aha - product & community

Looking at emerging tech companies through a different lens.

Hi, my name is Neer! 

I’m the co-founder of a collaborative writing game called HaikuJAM. 

In South-East Asia, we’ve created a community of nearly a million people who have fallen in love with our product and the people they meet when using it.

Every day, we get emails and reviews of people talking about how our product has changed their lives. In 2019, a European University found that using HaikuJAM is associated with improved wellbeing. And our community regularly host offline meet-ups with other jammers in their city.

It’s magical!

But one thing I’ve noticed is that the typical analysis around emerging tech companies doesn’t focus on this magic at all.

Typical analysis of startups focuses on the space in which the company is operating and macro-level trends that make that space interesting.

With this newsletter, I want to look at emerging-companies through the lens of product + community:

• How does it feel to go through the funnel?

• What’s the aha-moment?

• Is a community being built around this magic?

• Where could this team take the product?

In doing this, I’m hoping to explore companies and markets from the product-up, rather than the market-down. 

Once a week, I’ll be diving into relatively early-stage products (Seed / Series A-B). Have any recommendations? Email me at neer@haikujam.com

If you are or know someone who might be interested in this (founders, product teams, growth teams, consumer investors), please pass this onto them.

Thanks and see you soon :)

Neer