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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and I am so excited about the guests that we're being joined by today, because not only is this someone who is a fellow entrepreneur, just like you and I, but this is someone who is incredibly talented, and I can tell that he thinks like a visionary.
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This is someone who really envisions bringing real-life solutions to the marketplace in so many different industries and with some really cool technology.
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So I'm definitely biased, so let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Naren Bala.
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Naren is the founder of Product On Point, which is a cutting edge product development studio specializing in websites, apps and SaaS solutions, with extensive experience spanning diverse industries.
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Naren is a seasoned product manager known for his expertise in startup leadership, user experience optimization and software product management.
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He holds an MBA from the Georgia Institute of Technology, complemented by master's degrees in computer science from the University of Texas at Arlington.
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He's got a really cool and interesting background.
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I'm personally very excited to learn from Naren in today's episode, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Naren Bala.
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All right, naren, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Hey, thanks for having me.
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Thank you, yes, I'm excited to hear about all the things that you've got going on on your side of the world, but before we get there, take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Naren?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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I started at a very young age.
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I grew up in Kuwait.
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I did my undergrad in India Around 1999 is when I moved there and I came to America in 2003.
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And did my master's.
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India around 99 is when I moved there and I came to America in 2003 and did my masters, as you mentioned, and then set up on a career in IT.
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But I started out in QA and it took me a few years.
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I did QA at Sprint and WebMD and then I was like I need to go and get upskill myself.
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So I got myself that MBA, as you mentioned, from Georgia Tech and luckily enough, I found a job in product.
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I was able to switch my careers and I moved to product management at CNN, which was a great time in my life.
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I loved working there.
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I loved the culture, just the immediacy of what we're doing.
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It was a fast environment.
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I loved it.
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Yeah, naren, I'll tell you what.
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Anytime I get to talk to people who have been in product management and product development and all of those, it seems to me like you all think like business owners and entrepreneurs, as it is.
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Because you take ownership of those products, you view those as solutions.
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They're exactly that they're solutions in the marketplace.
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Talk to us about that mindset and how that professional career set you up for what you do today.
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Yeah, Talk to us about that mindset and how that professional career set you up for what you do today.
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Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you something it's a lot of times product managers are not just managing just one product, right, like, for example, cnn.
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I had like maybe five or six at a time, so it's more.
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What I loved the most about it was I managed it not just the product, but also the ecosystem around it, right.
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So you're working with a a lot of engineers, designers and whatnot, and different people in different departments.
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Uh, I do try to control that ecosystem as well, to keep it fun, uh, and it's more than just the product that keep makes it fun, to be honest, yeah, talk to us more about that, because I mean, what you're listing is managing people, managing the products.
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What I'm hearing is exactly that entrepreneurial business owner.
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It is managing people that you're working with, it's managing the products.
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It's also managing the expectations of everyone, right?
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So product management is such a public job.
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You know everyone can see your work.
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They log into the product, Everyone has opinions on your work as soon as they see it.
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So it's a very public-facing product on your work as soon as they see it.
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So it's very public facing product.
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You do spend a lot of time speaking very publicly to big, big, large groups of people to try to get them aligned and on the same page and moving forward.
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In the bigger organizations, obviously, in startups, you're going to have smaller teams, so you do have that sense of entrepreneurial management sort of energy of entrepreneurial management, sort of energy even without being one because you do need that mindset without actually investing in the company, so to speak.
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Yeah, for sure.
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I love that, and obviously listeners already know the spoiler alert which all of this culminates in the fact that you are one of us.
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Now you are a fellow entrepreneur with your business product on point.
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Talk to us about that transition, because I would imagine moving to the United States.
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You've obviously heard of the American dream and you are a great example of that starting your own business, growing and running your own business.
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What did that transition look like?
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Wow, thanks for for thanks for that mention but, yeah, I do pinch myself sometimes, but I did.
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Uh, I made the switch to start my own studio when I had my last job and I found it was a much smaller company than CNN and I found that I was the only product manager there, so I could really have a lot of impact on the product, the processes, the frameworks.
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And I messed around with everything and after doing that, I was like I just found myself doing some fundamental things nothing too big, just the fundamental things.
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Communicate what you're working on, be transparent, just how developers, designers and engineers work together, not just the fundamentals of it all.
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And it made such a big difference to that company.
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We ended up delivering a $50 million roadmap in one year, so it made a big difference.
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And at that point I was like, you know, maybe I should just try this and see where it goes, because I see a lot of organizations, especially the ones that will operate in a non-jazzy tech industry like I mean like stuff, like utility companies or law firms, for example they do need digital products to get their customers and interact with customers, but they don't have that sort of frameworks and processes that we in the tech industry have.
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So that was the whole intent of Product on Point.
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It's to be a one-stop shop.
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Access to product management, talent defines product strategies, etc.
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And we can also manage it as well, because the management is an important part.
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But essentially, that was my thought behind it is that I think a lot of companies forget the fundamentals when it comes to product management.
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It is a lot of vision, there's a lot of entrepreneurial skills that you're talking about, but ultimately there are fundamentals and I think a lot of companies miss it.
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I want to bring it and let's see how it goes.
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Yeah, I love that, naren.
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What's really interesting for me, obviously I get to interview entrepreneurs for a living and I hear all different ways that people start their businesses, and also I went to business school and you did as well, and so we've heard the academic approach to starting a business, and when I look at your business journey, obviously you have very tangible and incredible skills.
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But then also what I'm hearing and talking to you today is that your business mind thinks about the gaps in the marketplace, the needs of real life clients that you can serve.
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How do you balance the two of those?
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Because obviously, the way that you're growing product on point, you're thinking about both sides of that coin.
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But I'm curious, which comes comes first?
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How do you strategize from there and how do you execute it into reality?
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I think everyone does it different and I may have done it differently over the years, but, uh, how I do today.
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I think, as a product manager, you're going to be writing a lot, you're going to be reading a lot, you're going to be thinking by yourself a lot before you present it even to the first person, what you're working on.
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There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes before you get to that stage.
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So, for me, I like to uh think about large scale, very, very high level stuff like what do I want the studio to be perceived as?
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Uh, what do I want this studio to do?
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Uh, should it just be me as a freelancer or should it be like a studio with other people?
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So all these questions were something that I was thinking through.
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What would I have most fun with?
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Because when I first started, obviously, with LinkedIn.
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Everyone is going to independent consulting and all that kind of freelance work.
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But I didn't want to go into another organization and give them my solution and then rely on their engineers and their culture and whatnot to get it across the finish line.
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So that's why I was like I need to be a studio, I need to have engineers, I need to have designers, I need to have product managers and I think I'm not going to be a product manager, I want to be a studio head.
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So I love that I'm doing new things, but building on a foundation of what I learned through product management.
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Yeah, really well said, and the fact that you talk about it in that studio mindset, in the way that you're operating within your business model.
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Obviously it encompasses all of those aspects that you just introduced us to, from design to the actual engineering.
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Talk to us about how you've laid out your service lines and what it is that you offer to your clients, because I found I mean, I've been an entrepreneur now for 16 years and we're always evolving, we're always changing, we're always adding, we're always removing.
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I'd love to hear how you've laid out your services.
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Yeah, I went through hell for it.
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It took me one and a half years to come up with it.
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I went through hell for it.
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It took me one and a half years to come up with it, but I kept changing it, like I said, it didn't make sense, it wasn't what I want to do, it wasn't sometimes it wasn't the expertise that I felt I could do, it was maybe a bit below what I'm used to doing.
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But it started like I said if I were doing this as an individual, what would my services be?
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It would have been very basic stuff.
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So then, this as an individual, what would my services be?
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It would have been very basic stuff, uh.
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So then I was like what if I start hiring people to do stuff I cannot do?
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Uh, not just hiring, but you know, I mostly work with freelancers and so, uh, where they can own their own time, but I do share a person revenue uh with them.
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That uh gives them the value for the work more than just the hourly rate.
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But it started over there and I initially wanted the studio to cover the entire product development lifecycle, from the discovery to whatever design, branding, execution, deployment, marketing, promotion, everything.
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That's the whole cycle, and it started from there.
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But how do I put these seven to eight stages in a way that you know someone like a customer who's really in a hurry can understand?
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So that was the biggest challenge for me how to make this whole ecosystem into three to four services.
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What I have now on the site might actually change again, because I thought this was it in December or November of last year, but I think I have something better so I might be changing it soon.
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So it's a constant evolution and that's okay.
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Until you can reliably get a revenue, it's okay to keep changing.
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So it's such a low cost thing to do it because it's just me on the website right now.
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Yeah, I love your perspective on that, naren.
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I feel like this is the advice that most people don't hear in classrooms or in most traditional business educational resources, but this is the real stuff.
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You and I have absolutely found it to be true in our own entrepreneurial journeys, especially when I look at the work that your company does, and I think it's cool because you're working on projects that have real world implications, whether you're helping fire and rescue departments or your other clients.
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Walk us through some of those things, because obviously we're hearing your story about the evolution of your business, but I know, and you both know, that a lot of it comes from doing the real work, not sitting in your office and thinking about how to grow and evolve, but actually serving people.
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I'd love to hear the behind the scenes story from projects like that.
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Yeah, I mean, I did the basics right reach out your friends and family and I did get a couple of customers, I won't say uh one.
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One of them was a law firm and the other was the fire department in the county down, uh, in the next county down from where I am.
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Uh, I purposefully targeted these sort of industries because, like I mentioned, I think they will really value the work you're doing.
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Uh, I think some of the work we do is just taken for granted in a lot of tech companies, especially big tech, and it may not even be appreciated because everyone does it.
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But these sort of firms, I felt like it would make a big impact and I was not wrong.
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So, with the law firm, for example, it was just basic, fundamental stuff to increase page performance, increase the quality of lead conversions.
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A lot of these law firms have poor messaging on their webpage.
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They promote themselves versus what they do.
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This is the fundamentals of messaging, and so that was more than design, branding.
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That is what they valued and that's the kind of strategic aspect I'm hoping the studio can provide.
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And with the fire department, for example, they really don't have the kind of engineers that you would see in Google and whatnot.
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So the expertise I could bring there provides a real value for them, save them a lot of time.
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It was a lot of these government firms.
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They have really outdated systems that they kind of fill in the blanks to make them talk to each other.
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Like in the fire department they would download stuff from one app and make a spreadsheet, re-upload in other apps just to come do payroll.
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So it just kind of fused them together, just integrated the two of these systems.
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Standard stuff for maybe some of the larger companies, but invaluable sort of contribution.
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These sort of non-technical expertise sort of places.
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Yeah, for sure, I love the fact that you call that out because probably a lot of the things that you sort of contribution, these sort of non-technical expertise sort of places yeah, for sure I love the fact that you call that out, because probably a lot of the things that you do feel second nature and you've obviously seen it at huge companies but for smaller businesses that don't have that in-house talent you said the word invaluable and I actually very much agree with you there especially because what I think of is that a lot of us are so close to our work, so close to our businesses, that we don't see the solution.
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So I'd love to hear from your perspective maybe this is with your product management add-on of how do you walk into a business or a project, make sense of the existing landscape and then map out okay, here's all the different types of solutions and here's the solution that we wanna power forward with.
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I think it changed over the years and with the more experience I got.
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Like, when I walked into CNN, for example, for the first time in 2015, I came straight from QA so I had never seen a product manager before that.
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I mean these days, when I started at least back in the day you would never see product managers.
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You'd only see developers and DBAs, the QA person, your scrum meetings.
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And when I walked into the scene it was the first time I saw a product manager in the lab and it was a big jump.
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So when I was in that situation, you can easily start spinning very fast and especially in that fast environment.
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So many people are very successful over there.
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Well, big, big universities they come from over there.
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They can talk really good, especially at CNN.
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So, just trying to figure that part out, just be patient, you know.
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Looking back, I know the first two years over there I struggled so much because, like you mentioned, you know I didn't.
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I came from somewhere else, so my English wasn't that good as well.
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I had to learn to communicate and you got to communicate, you got to be public, you got to communicate.
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So that was kind of fundamental.
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I had to overcome that.
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But if, if I were going into a new place now with like a new kid going in, I'd say calm down.
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You know, just just go to your desk or your table, just read stuff, research stuff, look at the architecture.
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Don't get too caught up with everyone buzzing around you In product.
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Everyone will buzz around you.
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There's going to be a lot of people asking you for things, a lot of people who have urgent needs from their perspective, but maybe not from yours and the organization as well.
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So you need to just trust yourself a little bit more.
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Uh, back your judgment.
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You know you've spent time.
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You came up with a judgment, go for it, just express it.
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People will.
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People will rip it apart, regardless if it makes sense or not.
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So, especially if you own product, so just just do it.
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And so that was the kind of approach I would take if I'm going to something new.
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Looking back, of course, when I was doing it I was just all over the place.
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But another example when I went to my prior company, the much smaller one in the non-tech space, it took me a while.
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I was much more experienced by then, so I could add another layer to the landscape.
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I started looking at how the cc would perform.
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How was the management culture stuff that I didn't look at when I was younger because I just assumed everyone knew what they were doing.
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But uh, with the uh, but yeah, so it changes.
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Uh, as you grow older, you look at more things.
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Your title itself goes up hopefully.
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Uh, you have different responsibilities.
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Consider that when you're factoring in what you need to do, as you grow older, you look at more things.
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Your title itself goes up hopefully, you have different responsibilities.
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Consider that when you're factoring in what you need to do, fundamentals, have a good relationship, not like hey, what happened in the game last night relationship with your engineers and designers, but a good relationship where you are concerned about the quality of work you're providing to them.
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That has always been fundamental to me.
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It's so simple If you want to make a difference as a product manager, make sure the work you're bringing is quality that an engineer or designer feels like I want to come into work for this guy.
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Otherwise it's just going to go the wrong way.
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Yeah, I love that, naren, Especially because you're bringing up the important mindset stuff that I don't think we talk about often enough.
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You bring up patience, which is something that we could probably do multiple podcast episodes just on the topic of patience.
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But what I want to call out right now listeners know that before we ever get together, you and I, to create this episode, we do a lot of background research, and part of that is we always ask our guests what's your zone of genius?
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And I love your answer.
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I'm going to call it out here on the air because you wrote a winning mentality, even though it's not something that I had to begin with.
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I would love, with your entrepreneurial hat on, for you to talk to us about that, because obviously, working for somebody else is one thing, but now you're your own boss, you are the leader of the ship and you're growing your company.
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Why is that such an important part of what you do?
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Because I don't get stressed out when things aren't going well, because I know if I just put some time into it it's going to be hard, but eventually it will come through.
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And that's actually like I said, it was something I had to learn In product.
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You're not going to have this the minute you're walking through the door.
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You're going to get it.
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Doing this, multiple, multiple launches, multiple products, week after week, you're delivering.
00:18:10.934 --> 00:18:13.125
It comes after three to four years.
00:18:13.125 --> 00:18:14.087
You get the hang of things.
00:18:14.087 --> 00:18:15.371
You kind, you kind of know.
00:18:15.371 --> 00:18:18.298
Okay, these are three things I need to do to get things moving.
00:18:18.298 --> 00:18:23.992
These are three thing in pieces of information I need before I can even begin talking to anyone, it all starts falling into place.
00:18:23.992 --> 00:18:33.891
So when my big thing, if you're a product manager, one of the fundamental aspects is you need to be comfortable working in an ambiguous environment with very little information coming in, no one is giving you good information.
00:18:33.891 --> 00:18:34.272
You have to go get it yourself.
00:18:34.272 --> 00:18:35.144
Like I said, just keep it calm, keep it chill, you know it.
00:18:35.144 --> 00:18:36.835
Working in an ambiguous environment with very little information coming in, no one is giving you good information.
00:18:36.835 --> 00:18:37.717
You have to go get it yourself.
00:18:37.717 --> 00:18:45.606
Like I said, just keep it calm, keep it chill, you know, and I can see it making a difference with the studio work, for example.
00:18:46.147 --> 00:18:53.351
If I had done something like this four years ago, I would have been lost, I would have been panicked, I would have been nervous.
00:18:53.351 --> 00:18:55.749
I'm like, well, there's no progress, there's no customers, what's going on?
00:18:55.749 --> 00:19:00.244
But now I'm like you know, if I just keep doing the right things, uh, just be patient, it'll come.
00:19:00.244 --> 00:19:07.967
And I am having a lot of fun going through the process and since I am my own boss now, I'm not rushing through things.
00:19:07.967 --> 00:19:09.270
You know, that's the beauty of the zone.
00:19:09.270 --> 00:19:15.661
You know, I've had a lot of fun this one and a half years just thinking about what I want to do, being a bit meticulous.
00:19:15.661 --> 00:19:18.248
Meticulous, it's okay to be meticulous in life.
00:19:18.248 --> 00:19:26.050
I know in fast organizations that is the first victim, but I take my time these days.
00:19:26.050 --> 00:19:30.547
That's what's changed a bit from the fast product environment yeah, I love that.
00:19:30.626 --> 00:19:39.633
I'd love to hear some insights about your executive time behind the scenes because, hearing the way that you think, you obviously think like a product manager, which is a huge asset to you.
00:19:39.633 --> 00:19:44.736
But what I'm envisioning just being a fellow business owner is I realize you have a team, you have to manage them.
00:19:44.736 --> 00:19:45.425
You have clients.
00:19:45.425 --> 00:19:46.288
You're managing them.
00:19:46.288 --> 00:19:53.359
You also kind of lingering over all of our conversation today is you're also growing strategically the business development side of things.
00:19:53.359 --> 00:19:55.326
You have to manage the sales process.
00:19:55.326 --> 00:19:56.589
You have to get new clients.
00:19:56.589 --> 00:20:06.145
Clients talk to us about how you organize that, because I would imagine that as a product manager, you have a very systematic way of doing it all yeah, I, I didn't do everything at one shot.
00:20:06.267 --> 00:20:11.500
So, uh, when I first started, like, this is 2023, around september.
00:20:11.500 --> 00:20:16.736
October is when things started falling into place, maybe by january of 2024 is when I really started.
00:20:16.736 --> 00:20:20.835
I registered the LLC, for example, only in January 2024.
00:20:20.835 --> 00:20:25.115
But I knew, first thing, I need a lead generation website.
00:20:25.115 --> 00:20:26.419
So I started from the.
00:20:26.419 --> 00:20:29.027
I knew I couldn't do it myself.
00:20:29.027 --> 00:20:33.525
I had that realization in October of the year prior and that's why I reached out.
00:20:33.684 --> 00:20:35.788
Like you mentioned, I have a good team behind me.
00:20:35.788 --> 00:20:44.073
A lot of the website, a lot of the copywriting, marketing is done by Lauren Demarest, who is another entrepreneur herself.
00:20:44.073 --> 00:20:46.386
She may be a good fit for this episode.
00:20:46.386 --> 00:20:47.609
She's actually.
00:20:47.609 --> 00:20:58.298
She has a vacation studio, exercise studio in Mykonos, greece, and then I have my Austin, who is also someone I've worked with a lot in the past.
00:20:58.298 --> 00:21:14.751
So if there's something that doesn't involve the business side of the studio, the lead generation side of the studio, I do try to get people to help me to move it along, and if I hadn't done that, I would never be here on this podcast.
00:21:14.751 --> 00:21:16.477
Even I don't think anyone would know who I was.
