Koo

I joined Koo when it had roughly 40,000 users. I met the founder, we spoke about product, and I got the job almost immediately. Six months later the product had around 10 million users. I was the first person in product, and early on I was handling product management, frontend, and design directly before hiring and building those functions around me.

Koo was where I first saw what genuinely excellent consumer-product thinking looked like at close range. I learned a great deal from the founder, especially his ability to empathise with people who were very different from the people building the product. We were designing for Tier 2 and Tier 3 India, for people using Indian languages, and for users whose habits, expectations, and relationship with technology could be completely different from mine. That made empathy much more concrete for me. You cannot design for the person you think ought to exist. You have to understand the person actually holding the phone.

The company was growing so quickly that almost everything was happening at once. We ran more than 20 experiments a month, worked on retention, recommendations, content ranking, social graphs, onboarding, engagement, and the full product redesign. What I enjoyed just as much was seeing the breadth of the organisation around it. I was surrounded by people in engineering, design, marketing, operations, business, and leadership who were working as hard as I was. Until then, much of my experience had been assembling my own small teams. Koo showed me what it looked like when an entire company operated at that intensity.

The pace could be extreme. I sometimes worked 16-hour days, partly because I had people around me who seemed capable of working even harder. That intensity itself never bothered me much, but eventually it started affecting my health and wellbeing and I knew I needed to stop and move into a more sustainable role. The part I carried forward was much more important: Koo showed me how good I could eventually become at consumer product, and it made empathy one of the foundations of how I think about building.

What we built

Built feed ranking, recommendations, design systems and social growth features.

Delivered work and results

• Personally handled product management, frontend development, and UI/UX design during the early hypergrowth phase, then hired and trained the frontend and design teams.
• Ran weekly Android, iOS, and web releases, handling sprint planning, grooming, testing, and coordination across 15+ engineers.
• Ran 20+ product experiments per month, driving D2 retention up around 50%, engagement around 20%, and early network size around 100% over roughly three months.
• Built the core social-ranking machinery behind the feed, including tagging, recommendations, content ranking, and virality detection.
• Personally designed Koo’s full UI overhaul and built the design system, component libraries, and icon library that the product continued using for years.
• Shipped bulk follow lists and profile-page follow suggestions, ideas that later appeared on Twitter and Instagram.