priyansh
Everyone in my batch was getting placed. I was getting high scores.
BIT Mesra, BCA, class of 2020. Placement season arrived and I watched it happen to other people. At that point I was genuinely excellent at exactly one thing, and it was a video game.
The thought that changed everything wasn’t noble. It was: people are making money from this. Why not me?
Asking that question is the only thing I’ve been consistently good at since. It took me years to notice it’s also the first question of product management — not “what do I want to build”, but “where is value already moving, and can I stand in it?”
Curiosity about money is an underrated starting point. It makes you look at what people actually do instead of what you wish they did.
This is the unfiltered version — the actual sequence, including the expensive mistakes.
If you’re short on time, Chapter 06 is the work I’d defend in an interview, and the résumé PDF is at the bottom.
Ads took my savings. Organic gave it back.
To sell anything online I first had to build a store, so I taught myself web design off YouTube. Then I built a brand. Then another. Then five more — seven at once, because I couldn’t tell which one would work and didn’t want to wait to find out.
Then I learned to run ads. YouTube again. And I spent. Every rupee I had went into paid platforms while I waited for the machine to do what the machine was supposed to do. The money ran out before the sales showed up. That part genuinely failed, and it’s the most useful thing that’s ever happened to me.
So I stopped paying and started learning SEO instead — on my own stores. Hit and trial, on sites nobody visited. The safest lab I’ll ever get: there was nothing left to break.
Then one of them started ranking. Not for vanity terms — for money keywords, position one. That single site has done $217,799 in gross sales, and it still pays me passively today, years later, without a rupee of ad spend behind it.
Paid attention is rented — the second you stop paying, it’s gone. Organic attention is owned. One store proved it, and I’ve been building on that idea ever since.
I cold-messaged an agency owner in Australia.
Ranking my own store proved the craft worked. It didn’t teach me how it works at scale, for clients, with money and reputations attached.
So I went and found the person who did it for a living. Not a recruiter, not a job board — the owner of an SEO agency in Australia. I had no degree in it and no portfolio worth showing. What I had was a store I’d dragged to page one by hand.
That was enough. He took me on as an intern, then taught me the parts YouTube leaves out — the parts you only learn from someone whose money is on the line.
And the half of the job I hadn’t expected: stakeholders and clients. How to run a call where the client is unhappy. How to say no to a request that would hurt their results. How to make a case with numbers instead of opinions. That turned out to be the most transferable thing I’ve ever learned — it’s most of what I do now as a PM.
The fastest way to learn something is to find the person who does it for a living and make yourself genuinely useful to them. Ask. It’s free, and the worst outcome is silence.
Client management — running the relationship, not just the deliverable.
Stakeholder management — getting a yes from people who don’t report to you.
Reporting that survives scrutiny — because a client can fire you on a Friday.
I built a team out of the people I used to play games with.
Search Combat, 2021. I went from intern to SEO Team Lead, running 37+ enterprise campaigns at once across sites with genuinely complicated architecture, with a team of 7, full ownership of client reporting and retention, and the actual job of a lead: planning the work, distributing it, and getting it delivered on time by people whose week I was responsible for.
Here’s the part I’m actually proud of. When I needed to build that team, I didn’t go hunting for people with SEO on their CV. I went back to the friends I used to play games with — the same people who, like me, hadn’t been the placement story. I taught them SEO from scratch.
They were good at it, and in hindsight it’s obvious why. Gaming is pattern recognition, fast iteration and an unhealthy relationship with a scoreboard. That is a more or less complete job description for growth.
Talent is mostly unlabelled. The best people I’ve worked with were ones nobody else was looking at.
A calculator beat 500 articles a month.
On paper I was hired for content and SEO. In practice I ended up owning the investor tools — the Bonds Directory, the FD calculators, gold and silver rates. Running user testing. Sitting with design on the UX.
Meanwhile the content engine was enormous: 500+ articles a month across 5 editors, 7 subject-matter experts and multiple agencies. Organic went from 7K to 153.4K visits a month in a year — 22x.
But when I looked at what was genuinely pulling, it wasn’t the articles. It was the calculators. A tool people came back to on purpose. It ranked, and then it kept ranking, and it never needed rewriting.
That was the day I stopped being a growth person who wrote about products and started being someone who wanted to own them.
An article earns traffic once. A tool earns it forever. That one idea is the through-line of everything I’ve done since.
The articles got the credit. The calculators did the work.
So I stopped paying for attention and went and stood where it already was.
Same instinct as the calculators. Much bigger surface.
Instead of buying wealth customers through ads — the exact thing that killed seven of my brands — we put Dezerv’s portfolio tracker inside the apps people already open every morning: Moneycontrol, Livemint and Inshorts.
I was the only PM across three external partner engineering teams and our own squads: PRDs, wireframes, SDK integration specs, SEBI compliance guardrails, launch. Then the parts that make it compound — daily portfolio movement and news tied to what you actually hold (+38% repeat engagement), and lead scoring so sales called the right people first (+21% lead-to-call).
Alongside it I took organic from 10K to 140K sessions a month. That traffic is now 29% of new eligible-lead signups.
Seven dead brands taught me this the expensive way: don’t rent the road. Put the product on a road that already exists, or build your own.
Six years earlier I couldn’t get one person to buy one thing from seven different stores. The difference isn’t that I got smarter about ads. It’s that I stopped trying to buy a road and learned to build on one.
I’m a product manager who came up through growth.
Which means I have never been able to separate “is this good?” from “will anyone ever find it?” To me those are one question. Seven dead brands are why.
What I’m good at
Zero-to-one distribution. Finding where demand already sits and building the thing that meets it there. And the unglamorous half — getting three companies who don’t report to me to ship the same spec on the same date, inside a regulator’s rules.
Where I want to go
Deeper product ownership in fintech and wealth. A bigger surface than one channel, more of the roadmap, and a team to build rather than a funnel to run. I’ve done 0→1 once inside someone else’s app. I’d like to do it on our own.
What I bring
Five years that compound: SEO craft, growth economics, regulated-product instincts, and enough hands-on building that engineers argue with me about the right things instead of about whether something is possible.
I’ve led individual contributors and external teams — not an org of PMs. I’m not a design-led product manager. If those are the gaps that matter for your team, you’ll find that out faster from this page than from four rounds of interviews.
If any of that sounds useful, let’s talk.
Hiring, building a distribution channel, or stuck getting three companies to agree on one spec — that last one I’ve actually done.