learn so much doing that. So that's the roadmap, master AI PM as a new grad. Now let's talk about growing products. This question comes from Levaughn Hall. "I've built out a V1 MVP. What's your advice on finding that first customer who will pay and start building that early momentum? The long-term vision is to 10X executive coaches. V1 is focused on reducing friction and improving accountability at the client onboarding stage and in between sessions." So if you think that you have fundamentally built a V1 MVP, that means it is a viable product. The next thing I would do is figure out what's your early beta group, right? We're talking about executive coaches. It's a small world. So find your three friends and say, "Hey, I want you to use this app, and I want you to upgrade this MVP to an MLP, a minimum lovable product." You want to get them to say, "Levaughn," or you, app creator, "I love this thing. I am using this thing a lot. This is solving major problems for me. I can't live without this app." So you need to keep shipping features to that app. You need to keep reworking the design. You need to improve your notifications, all of those things until your three executive coach friends love this app. Once they love this app, which you should try to sprint towards in, like, a month by texting them, like, every single day and shipping features every single day, is you wanna go public. You wanna launch. And what you want to be doing in those 30 days, and you want to be previewing your launch. You want to say, "I've been working on this." You want to be posting that every day to X, LinkedIn, Instagram, maybe even Hacker News, and you want to be building your community of specifically people who can support your launch on Product Hunt. You want to build a community in those 30 days of roughly 600 people so that they can upvote your launch on Product Hunt and on Hacker News the day it comes out. "New AI exercise app," right, that's your headline for Hacker News. "How I built this AI exercise app," maybe is your story on the blog link for Hacker News. And then you want to follow all the best practices for Product Hunt, create a nice Product Hunt video and images, and then you want to be approved in the App Store if you're in the App Store, and you want to go live on that day with a massive marketing. And I would even say it's worth getting your friends and family to help for you on that day. Say, "Hey guys, could you please post about this?" Those 600 people, message all 600 of them and say, "Hey, please upvote on Hacker News and Product Hunt." So this is gonna get you a nice whirlwind of momentum, and that momentum is gonna bring you customers, and users, and feedback, and you're gonna have to deal with bugs, and scaling issues, and a ton of other requests. Work through all of those and your product will start to hum. Then you start building in your growth loops further and further, and you're ready to go. So that's my tactical advice for you for how to nail a launch of a new app, and I think most people should be doing that who are listening to this who aren't currently in a full-time job. Now let's talk a little bit about growing on social media. I love this question. This is from my friend Siddharth Arora, who's a great product creator,

13. 53:17 – 59:24

    Zero to 250K Followers

    1. AGAakash Gupta53:17

       if you haven't seen him online. Siddharth asks, "If you had to start from scratch your creator journey at zero followers, what would you do?" So if we're talking purely about a creator journey, not about launching a product like the roadmap I just gave out, I would start with one platform and one product.So I would think about what is the product I want to offer? So at the beginning of my created j- creator journey, it was a free newsletter. I wanted to get you to email subscribe to that free newsletter. And what platform? So for me, at the beginning of my creator journey, LinkedIn was the platform. You want to choose a platform that is friendly to new creators and is giving reach. So Facebook, Instagram, out the window. X, LinkedIn, Substack, YouTube, TikTok. These are the types of places you should consider as a potential platform. Medium. These are places that you can actually still grow. Snapchat. But other places you can't really grow. Uh, Facebook and Instagram, like even my own pages, years into this, posting regularly, they don't have any reach whatsoever. Facebook and Instagram are dead zones. They become pay to play unless you have this very specific type of content that does well. Like on Instagram, the only product account that's growing, it does memes every day. So you could do that if you wanted. Or the other types of accounts that go on Instagram are personal lifestyle brands, right? Daily ice bath stories filled with motivational main posts, filled with reels from your appearances on podcasts. That's the Sahil Bloom formula. Zero to like one million in like two years. Pretty mind-blowing, right? So you can do something like that as well. Uh, but for me, right, it was starting with, "Okay, I want to build a writing business. I want to build this newsletter." For that, LinkedIn is the platform. And you have to think about where your audience is as well. My audience, they are product managers. They're highly career-oriented people. They spend time on LinkedIn. So going where your audience is. But that doesn't mean you have to. You know, you guys look at Nate Jones on TikTok. The man is blowing up on TikTok, right? And he's used that to create a highly profitable paid Substack as well. So you can do things like that. But in general, I think the playbook, if you want a creative writing business for product management, which I did, would be to create a newsletter and cr- advertise on LinkedIn. If I were doing it today, I'd create a Beehiiv newsletter, not a Substack newsletter. Beehiiv is way more configurable, they ship way more often, they're more writer-friendly, and they're cheaper. Substack, I just have a lot of network lock-in, so I'm there. Um, and then on LinkedIn. So what I would do then is I would be experimenting with what content types are working for me. So I would go look at all the PM content creators or people I like, you know, the Shreyas Doshis, the Lenny Rachitskys, the Siddharth Auroras, the Atheer Abdulrauf's, the Pawel Herns, the Aakash Guptas, the Sachin Sharmas. Everybody who you're seeing who is blowing up, who's getting really high engagement on their posts, you know the number of likes. Marty Cagan. So you look at all those people and you say, "Okay, here are some different post types," and I would start to build my swipe file. So I'd use the top three buttons on the top right. Hit those buttons and then hit save, and build my swipe file. And the way you access that is you go into your profile, then you hit more, then you hit saved items. Uh, it's sometimes under resources. Uh, and then you look at your swipe file and you say, "Okay, these are the types of posts. What am I getting inspired by? Or what do I have a particularly strong reaction to?" Maybe Aakash said something, like some people reacted recently to my new AI flow versus prior flow for PRDs versus evals. So if you reacted to that flow, why don't you come up with a new flow for yourself? And then you can look at my post, you can say, "Okay, Aakash created this infographic. It looks highly designed. It looks like it has a good amount of information on it." So then you open up Canva yourself and you create an infographic like that with your own unique content. Then you look at, "Okay, how did Aakash structure this post? Okay, he has a really strong hook, then he has a re-hook. He's written in short lines. He has three components to it, and then he has a strong ending. He does not use emojis. He does @ some people, but he... and he has some links." So you kind of create that similar style post, again, with totally original content, but with those bare bones inspired by me, and you publish that. And you- then you look at the response and you say, "Did this do well? And did I like doing it this way?" Then the next day you look at, okay, Shreyas Doshi. Okay, he does a lot of polls, so let me come up with a poll. Let me create a poll now. Then you look at Lenny Rachitsky. Okay, he does a lot of videos and highly designed images, so let me go ahead and create a highly designed video. Let me create a highly designed image. Let's post those. He often does a lot of high research pieces. Let's do that. Then you go look at Pawel Hern. Okay, he's creating these cheat sheets, these roadmaps. Then you do one of those. You look at Sachin Sharma. Oh, he's using this bicycle GIF picture. I can use that bicycle GIF picture because a million other people are using it, and he's used it in a thousand posts. But then what else is he doing? Okay, he's creating this cool roadmap. He's often taking a post that somebody else has taken and crediting them right at the beginning. So then you do that. You try out these seven, eight different ways of creating content from people you like. Content you like, that's the key, not just what's doing well with the algorithm. And you look at, "Okay, how did it perform for me and did I-- which one did I like creating?" And then you triple down on that content, and you start building it daily, most likely. So I would be doing a daily LinkedIn posting and a weekly newsletter, and what I would be doing is really seeing, "Okay, how am I growing on followers? How am I growing on the newsletter?" And then I would iterate based on that data. So that's how I do it from zero followers, and once I hit ten thousand on LinkedIn, that's when I'd add the next platform. Uh, and zero to ten thousand is about similar to ten to a hundred thousand in my opinion, so then once I hit a hundred thousand on LinkedIn, I'd add the next platform. So once you hit ten thousand for product management, the next best platform is YouTube, so I'd go to YouTube. And then once you hit a hundred thousand, the next best platform for product management is Twitter, so I'd go to Twitter. Once you hit a million, the next best platform is probably Medium, so I'd go to Medium. So that's how I think about the scaling challenges and how to grow from zero to two hundred and fifty thousand followers. All right, here's a question from my team: What's the benefit of a strong LinkedIn presence?

14. 59:24 – 1:05:07

    LinkedIn $525K Salary Jump

    1. AGAakash Gupta59:24

       A strong LinkedIn will get you jobs and will earn you more money, and I can give you a perfect example for myself. My total compensation at Epic Games was around two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. For the triangle, that was excellent total compensation. When I moved to Affirm, my total compensation went to something like eight hundred thousand. Whoa. Right? Because suddenly I got paid on the national scale, and Epic Games was just paying on the triangle scale. So to get to that eight hundred thousand dollar compensation at Affirm, I had to have a great LinkedIn presence. They found me via LinkedIn. The SVP of product loved following me on LinkedIn. He thought that my content was thoughtful. And if you look at it back then, when I moved to Affirm, I didn't post daily, actually. So that's one thing to think about, is being a creator versus being a product manager or a professional. If you're gonna be a professional, I actually recommend the weekly posting schedule on social media, so it doesn't seem like you do too much social media, and only posting on weekends. So at Affirm, he looked at my social media, he said weekends for him are his passion, improving at product management, and he's had a great career in growth and product management and as a founder. I want to bring him into my company, right? And so that's how you create this magnet [chuckles] for inbound opportunities, and that's how you can really earn a lot more money, and that's my personal experience with it. I got many jobs from LinkedIn, many job offers to this day. A lot of people messaging me, "Hey, do you want to work here?" Like, I would say I get-... three inbound a day as we're recording this for, "Do you wanna go be a VP of product at this new $2 billion startup? Do you wanna go be a chief product officer at this new billion-dollar startup?" That is because of my LinkedIn presence. So you need to have a great headline. You need to have a great About Me. You need to have your experiences filled out. You need your recommendations. You need your reviews. You need your top skills. You need the keyword stuff so you arrive in search results. You need to have a good picture. You need to have a good headline. Your LinkedIn needs to be optimized. All right, this question comes from Advait Lad: "As someone who's spent two to three years in product management, how do I post about things on LinkedIn regularly to build a presence? Is there a hack to have successful posts in terms of impressions and engagement?" So there are a lot of junior product managers who say, "Oh, I don't know if I have anything to say. People might think I'm dumb." Forget that, right? What you wanna do is you wanna take a look at the number one thing I do in my content, which is called high-effort content. If you look at all of my text, all of my images, I'm never just off the dome sending you 15 sentences or, "I'm at this meeting, and I saw this person do this cool thing." I'm sending you a curated, manicured, edited, marinated on over 24 hours post. You want to work on high-effort, high content quality work. If you wanna do something, what I do is I take... So I even have this AI Claude project myself. I keep putting in LinkedIn posts I like, and I put the title of who I put it, who wrote the post. Then I ask Claude, when I have drafted a post, I say, "Hey, pretend you are Jasmine Ilic, Pawel Hern, Justin Welsh, Ben Meir, Sahil Bloom, Steven Bartlett, Shreyas Doshi, Aakash Gupta, and rewrite a version of this post in their voice and in their LinkedIn post style." So you have your original content, then you look at their versions, and then you take components of what you've learned from those other people to edit yours. Again, you're not even copying and pasting. You're taking components. Like, "Oh, I think Jasmine's using the PS and PPS really well, and it gave me this idea. I think a better PS and PPS would be this, so I'm adding this to my post. Oh, Aakash does really strong copywriting, so I'm gonna take this first line that Claude had come up with and replace my first line because it removes three words, and so it's straighter to the point, and it's more rhythmical when you say it," right? You're slowly improving your quality of your post so it's high-quality stuff, you know? You spent hours on it. You have a really good infographic. You went and go and talked to people or did some research, or you're talking about your personal experience, and you're sharing a selfie, but it's a good selfie, right? All these things that you're showing that you did a lot of work. High-effort content, and then content that's for a specific person. Like I say, the best person to write to is yourself six months ago, so a product manager with two experience- two years experience, 'cause you have three years experience. And then teaching content. So the type of content that does well on LinkedIn is either personal stories or highly actionable knowledge type content, the type of content I'm posting. So those are the hacks, and the final hack is that chart we just talked about at the beginning, right? The Jack Butcher chart. It's all flat until it suddenly grows, right, guys? You need to put in the year and a half of just posting to almost nobody to improve your skills and improve your reputation with the algorithm and slowly accumulate followers to then grow. I'll say the final hacks to growing when you're early on are to engage with a lot of other people thoughtfully. No AI comments, but really strong comments that add value to other people's posts. And after you've engaged with them for 10 to 15 posts, and they have replied back to you 10 to 15 times, so maybe you engage with them 50 times, send them a DM, send them a connection request, make them part of your network. They'll start to see your content. They'll start to engage with your content. And you know what? 80% of people will stop engaging with your content. Forget about those people, and the 20% who do continue to mutually engage, those are your friends. Those are your online friends. And build your online friends from one friend to 10 friends to 100 to 1,000 friends, and keep those communication relationships. Keep those DMs going. It's hard to do with 1,000 people, but that's what I do. It's what Jasmine does. It's a really good hack to improving how you do in social media because you're being social. All right, this is another question from my friend Atheer Abdurrauf. So Atheer asks, "Stack

15. 1:05:07 – 1:09:47

    Newsletter Success Stack Rank

    1. AGAakash Gupta1:05:07

       Rank the following for newsletter success: timing, luck, strength of network, research ability, copywriting skills, social media prowess, and consistency." Okay, so for newsletter success, I'm gonna have to look at what he has. So the number one thing for newsletter success is gonna be timing. If you're launching a newsletter now, you're not gonna face the same growth headwinds that other people faced, you know? I got to benefit from the COVID boom on newsletters. [laughs] You're not gonna be able to benefit from that if you didn't come before COVID started. The second most important thing is gonna be social media prowess. Fundamentally, the quality of your newsletter does matter, but the more limiting thing is how good you are [laughs] at social media, uh, because social media is how you get people to your newsletter. And I'm also gonna include and modify this to not just social media prowess, but marketing prowess, because an interesting channel to grow your social media-- grow your newsletter, excuse me, is SEO. So it's really marketing prowess as the second most important skill. The third most important skill is gonna be copywriting skill. So if you timed things correctly, like Lenny, you saw ahead of the curve, right? If you saw ahead of the curve and had early timing, and you had really good social media prowess, then the next thing that you need is really good copywriting skill. Because I actually know a newsletter... There used to be a newsletter that recommended me that would recommend so many people to my newsletter, and my newsletter would grow, but that newsletter would stay flat because every time they sent a newsletter, so many people would unsubscribe. So you need that really strong copywriting ability, really good email openers, really good ability to deliver. The next skill is gonna be research ability. So you-- to-- in order to decrease those unsubscribes, you need to research unique stuff that ChatGPT can't say, that asking somebody else just in person, a reader can't do. You need to bring that unique sauce [laughs] right, that they can only find in your newsletter. And so your ability to do really good research is so important. The next most important thing is gonna be consistency. So you have to be consistent with sending your newsletter if you want it to grow. You should be creating a habit within people that every week or twice a week or every day they're getting something from you because people stick to habits. They don't stick to sporadic things. The next most important thing is gonna be strength of network. It's so important to get people to recommend your newsletter, to link to your newsletter, to get them as guest posts, to be able to guest post on their newsletter, so having a great network really helps. The final thing is luck. Honestly, I don't think luck plays even a shred of a role in newsletter success. Newsletters are grind-it-out, grow with severe effort, sustained over time type of products that have no luck involved. All right, let's move on to getting a PM job questions. This question comes from Shreyansh Gonka: "How do we present qualitative aspects like good communication, ownership, passion, et cetera, on a resume or application?"When going for a PM job. Let me be honest with you, these things don't matter in the resume. These things people know that you are going to be f- inflating on the resume. "Oh, I convinced X engineer who disagreed with me. Oh, I convinced the executive team. Oh, I swayed these tough stakeholders." Like, putting those things on your resume, it doesn't mean much. Once they can meet you, [laughs] they go get a sense of, "Okay, what are the stories?" And they're gonna ask you those behavioral questions. "Tell me a time an executive got mad at you. Tell me a time an engineer disagreed with you. Tell me a time you disagreed with your core product trio." So you need to be able to handle those situations well in real life, and they matter, and you need to be able to demonstrate your success in an interview. But when it comes to a resume or an application, you should be focused more on hard skills. What's the impact of what you shipped? What did you ship? How many people did you manage or lead or influence? These hard facts, these hard numbers, that's what drives success when you're trying to get a PM job. So cut the skills section where you say you're a good communicator, blah, blah, blah. Instead think about, "Are there hard facts around how I'm a good communicator?" For instance, when I was in college, I won a writing competition. Say that you've won a writing competition. Or when I was in college, I won a national debate championship. Say that you were a national debate champion, right? These are the types of things that are gonna show, "Okay, he's a good communicator." Or maybe, uh, you were the... You were elected president of a 400-person club, right? That just shows that you're able to rally people around your cause. Or you were elected president of your student body, right? These are hard facts around your soft skills. So cut out all the bullet points that I communicated with xxx, and put these hard facts around soft skills instead. This next question

16. 1:09:47 – 1:19:14

    Breaking Into US PM Jobs

    1. AGAakash Gupta1:09:47

       comes from Yatin Patinia. "I'm exploring PM opportunities in the US after graduation. I've applied to thousands of jobs. I get automated rejection emails. What should I do to get more interviews, an AI PM roadmap to make self-guided projects?" So looking at Yatin's profile, Yatin has been working in Gurgaon, Pune, and Bangalore, right? So he's been working in India. He's trying to get a job in the United States. Let's be honest, getting a job in the United States is extremely difficult. The first thing you wanna do is see if you can come up with an alternative way to live in the United States, where the work company doesn't need to sponsor your visa. Because if you do, all of the sudden you're dramatically restricting the amount of opportunity you have. The amount of people who are gonna m- m- sponsor your visa, very small. And then the other thing is move to the US too, 'cause the amount of people who are gonna sponsor and move you, extremely, extremely, extremely small. So that's the first thing to think about. The second thing is he said he's applied to thousands of jobs, which means he's not approaching the job search correctly, right? Especially if he's getting rejection emails. What is insanity? It's doing something that's not working and continuing to do it. If those applications aren't working, something is broken with your application. Most likely it has to do with your candidate market fit, the types of jobs you're applying for. You are not overqualified compared to the other candidates applying. And most likely it has to do with how he's applying. Sounds to me, if he's sending thousands of applications, that he is not getting a referral. He is not getting a strong referral. He is not creating a work product. He is not following up and networking with the company extensively to enhance his application. In a tough job market, you have to go above and beyond. And you don't need to do all of that, but you need to do some of that. So check out the Getting a PM Job section of my newsletter, where I talk about all these extra ways to not just drop your resume. Pi- try out all of those different options, see which one works best for you, and triple down on that. And he will also need to approa- do what I have called the small market recruiting strategy. So with the small market recruiting strategy, Yatin, you're gonna need to create a list of companies that, you know, based on your constraints of probably needing to sponsor your visa, A, sponsor visas, and then B, you would be a really strong candidate market fit. Where the other companies on your resume, they would say, "Ah, those are some fantastic companies. I've heard of them. [laughs] I think they're great. I think they have good product managers," right? So you wanna find that intersection, which is gonna be small, and you might even need to move to where most of those companies are. Which, where are they? They're in San Francisco, right? So you move to San Francisco, maybe New York City. Those are really the only two places they are for PM jobs in any volume. And then you move there, and then you network into those comp- before you even apply, before a job is even available. You have 10 people who know you at that company, and then you get referrals from that company into those jobs. When a job posting comes available and you apply in the first 24 hours with a work product, and then you message other people, and you have your network message the hiring manager and the recruiter. You know, if you're doing all this work, you are gonna get interviews. But the key thing is don't keep doing stuff that isn't working and just applying in volume. You know, most people are using AI tools, like I highlighted in my AI job search tool report, to do that. So it's just totally useless at this point. All right, now let's move into some PM career advice. This one is from Gabriella Hopkirk Giromolo. "How does one decide whether to continue a career in product management? Essentially, how can I assess if it's the right career path for me? I'm keen to know, am I good enough, and how to evaluate that." So when somebody asks me a question like this, the first thing I want to do is understand what's their background. So she has a fantastic background. She spent five years as a PM at Amazon. She spent a year as a PM at TikTok, a year as a PM at Simple, and a year now as a PM at IG. So if she's asking me this, I'm thinking, "Okay, maybe there's been some layoffs along the way, or firings, or not that, maybe just lower performance reviews where it caused her to move jobs." Or maybe she's not seeing the career growth that she wants to see because she has been in this product management field now for eight-ish years and hasn't, you know, progressed all the way up the ladder. My overall take would be if it's that last scenario where you haven't progressed up the ladder, you're doing just fine. She's moving to good companies. She's finding good roles. And in that case, this product management career is for you. Now-If there have been performance reviews that haven't done well, or if there have been layoffs or firings, that is a normal human thing, and I totally... I resonate with that. It sucks. It sucks. I'm so sorry, and I'm sorry you're questioning whether this career is right for you. So the thing to think about now is, "What do I like, what does the world pay for, and what am I good at?" These three things. What is at the intersection of that, you know? As a product manager, we have this benefit that we get to do a little bit of sales, we get to do a little bit of marketing, we get to do a little bit of customer success, a little bit of analytics, a little bit of design, a little bit of engineering. Amongst all those things [laughs] that are jobs that people pay for, bucket one, right, what do you like and what are you good at? What is your superpower and the superpower you like to exercise? For a lot of people, it might be analytics. But if it is that core doing a little bit of everything, product management glue work, driving the product strategy, if what you like and are good at is driving the product strategy, number one, and influencing people, number two, if those two things are at the top of the list, then product management is great, and you should continue to do it even if you've had some layoffs, firings, or low performance reviews. And here's why. Not everybody is gonna be able to see the real you. Maybe you had a hard season in life. Maybe it was hire to fire you, or maybe the company was just not doing well and they laid you off, and it didn't actually have to do with your own performance. Or maybe you got a low performance review because people misinterpreted your actual performance. If you have gone through the self-analysis that, "I like and I'm good at those two things, influencing people and driving product strategy," then product management is a great career to continue to do, especially with your trajectory of working at awesome companies, and I think you'll continue to be able to work at awesome companies even if you have faced some issues and headwinds. On the other hand, if you look at those things, right, and you say, "Oh, I really like and am good at sales," consider a career in sales. Or if you really like analytics, do that. It's really great that as a product manager, we can easily shift into those other careers, and I think the best way to shift is to do an internal transfer where you currently are. The coolest thing about doing an internal transfer where you currently are is often if you don't like what you've done for a year, they'll let you transfer back too, and so you can really reduce the risk. So my summarized advice is figure out what do you wanna do for the long term, um, how your performance feedback has been, and what you're good at, and what people pay for, and then potentially consider trialing something out for a year. 'Cause you have a long background in product management, you can always come back to it. All right. This one is from Jared Broad. "Looking back on your career, whether it was launching your first project or scaling this podcast, what's one time management or prioritization mistake you made early on, and how did you course-correct? What did that teach you about staying productive over the long haul?" Okay. So let's do, um, prioritization mistakes both as a product manager and as a content creator, right? So first starting with the product manager prioritization mistake. One of the very first prioritization mistakes I made when I first became a director of product is I spent way too much time still doing IC product work and working with other directors, and not realizing that the aperture for a product manager is typically level plus one. [laughs] So I need to be spending more time with senior directors, and level plus two, VPs, and level plus three, the C-suite. Once you become a director, you need to be looking three levels up. When you're a lead PM, you should still be looking three levels up, but that takes you to VPs. And when you're a senior PM, you should still be looking three levels up, but that takes you to senior directors. And so you should always make sure that you're leveling up who you're influencing. I sometimes would be so comfortable influencing at certain levels that I've developed those skill sets, but I'd get nervous about influencing the next level. But as a PM, that's incredibly important to prioritize. Now let's talk about prioritization [laughs] mistakes that I made as a creator in scaling this podcast. I spent a lot of time in the editing process, in the editing booth, in the video area, when I should've spent way more time on the interview guide, on the topics, on the sequencing of the content in the video, in the podcast, because the stuff you talk about, that's how you're gonna deliver loyal readers, how you're gonna grow your loyal listener base, how you're gonna retain people who have clicked or watched or listened to a video. So I definitely didn't spend enough time early on on interview guides and research, and I did do, like... You know, I would spend, like, two hours on it, but I didn't spend the right time, where I didn't think about, "Okay. How is this going to create retention for my podcast? How is this gonna be differentiated from other podcasts out there?" You know? There are a litany of other product and growth and career in tech podcasts. How do you create your own thing? Now I'm getting closer to that, but I think I can go even further in terms of creating a differentiated product. The next question

17. 1:19:14 – 1:24:58

    MBA to PM Roadmap

    1. AGAakash Gupta1:19:14

       is from Urja Shukla. "I am an upcoming MBA student at Nirma University with one year of experience as a software developer. I'm interested in pursuing a career in product management. What should be my one-year roadmap?" This is a great question. So you're currently pursuing your MBA, so you have a lot of time. First thing on your roadmap should be that GPA is not the most important thing. In fact, for a lot of MBA candidates, I don't even see them listing their GPA or their class rank. So your core school performance is not the most important thing. The very first thing you should do, since you're a software developer, is code your own product today. Like, build your own product today. I've gone through in earlier sections of this podcast the roadmap for how to find a problem, how to find a market, how to scale and launch. Follow those recipes that I gave you earlier on in this podcast, and specifically focus on the PM tasks, problem discovery, dis-... definition of different potential solutions, exploring the solution space. As an engineer, you're often just focused on executing the solution space, but focus on those three steps. And then measuring the impact, defining the product strategy, and the improvements to the product strategy as a result. Those steps are way more important than the implementation step. So focus on those other steps within the journey, and build out your skillset, and build out your real-world stories for the interview. So that's the number one most important thing. The second thing to do on your roadmap is to consume more product management content, my content, other people's content who you like. And I say infiltrate it into your life. Subscribe to newsletters, follow people on LinkedIn and X, and make sure you like and comment on their posts so the algorithms show you more of their posts. Listen to good podcasts, and generally just become a product person. Instead of at night watching a new Netflix show, at night, analyze a new product, try out a new product tool, watch a new product podcast, or read a new product newsletter. As you get into the world of product management, you'll get going. And then the final element of your roadmap is job searching. Once your product is released, then you want to start to put on your own LinkedIn that you're a product manager of that product, and you want to find an internship, free or paid, as a product manager at a local startup. So you then have two product management experiences on top of your software development and MBA experience. These four experiences are gonna differentiate you substantially from the other MBA candidates, and it's gonna show that product leader who's thinking of taking a bet on you that, "Hey, this person has some chops." And the final component is to network in. So you need to start networking into your top 25 companies that you wanna work at after graduation, um, by sending them work products, showing them, "Hey, I analyzed this part of your product," or, "I prototyped this solution to this problem I'm having with your product," and try to get in with coffee chats. Say, "Hey, I'll buy you coffee. I know your office is over here. Can I buy you coffee at the coffee shop nearby on Thursday at 11:00 AM?" And get into these companies with networks, so that when they post a job or when you're ready to go on the job market, you can message them and say, "Hey, love to become a APM. I know you don't even have an APM program, but I think I could be a great associate product manager because..." Da, da, da, da, da, so you can even create your own job for yourself if they're a smaller company. So that would be my roadmap. And the final thing I will mention is, at Nearmap, where did all the PMs go who worked there? What companies did they go to? Did some go to Google? Then get really good at the Google product management interview process. Go find my article on it or some other people's articles. Practice those interview types. Same thing with all the other companies that hire PMs at Nearmap. Make sure you get really good networks in so you can get a referral. This question comes from Shilpa Pillai. "What's your advice for finding the right mentors, people who not only inspire but also challenge your product thinking at the right altitude?" So my advice is that there should be three categories of mentors that you pursue, and I'm so glad you asked this question because most people don't pursue enough mentorship. [laughs] That's just, like, a fact that I've learned, is that you h- people need to be pursuing more and more mentorship. So the first category that I would pursue is in and around your life, people who are six months to a year ahead of you. At the company you're working at, if you're a PM, a good senior PM. If you're a senior PM, a good lead PM, right? People who are a step ahead of you within the confines of your own life. If you are in school, the person who has secured a PM internship versus you who hasn't. The second category is I want you to think about investing. Especially if you are somebody who has a job, think about paying for a coach. I do sessions. I do coaching sessions with people. There are millions of other coaches out there. Find out some people who you can pay who have the expertise you want because they have that amazing background. The final thing to look at is people who you proactively reach out to and network with in person. So in your local area, you should be attending the product meetups. You should be messaging people who are a few years ahead of you with, "Hey, I wanna buy you coffee." And only some of those will work. Like, 20% of them will respond to your message. 20% of them after the coffee will becomes friends. 20% of those will become mentors. So you need to play a little bit of a numbers game on those and do a lot of it. It's kind of like dating. You just have to put in the reps early on to create your mentors. But I think if... You should create mentors from all three of these categories, ideally, and you should be talking to your mentors regularly about your latest performance review, about how you're gonna get that next promotion, about the upcoming big product review, about the big upcoming interview. I think this is a fantastic hack for life, and I personally do it. Let's move into some PM fundamentals now. All right. This is another question from Shilpa

18. 1:24:58 – 1:37:24

    Sprint Prioritization Framework

    1. AGAakash Gupta1:24:58

       Pillai. "In early stage teams or fast-paced environments, how do you personally decide what not to ship in a sprint, especially when every stakeholder thinks their feature is a priority?" Okay, so she said what not to ship in a sprint when every stakeholder thinks their feature is a priority. So the first thing is that most features can't be shipped in an entire sprint, right? So your sprints need to have themes that are informed by a backlog, which is informed by a product roadmap, which is informed by a product strategy, so it all starts with strategy. In this small, high-growing startup, you need to create alignment on your strategy. In this quarter, what are the key problems we are going to solve? This will then help you build a roadmap where you've done solution exploration and you've listed solutions, and then you've prioritized them based on impact and work. That roadmap will then inform the themes for given sprints, or they will inform the backlog that you create, where your engineers create the specific tasks to create the things on the roadmap, and then they will group the sprints together in terms of a themed action. So as a PM, your input should be way up at the beginning, and you should ask your engineers to do the final bit of the backlog and the roadmap and the sprint themes and what goes into a specific sprint. You should focus instead on that input of this is the prioritization. So every stakeholder wants their feature done right now. You have to go back to them. You have to manage them. You have to say, "Hey, this is why it's coming, where it is in the priority. Here's what I think. What am I missing? How would you reprioritize this?" And you need to co-create that ranked priority list, and that's why I go back to 2025 is a great time to be a PM, because that work, that secret sauce of PM, is gonna be here with or without AI. This next question comes from Sandro Billebirk. "How did you learn to quickly distinguish between someone who has passion for their product or somebody who is just focused on the goal, like being rich or making money, and does that difference even matter to you?" That's a really interesting question. So I'm gonna take this from the point of view of when I was a product leader, like a group director, senior director, VP of product, hiring product managers, and I was looking at are they gonna be passionate about my product, or are they just coming here for the money? And let me tell you-10 times out of 10, I would prefer somebody who is passionate about the product. [laughs] I think it's really, really important to use your product regularly, to want to use it regularly. You know, when I worked in sales tech, I looked for people who wanted to do outbound sales work because that work is gonna help you get passionate and use the product. You're not just gonna be relying on user interviews or data analysis. That's a really good way to have a shallow understanding. And then when it comes to a conversation with your marketing lead, who has actually been a salesperson and is using the product, how are you gonna have anything to say if they're saying, "When I'm using the product, this is what I'm experiencing," if you're not using the product and experiencing it, right? So passion is so, so important. So 100% it's important. So then the question becomes: how do you detect passion, right? How do you detect this in a application interview setting? So the first thing I do is I do not pass anybody who has not used the product. Even if it's an enterprise product that they need to ask f- for us for a demo instance, I wanna see people doing it. The second thing is I wanna see people who have domain experience, who have been willing to stick it out. Most PMs, they're like, "Ah, I've been in music for a while. I don't wanna be in music anymore." Or, "I've been in gaming for a while. I don't wanna be in gaming for a while anymore." I wanna see someone who's, "I've been in gaming. I love gaming." So then I was more likely to hire them at Epic Games. And then the final thing is I would actually test them in interviews. Like, "So what are the biggest problems you think our product has?" And I would try to listen for that they don't hate our product, but actually that they're passionate about it and that they're identifying, "Okay, as a good product, here are the problems." So that's how I personally would figure out who is passionate about a product, and I think it's so important. This question comes from Abhijeet Chaudhary. "How do you develop a PRD for platform product? For example, data products or AI products in a B2B context. I feel we have a good amount of B2C content, but not sure about platform, like a marketplace." So let's talk about what's different with a platform product PRD versus another PRD. The very first thing is that you're not gonna immediately be creating impact. You're not gonna immediately be going to the end consumer. You're usually gonna be building a platform for people to build on top of. So one of the first things to do before you build anything in a platform team is to get commitment that people are gonna use your thing, and you're gonna understand what are the user stories one step down the line that they're gonna solve. And so I... You wanna have a two-step user story. What's the user story for the platform I'm building for the developers who are gonna build atop that platform? And then what's the user story for the product that those developers built for the end user? You wanna have this two-step user story, and you wanna have this two-step impact sizing, that once they build this thing, the impact that they are gonna drive is this. So from a metrics point of view and from a user story, user problem point of view, you wanna have this two-step process. So that's one really important element to think about in how this PRD is different. Another is: who's your audience, right? Your audience is usually gonna be you're building a platform for people to use, so it's an internal audience. So you wanna think about, "What is my internal discovery? What are my internal problems to solve? What is my internal data on usage of the existing platform? What are the internal problems we're facing from governance of this platform?" And you wanna talk about those things as well in your PRD. And then, yes, your PRD may not have a visual AI prototype, right? There's no end product there. But then you wanna think about, okay, from this develop- Let's say they're developing on top of your platform. What are the API calls that they would make? You know, you wanna get technical as a platform PM. You wanna write those user stories as a developer point of view. They're gonna create the API, and the API is gonna be real time, and they're gonna love that, and it's gonna be lightweight and easy to access, but it's gonna be secure, right? These types of things is how you wanna think about it. And then when it comes to measurement of success, right, sometimes this can be harder too because a lot of times your platform measurements of success are things like how uptime you are, how responsive you are to requests, how much you could scale up. So those are the types of measurements of success you wanna have. And then you wanna have that second step of, also, people are gonna build what they committed, and what they committed is gonna have the impact they estimated. So those are the major ways that a platform PRD differs. But I would say that with AI products, there's another nuance. So he also mentioned AI products in his question. So with AI products, you need to think about what are the evals, and that's why I wrote about those recently in the newsletter, and we're gonna be having Kamil Hussain on the podcast to talk a little bit more about those evals, because you wanna have these fundamental tests that you're actually getting into, and you're analyzing the errors, and you're showing, "Okay, we wanna make sure we're solving these errors," and you wanna be in the weeds with your team. So you wanna have a section on evals as well in your PRD for AI products. This question's from Satvik Saini: "What's one book- [gentle music] belief about product management you had early on that you've completely changed your mind about? So I've been in product management for over 16 years, so there's a ton of things I've done a 360 on. You know, one, there was a time and place where I thought product managers should only own product metrics because there's too many other sales and marketing factors to own business metrics. I've done a 180 on that, as the industry has done a 180 on that. One of the things that I had a belief on early on was that I should be the glue, and I've decided that you shouldn't because you kind of overextend yourself. You should be the glue when you can, but it's not... Glue is not your core identity. Your core identity is understanding the product strategy, delivering the problems to work on, making sure that the business metrics are hit and the stakeholders are happy, right? That's your core identity. It's not being the glue for design and engineering and answering every little question. In fact, I should have done more empowerment of design and engineering to answer those questions on their own. So that's another thing I've gone 180 on. Let's talk a little bit about growing my business. This question comes from Atheer Abdulrauf: "How do you tackle newsletter revenue and user churn tactically and emotionally?" Yeah. So paid newsletters, let's be honest, they don't have very good retention, or at least mine personally could have much, much better retention. So how do I handle this churn? Um, on an emotional level, I just acknowledge that that's the current state of my business. Perhaps, you know, you know how it normally is with retention, right? The number one product in the market has insane retention, and then everyone else faces their own set of retention. So I'm in that, and I'm trying to figure out, how do I emotionally handle this, is, "Okay, I need to build around this." My, my retention rates have been incredibly stable over time, so I haven't been able to improve them. So then tactically, I need to acquire more than churn. That's my main tactic, right? I can't... I haven't figured out yet, I haven't unlocked improving retention greatly. I do have some things cooking up [chuckles] that I'm considering. I have some tests, and in fact, every month I'm running at least one big test to improve retention. So one of the recent things I've done is I've switched back to one high-quality newsletter a week instead of two faster newsletters, so that I think is a test to improve retention, but we'll see. And so there are things like that where you need to continuously tactically try to improve retention, but for me, the biggest one has been acquire more, so improve my marketing channels, improve my LinkedIn, Twitter, SEO, YouTube, and other games that I'm playing, like Medium, so that I'm acquiring more people. Let's talk a little bit about time management. This question's again from Jared Broad: "In a world of constant notifications and shifting priorities, how do you carve out uninterrupted time for strategic work? Can you share one habit or tool that's been a game changer for you in maintaining focus?" I am not that good at this, if I'm honest with everybody, uh, because I feel like I need to respond to my sponsors' emails, and I feel like I need to respond to my readers' comments on social media and the newsletter. So I do get distracted by those two things. But one thing is that I don't have notifications on for almost any apps at all, except for my Gmail, where I have it set to very specific high-priority notifications. So that's one thing that really helps. I don't get notifications from LinkedIn or X or anything like that. I've also deleted the X app off my phone. Frankly, LinkedIn, they're just not that good at, like, [chuckles] getting you to do it as much as X. X was phenomenal at it. You know, they're always reloading new content that's interesting. So I deleted X, um, the app off my phone. If I wanna go to X, I go to x.com, and that has been a huge friction reducer. I also removed a lot of apps all the way to the back of my iPhone that were distracting me. Uh, for me in particular, that was my brokerage accounts and ESPN app. And so I just moved those all the way to the back. I said, "Hey, I don't wanna get distracted by these." The more you look at your brokerage account, the less you perform anyways, right? [chuckles] And sports, you know, it's, it's inconsequential. Same with the YouTube app. Like, move it to the back, you know? I'm even considering deleting the YouTube app. So managing what's on my phone and notifications on my phone has been good. And then the other thing I do is I do a lot of time blocking. You know, we had Nir Eyal on the newsletter a couple years ago. He said, you know, "Time blocking is the way," and I still follow time blocking on my calendar. So after this r- podcast recording, I need to post the next podcast, so I have an hour-and-a-half block. Then I'm meeting somebody for lunch, so I have an hour block for that. Then I need to write the next newsletter coming out in two days, so the rest of my afternoon is blocked for that. And I really try to follow those blocks religiously, and I try to think about those blocks days in advance so that I don't even have that blocking in front of me, but I've been looking at it so often that I'm ready to execute on it so that when stuff comes in, I'm not as bombarded or easily distracted, and I say, "Hey, I... In this block, I need to finish this thing." And let's do our final question from Atheer Abdulrauf: "What's a common pers- misconception people have about you would you like to rectify?" I think that a lot of people think that, "Oh, Aakash has just become a creator. He's far from product management." I would say for me personally, I am as close as ever. In fact, I feel like I have a much better pulse on product management now than I ever did before, because I'm coaching product managers. I'm talking to product managers every day. Every month, I do 10-minute meetings. Every month, I do office hours with my newsletter. So I'm getting to see what a vast swath of product managers are thinking about. I consume more product content than ever, so I get to understand what all the content creators are saying. So if anything, I feel like I'm closer to product management than I ever have. And that's it, guys. Thank you so much for listening to this solo podcast episode. I was of course inspired by Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom podcast, where he does these regularly. We have crossed 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. Thank you so much. We have crossed 50,000 average listens. We are doing really well growing this podcast. I appreciate you guys so, so much. I can't wait to break more barriers with this podcast. I can't wait to one million X this podcast, you guys. Let's go get it. Let's do more. Please share with your friends. Please g- leave me a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Please like and comment on my social media posts. All that really helps. Thank you so, so much for listening till the end, and I will see you next time.

Episode duration: 1:37:24