Meeting Title: Brainforge Interview with Aakanksha Date: 2026-02-13 Meeting participants: Aakanksha Khanna, Greg Stoutenburg
WEBVTT
1 00:02:46.290 ⇒ 00:02:47.979 Aakanksha Khanna: Hi Greg, how are you?
2 00:02:48.290 ⇒ 00:02:50.850 Greg Stoutenburg: Hey, great, nice to meet you. I’m doing well, how are you?
3 00:02:51.330 ⇒ 00:02:54.179 Aakanksha Khanna: I’m good, good, nice to meet you, as well.
4 00:02:54.840 ⇒ 00:02:56.520 Greg Stoutenburg: Yep, happy Friday.
5 00:02:57.310 ⇒ 00:02:58.659 Aakanksha Khanna: Happy Friday indeed.
6 00:02:59.030 ⇒ 00:03:00.299 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, where are you located?
7 00:03:01.190 ⇒ 00:03:11.819 Aakanksha Khanna: I’m actually based in the GTA in Canada, but I’m currently in India visiting family for some urgent work, so I’m… Oh, nice!
8 00:03:12.230 ⇒ 00:03:21.019 Greg Stoutenburg: Nice, yeah, yeah, very nice, yeah, I, I thought maybe I’d seen, yeah, I thought I’d seen you were in Canada. I’m originally from Michigan, so, you know, I.
9 00:03:21.020 ⇒ 00:03:21.450 Aakanksha Khanna: Nice.
10 00:03:21.450 ⇒ 00:03:25.740 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, good, good. Anytime I, you know, hear Canada or Ontario, I’m like, alright, cool.
11 00:03:27.710 ⇒ 00:03:29.490 Aakanksha Khanna: Back home, yeah.
12 00:03:29.740 ⇒ 00:03:30.690 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah.
13 00:03:30.790 ⇒ 00:03:39.199 Greg Stoutenburg: Cool. Alright, well, we can just jump right in. So, this is, this is the interview that’s sort of focused on,
14 00:03:39.200 ⇒ 00:03:53.800 Greg Stoutenburg: on… on the role, and on the way that you think about things like experimentation, analysis, and in many cases, even more importantly, like, what you do with insights that you’re able to uncover using, you know, quantitative means. So,
15 00:03:53.960 ⇒ 00:04:08.799 Greg Stoutenburg: let’s just, let’s just jump right in. So, could you walk me through a funnel that you own from end to end, and, and give an example of where users would drop off, and, what did you change?
16 00:04:09.690 ⇒ 00:04:19.829 Aakanksha Khanna: Sure, for sure. I can give you a couple of examples, and I’ll just… before I get into that, I’ll just tell you a bit about myself and where I’m coming from.
17 00:04:19.980 ⇒ 00:04:38.029 Aakanksha Khanna: I’ve been in the growth and digital marketing space for more than 11 years now, and I started my journey in ed tech, and at that time, acquisition used to be the main play, right? People didn’t know more about funnels, it was more about just getting as many users to come in as possible, and…
18 00:04:38.100 ⇒ 00:04:43.219 Aakanksha Khanna: I worked, when I was in India, I worked with a couple of big e-commerce giants, and…
19 00:04:43.280 ⇒ 00:04:59.789 Aakanksha Khanna: they had unlimited budgets, so the aim was just to get as many app installs as possible, and very performance-heavy, kind of roles. But then I… as I grew in my career, and I started working with a couple of startups, and got into different industries, I got more into
20 00:04:59.850 ⇒ 00:05:14.190 Aakanksha Khanna: understanding about the user funnel and the user journey end-to-end, that what happens to these users once they come into the funnel? Are we looking at their individual journeys? Are we creating personas out of them? Are we bucketing them rightly to understand
21 00:05:14.470 ⇒ 00:05:17.410 Aakanksha Khanna: How certain audiences would respond to
22 00:05:17.630 ⇒ 00:05:26.890 Aakanksha Khanna: say, a certain feature that we introduce, or a certain marketing campaign that we introduce. So that’s where my focus has been for the last few years, and
23 00:05:27.080 ⇒ 00:05:34.219 Aakanksha Khanna: Now that you mention it, I’ll talk about my recent experience. I was working for Shobi, a net tech company, and
24 00:05:34.590 ⇒ 00:05:39.379 Aakanksha Khanna: There, they have a B2… it’s a B2C2B kind of product setup.
25 00:05:39.500 ⇒ 00:05:41.250 Aakanksha Khanna: So they… they have…
26 00:05:41.630 ⇒ 00:05:47.999 Aakanksha Khanna: a B2B site, which is purely dealt by the sales team, and there’s not a lot of growth intervention there.
27 00:05:48.240 ⇒ 00:05:55.240 Aakanksha Khanna: And then they have a B2C product, which they wanted to convert into a B2C2 B kind of product, which is an assessments product.
28 00:05:55.610 ⇒ 00:06:10.959 Aakanksha Khanna: And it’s mostly meant for educators from around the world to sign in and basically assess their student groups, or assess their classrooms, and maybe do some tests, or just general assessments, and then share the results.
29 00:06:11.350 ⇒ 00:06:27.969 Aakanksha Khanna: And, it was… when I joined the team, it was a very lean team. We were just two people working in the team, and there was no funnel to begin with. It was just, okay, yes, people come in, they sign up, there’s a freemium system that we have, and now we want to grow.
30 00:06:28.390 ⇒ 00:06:37.019 Aakanksha Khanna: And that was it, that’s all I came in with. And I was like, okay, well, there’s not a lot of information to work with, so let me start from the basics.
31 00:06:37.410 ⇒ 00:06:46.110 Aakanksha Khanna: How many users are coming in on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis? How many users are active on this platform that we have, which is great.
32 00:06:46.290 ⇒ 00:06:51.069 Aakanksha Khanna: How many are from those user bases? How many of them are using the free version?
33 00:06:51.260 ⇒ 00:07:02.559 Aakanksha Khanna: And then how many of them are inching towards getting into that freemium zone where they want to use the assessments platform a little bit more, but are not sure about the price, so they get into a trial?
34 00:07:03.000 ⇒ 00:07:05.110 Aakanksha Khanna: And then what happens to these…
35 00:07:05.270 ⇒ 00:07:11.470 Aakanksha Khanna: Premium to trial audiences, and then when we see them converting after a certain point of time.
36 00:07:12.140 ⇒ 00:07:13.969 Aakanksha Khanna: What’s their window looking like?
37 00:07:14.150 ⇒ 00:07:23.979 Aakanksha Khanna: So that’s how I started that whole funnel analysis assessment. There was data fragmented everywhere, it was on amplitude, but it wasn’t on amplitude.
38 00:07:24.080 ⇒ 00:07:37.680 Aakanksha Khanna: So, there were some events which were missing, a lot of things were just all over the place, because that’s what happens when you work in a startup and things are a bit all over the place, so… so I started with structuring my entire funnel by looking at
39 00:07:37.840 ⇒ 00:07:47.989 Aakanksha Khanna: audiences, and also working roundup, that, okay, we have a good funnel, we are looking at certain metrics, some metrics are just for vanity as well, fine.
40 00:07:48.100 ⇒ 00:07:51.200 Aakanksha Khanna: What should be, like, the key metrics that I should be looking at?
41 00:07:51.320 ⇒ 00:08:07.079 Aakanksha Khanna: and then start working up my way to figure out where are the gaps. So I started with just a user sign-up, okay? We’re getting so much traffic on the app, on the website, and we’re getting so many users to sign up. From those users, a certain set of users are
42 00:08:07.720 ⇒ 00:08:11.859 Aakanksha Khanna: From moving from sign-up, they are starting their assessment journey, or they are, say.
43 00:08:12.150 ⇒ 00:08:17.919 Aakanksha Khanna: Launching a sample quiz, or sample assessment, which is there by default on the platform.
44 00:08:18.080 ⇒ 00:08:28.060 Aakanksha Khanna: Within this audience, there are some users who are launching more than one assessment, so they are launching the same assessment twice, so they’re trying to get a look and feel of the platform.
45 00:08:28.290 ⇒ 00:08:30.839 Aakanksha Khanna: And then there’s another set of users who are
46 00:08:31.330 ⇒ 00:08:47.379 Aakanksha Khanna: they’re just jumping right into it. They’re like, you know what, we have the material, we’ll just create the assessment from scratch, and we will straight away get into starting and launching the assessment, sending it out to our classroom, seeing the results, and then even sharing the results. So they’ll complete the funnel end-to-end.
47 00:08:48.170 ⇒ 00:08:56.569 Aakanksha Khanna: So, with that basic funnel in mind, I started breaking it down that, okay, from, say, 100 users who are signing up on a daily basis.
48 00:08:56.840 ⇒ 00:09:00.380 Aakanksha Khanna: Say, 20 of them are dropping off just from sign-up to
49 00:09:00.600 ⇒ 00:09:07.900 Aakanksha Khanna: say, getting on the homepage and just starting any activity. It doesn’t matter what activity it is. Clicking on even
50 00:09:08.740 ⇒ 00:09:19.679 Aakanksha Khanna: looking at samples, or clicking on even looking at audiences when there is none. Like, they don’t have any results to share, they don’t have any classroom or roster created, nothing is there, they’re just exploring.
51 00:09:19.870 ⇒ 00:09:26.149 Aakanksha Khanna: So, I started looking at what are these small, small, small, small drop-offs which are happening right at the very first step.
52 00:09:26.500 ⇒ 00:09:29.100 Aakanksha Khanna: Before I get into a deeper analysis.
53 00:09:29.390 ⇒ 00:09:34.270 Aakanksha Khanna: And the main problem that I found was that Tosers were coming in.
54 00:09:34.510 ⇒ 00:09:46.609 Aakanksha Khanna: browsing around, and they just weren’t even starting their activation journey. So it… I was… it came to my mind that if I start getting into the whole R funnel, it’s gonna…
55 00:09:47.080 ⇒ 00:09:54.079 Aakanksha Khanna: That’s a problem for a later day. Let me solve the most basic problem there, is that people just don’t know what to do there.
56 00:09:54.380 ⇒ 00:10:04.710 Aakanksha Khanna: They are maybe getting lost, maybe they are not understanding what needs to be done, maybe there’s a language barrier because this platform has been used by users all over the world.
57 00:10:05.230 ⇒ 00:10:14.730 Aakanksha Khanna: So I started breaking it down. Okay, from this drop-off that is happening on a daily basis, what’s the audience looking like? What… who are these people? Why are they dropping off?
58 00:10:14.900 ⇒ 00:10:16.970 Aakanksha Khanna: And I found some interesting cues.
59 00:10:17.100 ⇒ 00:10:20.269 Aakanksha Khanna: A lot of users were coming in and signing in from
60 00:10:20.500 ⇒ 00:10:40.189 Aakanksha Khanna: not the North American subgroup, but they were coming in from, say, Latin American countries, or they were coming in from India. So, maybe language was the barrier. They were signing up in their own language, because the support for multiple languages at the very first sign-up stage, where you can enter your name, enter where you’re from.
61 00:10:40.310 ⇒ 00:10:41.300 Aakanksha Khanna: But there’s…
62 00:10:41.410 ⇒ 00:10:51.599 Aakanksha Khanna: there’s a huge gap from that sign-up stage to the homepage. As soon as you are done signing up, you just come to the homepage. There are no prompts, there are no guides to
63 00:10:51.700 ⇒ 00:10:55.499 Aakanksha Khanna: Push you, or, like, nudge you in the right journey, and you just…
64 00:10:55.720 ⇒ 00:10:58.129 Aakanksha Khanna: You get lost, and you start dropping off.
65 00:10:58.390 ⇒ 00:11:12.379 Aakanksha Khanna: So my… I took that upon myself, nobody told me to do this, and I was like, I need to solve this problem immediately, because figuring out the other funnel gaps is a later days issue. If I don’t solve this right now, I am actually
66 00:11:12.530 ⇒ 00:11:26.420 Aakanksha Khanna: affecting organic conversions by a huge percentage, and we don’t even know what is the percentage. So the very first thing I did was figure out these audiences, figure out the drop-offs. I actually created a dummy customer support account.
67 00:11:26.690 ⇒ 00:11:36.440 Aakanksha Khanna: And went through a couple of customer support journeys, and reached out to those users who were dropping off, and asked them, hey, we saw that you signed up.
68 00:11:36.550 ⇒ 00:11:40.560 Aakanksha Khanna: But we… we didn’t see you on the platform. We’d love to chat with you.
69 00:11:40.600 ⇒ 00:11:58.470 Aakanksha Khanna: And out of, say, 100 responses, a few of them actually responded back. And I started chatting with them, and I understood that my hunch was right, that people just did not know what to do. They were like, oh, you know, my… my friend told me about this, and she uses it at… in her school.
70 00:11:58.470 ⇒ 00:12:02.819 Aakanksha Khanna: And she told me it’s a great platform, but I kinda don’t know what to do here.
71 00:12:04.270 ⇒ 00:12:07.830 Aakanksha Khanna: oh my god, then the light bulb went in my head, and then I had…
72 00:12:07.900 ⇒ 00:12:10.769 Aakanksha Khanna: I created this whole, you know, plan.
73 00:12:10.800 ⇒ 00:12:27.279 Aakanksha Khanna: that this is what I want to do, this is where the interventions would be required. Maybe I’ll use an internal CRM platform to just nudge the users first. I won’t get into the whole PLG kind of growth setup, where I’m working with the product team and engineering team, and we are actually creating a nudge
74 00:12:27.280 ⇒ 00:12:35.299 Aakanksha Khanna: which is going by default, or creating a different step in the journey, which would require a lot more time. Let me… let me…
75 00:12:35.310 ⇒ 00:12:42.760 Aakanksha Khanna: grab the lowest hanging fruit first, and let me fix this… this impending doom problem that I’m seeing.
76 00:12:43.550 ⇒ 00:12:52.459 Aakanksha Khanna: So the fun… the silliest thing I did was just went through a CRM platform that we were using, and I just created a welcome checklist. So when you sign up.
77 00:12:52.800 ⇒ 00:12:58.850 Aakanksha Khanna: you get a checksus, which is in the most basic English possible, which is easy to be translated if you’re using a translator.
78 00:12:59.690 ⇒ 00:13:01.970 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, just, like, right on the screen. So, like, they log in.
79 00:13:01.970 ⇒ 00:13:03.290 Aakanksha Khanna: Right on the stream, so when they…
80 00:13:03.290 ⇒ 00:13:03.670 Greg Stoutenburg: That’s right.
81 00:13:03.670 ⇒ 00:13:22.629 Aakanksha Khanna: So, I know what events are firing in the funnel, right? Because I can see them in amplitude, and I’ve created a user funnel end-to-end. I know where the major gap is happening. The major gap is happening right after sign up, launch, and then launch an activity. So, launching the homepage versus launching an activity. So, I know this is where the major gap is.
82 00:13:22.990 ⇒ 00:13:27.519 Greg Stoutenburg: So, right at that point, I created an intervention, which was just a.
83 00:13:27.600 ⇒ 00:13:40.850 Aakanksha Khanna: like, the most basic, like, it’s not nothing fancy. Most basic checklist that you’ll see. It’ll have my… there’s a face, so it doesn’t seem like a border chatting with you. It’s an actual person, so it’s me, it’s my account, it’s my name.
84 00:13:40.880 ⇒ 00:13:51.559 Aakanksha Khanna: Say, hey, this is AK, from Showbee, nice to connect with you, happy to have you here, let’s get you started. This is what you need to do. So, step one is this.
85 00:13:51.780 ⇒ 00:14:11.000 Aakanksha Khanna: click on this link, or click on this button. Step 2. Create your assessment. Step 3. You can… at step three, do you have some more material that you want to import? This is how you can do it. Step 4, Step 5. That’s how I created this silly little list, but I knew in my mind that this should solve some of the problems.
86 00:14:11.410 ⇒ 00:14:14.130 Aakanksha Khanna: And it did. I ran the experiment.
87 00:14:14.460 ⇒ 00:14:19.340 Aakanksha Khanna: it was… because it was internal, it was going through customer I.O, we already had
88 00:14:19.630 ⇒ 00:14:35.159 Aakanksha Khanna: an internal connect in the backend, so every time I would run a small experiment, I could decide which audiences or how much of an audience I could send it out to. So I started really small, sending it out to only a few hundred users to begin with.
89 00:14:35.240 ⇒ 00:14:43.529 Aakanksha Khanna: And I started seeing some great results that the drop-off reduced drastically. Like, in the first couple of weeks, we saw, like, a 20% improvement, which is huge.
90 00:14:43.890 ⇒ 00:14:59.770 Aakanksha Khanna: Because the base is small, right? So, I’m like, okay, now I can scale it up. But before I scaled it up, I had a discussion with the product folks, the tech folks, and I’m like, look, guys, this is a problem that I’m trying to solve. And I estimate that from this improvement in the funnel.
91 00:14:59.770 ⇒ 00:15:07.930 Aakanksha Khanna: We will see an organic uplift in the conversion rates by, say, even 0.5% over a span of a couple of months.
92 00:15:08.260 ⇒ 00:15:28.190 Aakanksha Khanna: So, they were like, you know what, this makes sense, this is great, we’re not actually spending any money in it, there’s no bandwidth required, because there’s no tech or product intervention required here to, say, create a custom funnel, or create a custom event that needs to be mapped. So, let’s do it, just go for it. And I did, and it was a successful campaign, and now
93 00:15:28.490 ⇒ 00:15:42.410 Aakanksha Khanna: whenever you sign up on Socrada, which is the B2C division I’m talking about, you will see that list by default. It might seem annoying, but it gets the job done. And I think that’s… that’s how that… my brain works like that, like, as a growth marketer, if you
94 00:15:42.590 ⇒ 00:15:48.939 Aakanksha Khanna: are not solving for some glaring issues. Sometimes they can be as simple as just nudging the user.
95 00:15:49.220 ⇒ 00:15:57.789 Aakanksha Khanna: at a certain point in the journey. But if you’re not solving any of those problems, everything else, like getting into complex, you know.
96 00:15:57.900 ⇒ 00:16:05.010 Aakanksha Khanna: LTV calculations and everything, that becomes immaterial if your funnel doesn’t make any sense, or if your funnel is broken.
97 00:16:05.440 ⇒ 00:16:23.300 Aakanksha Khanna: So, I guess with that mindset, that was one of the, I think, my most successful recent projects, because not only was it recognized by the whole, like, B2B division also, and we had a chat with the CEO, who was super impressed, he was very happy about it, and
98 00:16:23.650 ⇒ 00:16:40.300 Aakanksha Khanna: now it’s a permanent feature, not in… not just in the B2C division, but it’s also in Showbe itself. So, if you’re an educator and Showbee is part of your entire education institution group, so if you’re in that funnel as well, whether you’re an educator or a student.
99 00:16:40.350 ⇒ 00:16:44.120 Aakanksha Khanna: Whenever you log in, there are certain prompts that will guide you.
100 00:16:44.200 ⇒ 00:16:52.650 Aakanksha Khanna: To get certain events completed. Or, like, just get your user journey on the platform, seamless.
101 00:16:52.900 ⇒ 00:16:59.080 Aakanksha Khanna: So that… I think that was, like, super awesome that I did. One more example that I can share with you, I’ll try to be concise.
102 00:16:59.250 ⇒ 00:17:03.849 Aakanksha Khanna: was that I was working for a fintech company, which was…
103 00:17:04.410 ⇒ 00:17:16.279 Aakanksha Khanna: Expanding into the Nigerian market. Nigeria is a very complex market. There are multiple languages being spoken. The culture is very different as soon as you move from, say, one
104 00:17:16.380 ⇒ 00:17:19.550 Aakanksha Khanna: Province to another, or even within the same
105 00:17:19.980 ⇒ 00:17:24.149 Aakanksha Khanna: same… same state. If you move, say, from one audience group to another.
106 00:17:24.290 ⇒ 00:17:29.050 Aakanksha Khanna: things change drastically. So the marketing has to be changed drastically.
107 00:17:29.610 ⇒ 00:17:33.429 Aakanksha Khanna: So, when I approached that problem, I realized that
108 00:17:33.860 ⇒ 00:17:44.330 Aakanksha Khanna: no matter how much budget I spend on, say, a performance campaign, unless the messaging is right, I will not get the uplift I am looking for.
109 00:17:44.800 ⇒ 00:17:49.819 Aakanksha Khanna: So, in Nigeria, there’s a really unique localization problem. They speak English.
110 00:17:50.310 ⇒ 00:17:54.380 Aakanksha Khanna: And they read English, but it’s not the same English that you and I know.
111 00:17:54.750 ⇒ 00:18:09.320 Aakanksha Khanna: So they use the same language, but they mix their own… like, in India, it happens as well, so they… everybody speaks English, but it’s colloquial, so they’ll mix Hindi, and they’ll mix Punjabi, and they’ll mix some other local languages, and they’ll create their version.
112 00:18:09.730 ⇒ 00:18:14.670 Aakanksha Khanna: Of that language, and that’s the language people understand, and they relate to.
113 00:18:14.860 ⇒ 00:18:17.650 Aakanksha Khanna: Similar problem I saw in the Nigerian market.
114 00:18:18.380 ⇒ 00:18:34.789 Aakanksha Khanna: And the problem was that there’s a lot of money to spend, and yeah, you know, the business is booming, but we need to get a certain group of audiences to enter into this funnel stream, get signed up, you know, give their KYC documents, and get started on their
115 00:18:34.940 ⇒ 00:18:41.829 Aakanksha Khanna: say, personal lending journey, but how do we do that? We don’t really know how to market to these users.
116 00:18:42.030 ⇒ 00:18:46.370 Aakanksha Khanna: So there, my mind goes into a different… space where I’m like, okay.
117 00:18:46.500 ⇒ 00:18:53.899 Aakanksha Khanna: Let’s look at the funnel a little differently. Let’s try to solve for localization, but also look at
118 00:18:54.630 ⇒ 00:18:58.460 Aakanksha Khanna: within the data that I have, within the audience that I have.
119 00:18:58.550 ⇒ 00:19:14.890 Aakanksha Khanna: how can I create smaller buckets and understand which are these high-performing users, high-performing customers, that are doing a great job and are relating to the content that has gone out so far? And I can take cues from that and then
120 00:19:15.320 ⇒ 00:19:19.980 Aakanksha Khanna: create, say, a marketing campaign, which I know will hit the nail on the head.
121 00:19:20.730 ⇒ 00:19:32.760 Aakanksha Khanna: And, that’s when my… like, it was a completely different approach from what I’ve done so far. But I started getting into research, I started getting into the nitty-gritties and trying to understand why certain people are…
122 00:19:33.210 ⇒ 00:19:46.960 Aakanksha Khanna: understanding and relating to our platform so well, and why some of them just don’t even bother, no matter how much money I throw at them. If I say, start a referral campaign, which I’ll say, okay, you know, we’ll give you $100 for signing up, which is huge!
123 00:19:47.270 ⇒ 00:19:52.119 Aakanksha Khanna: Still, people just don’t relate to it, because they just don’t understand what I’m trying to say.
124 00:19:52.610 ⇒ 00:20:01.190 Aakanksha Khanna: So there, the approach is a little different. I get into the research, I look into the data, and data sometimes gives some cues that you won’t generally see
125 00:20:01.540 ⇒ 00:20:04.859 Aakanksha Khanna: write on paper. You have to go a little deeper, look at
126 00:20:05.170 ⇒ 00:20:08.460 Aakanksha Khanna: individual user-level data. Look at, say, their journey.
127 00:20:08.640 ⇒ 00:20:14.650 Aakanksha Khanna: on the platform, that’s where Amplitude comes in, so say you can look at the entire user funnel for a certain cohort.
128 00:20:14.810 ⇒ 00:20:28.030 Aakanksha Khanna: So you then, from that cohort, you get some insights that, oh, you know what? This is what makes sense. These people are active on these days. These people are active around these seasons. So I need to incorporate those elements whenever I’m
129 00:20:28.170 ⇒ 00:20:38.970 Aakanksha Khanna: designing a campaign, or whenever I’m designing a funnel, because those are the cues that will help me grow the business, and that will help me chase the main, say, company metrics that I have.
130 00:20:39.190 ⇒ 00:20:57.700 Aakanksha Khanna: So that’s… that’s… I guess that’s my approach when it comes to creating or designing a user funnel end-to-end. Whether it’s performance, or whether it’s growth, or whether it’s product-led growth, I always try to make sure that I have a very holistic and, like, a very comprehensive, wholesome kind of… kind of approach.
131 00:20:57.840 ⇒ 00:21:13.339 Aakanksha Khanna: Where I’m trying to incorporate every single element that I can, but also have the main goal in mind that, okay, this is what we’re trying to chase. And that is the end goal. So let me work back through it, but also let me try and incorporate the right elements to make sure that
132 00:21:13.440 ⇒ 00:21:17.360 Aakanksha Khanna: Any effort that I’m doing, or any project I’m running, is a success.
133 00:21:18.410 ⇒ 00:21:26.239 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, good, yeah, thanks for that. Can you give an example of a time when event tracking was wrong?
134 00:21:26.380 ⇒ 00:21:32.420 Greg Stoutenburg: Like, tracking the wrong thing, or something wasn’t firing as expected, and then how you found that out, and then what you did about it?
135 00:21:32.940 ⇒ 00:21:42.360 Aakanksha Khanna: Yeah, for sure. So, for one of the, clients I was working for, they just had a concert with me, and, they…
136 00:21:42.570 ⇒ 00:21:49.149 Aakanksha Khanna: wanted to understand… so they had hit a plateau in terms of their growth. It’s a B2B platform where,
137 00:21:49.300 ⇒ 00:22:01.760 Aakanksha Khanna: Basically, the sales teams can get together, and they can, get their emails automated through AI, and they were… there were… there’s just too many things on the platform they were… that they were trying to sell.
138 00:22:01.800 ⇒ 00:22:13.949 Aakanksha Khanna: to certain audiences, and they had hit a plateau that they just wasn’t growing. So, they came to me with this problem that, okay, what are we doing wrong? Or are we doing something wrong? Or is this the expected growth?
139 00:22:14.150 ⇒ 00:22:16.009 Aakanksha Khanna: How would you solve for this?
140 00:22:17.220 ⇒ 00:22:21.639 Aakanksha Khanna: So, like, okay, you know what? Let me just get straight into it, let me look at
141 00:22:22.210 ⇒ 00:22:37.750 Aakanksha Khanna: the funnel, and let me look at all the events that they’re tracking. So, I asked them, like, do you have, like, a document or a place where you’ve written down the event schema? Because I’m not a coder, so I don’t understand the technical aspects, but if you give me the
142 00:22:37.850 ⇒ 00:22:51.790 Aakanksha Khanna: just the basic insights that, okay, there’s a list of events that we have, this is what we are tracking, and these are… this is when these events were incorporated. I can make some sense of it, and I can then create something on my own.
143 00:22:52.140 ⇒ 00:23:03.189 Aakanksha Khanna: And when they shared that list, and thankfully there was a list, because the product manager was very much involved into the whole process, and we had a chat, and I realized that
144 00:23:04.070 ⇒ 00:23:05.830 Aakanksha Khanna: In the event journey.
145 00:23:05.970 ⇒ 00:23:12.860 Aakanksha Khanna: there were some events which were, according to me, not there at all, or they were missing. So, say.
146 00:23:14.350 ⇒ 00:23:33.080 Aakanksha Khanna: in their whole sign… their sign-up process was very long. So when you sign up, you have to give your organization name, your name, your details, company details, even have to add your image or, like, some credentials of the company to get started to the next step. Then there are 4 more steps.
147 00:23:33.890 ⇒ 00:23:38.570 Aakanksha Khanna: Which is, okay, okay, fine, that’s how it is, that’s how it’s worked so far, fine.
148 00:23:39.780 ⇒ 00:23:43.989 Aakanksha Khanna: Those four steps did not have proper events.
149 00:23:44.130 ⇒ 00:23:50.260 Aakanksha Khanna: They were just… there’s a starting event started, so journey started step, and journey completed step.
150 00:23:50.390 ⇒ 00:24:00.440 Aakanksha Khanna: So when the sign-up is complete, then there’s a fifth screen that comes in, when they start asking… the platform starts asking you questions, and then they bring in their AI assistant, and blah blah blah.
151 00:24:00.900 ⇒ 00:24:10.169 Aakanksha Khanna: So, I told them that, listen, you’re not tracking all the events. They were like, what do you mean? We are? Of course, every single event is there in the list.
152 00:24:10.490 ⇒ 00:24:17.259 Aakanksha Khanna: I’m like, no, but it’s not there, because those four events are the key places where you’re probably losing out on a lot of…
153 00:24:17.510 ⇒ 00:24:26.149 Aakanksha Khanna: A lot of users who are signing up, because they are spending a lot of their time signing up on the very first page. But then there are 3 more pages, which
154 00:24:26.310 ⇒ 00:24:45.120 Aakanksha Khanna: there is no, like, there’s no way for them to know how many pages they can expect in the sign-up journey. There’s no marketing. Usually, like, when you… when you sign up, there’s, like, a completion bar, or there’s, like, they’ll give you some hints or nudges that only two… two more steps till you get started, or whatever. Nothing like that.
155 00:24:45.420 ⇒ 00:24:49.610 Aakanksha Khanna: So I told him that, listen, we need to have, like, you guys need to have these…
156 00:24:49.830 ⇒ 00:24:59.709 Aakanksha Khanna: Every single page is, like, sign-up pages, broken down into four sections, and then you define those sections, and then have these events firing at every page.
157 00:25:00.190 ⇒ 00:25:11.490 Aakanksha Khanna: That will give you some insights as to where is the major drop-off. We know there is a drop-off at this stage, but we don’t know which page. Is it the organization page? Is it when we ask them to, say, link their LinkedIn?
158 00:25:11.600 ⇒ 00:25:16.460 Aakanksha Khanna: Is it when you ask for a picture upload? What is it? We don’t know.
159 00:25:16.930 ⇒ 00:25:22.009 Aakanksha Khanna: Right? They’re like, okay, fine. If we give you the raw data, can you make some sense out of it?
160 00:25:22.190 ⇒ 00:25:27.410 Aakanksha Khanna: So yes, let’s look at just this part of the funnel. Let’s work with the data that we have.
161 00:25:28.080 ⇒ 00:25:38.939 Aakanksha Khanna: And then we realized, when we looked at that data, I put it just in an Excel, like, nothing fancy, just put it on an Excel, and I saw, within those specific pages.
162 00:25:39.050 ⇒ 00:25:42.470 Aakanksha Khanna: The biggest drop-off was happening at the picture upload stage.
163 00:25:43.720 ⇒ 00:25:48.149 Aakanksha Khanna: So, people… it was not clearly defined what size
164 00:25:48.450 ⇒ 00:26:03.850 Aakanksha Khanna: picture you have to upload. It was only defined, okay, JPEG has to be PNG, blah blah blah. It could be and can be a recent photo, it should be professional. Some prompts were there, but not a prompt about, I think, the size, or just the dimensions. So people were trying, they were uploading, but
165 00:26:04.040 ⇒ 00:26:09.280 Aakanksha Khanna: After some point, when they don’t really know what exactly they need to do, They were dropping off.
166 00:26:09.660 ⇒ 00:26:24.550 Aakanksha Khanna: And that… that was, like, a big red, like, red flag, according to me. I’m like, okay, so this is the thing that you have to solve. It is as simple as just updating that… that section in the journey, and mentioning that this is what needs to be uploaded.
167 00:26:24.550 ⇒ 00:26:31.650 Aakanksha Khanna: Or, in future, maybe you can skip this step completely, and this can be added once the profile is already created.
168 00:26:31.840 ⇒ 00:26:44.399 Aakanksha Khanna: Because that will make the process of onboarding really, really super smooth. It will help users move to the next stage, and that’s when your AI companion can come in and then start asking the questions at what is the customizable product for you.
169 00:26:44.920 ⇒ 00:27:03.339 Aakanksha Khanna: So they were like, this is great, genius! Why didn’t we think of this? I’m like, you wouldn’t think of it, because I guess, it’s a marketer thing, because if I’m a marketer, and I get plenty of emails every day, if I want… if I’m interested in a product or a service, I want to sign up quickly, because I want to get to that
170 00:27:03.610 ⇒ 00:27:15.909 Aakanksha Khanna: aha moment, or get to that point where I’m satisfied that, okay, you know, I’ve signed up, this is what I wanted, that’s it. And then I can move forward into a next bucket. The users are already getting stuck there. They don’t even know.
171 00:27:16.020 ⇒ 00:27:17.680 Aakanksha Khanna: That why they’re getting stuck.
172 00:27:17.830 ⇒ 00:27:24.729 Aakanksha Khanna: So, I guess that… that… I gave that very simple insight. I didn’t give any… anything fancy. I didn’t create any…
173 00:27:24.830 ⇒ 00:27:40.430 Aakanksha Khanna: you know, dashboards or anything, I just told them that this is the problem, this needs to be solved immediately. This should give you, say, an incremental lift of 10% overall improvement in this step to this step. So they were like, okay, let’s do it.
174 00:27:40.430 ⇒ 00:27:51.610 Aakanksha Khanna: So that was just a consult, so I don’t really know what were the results, but from what I could understand with that… that meeting, it went… it was positively received, and it seemed like a good solution, a very easy solution.
175 00:27:51.700 ⇒ 00:27:55.009 Aakanksha Khanna: And it also gave the company cues to…
176 00:27:56.490 ⇒ 00:28:08.570 Aakanksha Khanna: think about, say, adding, like, a progress bar, or adding some prompts, or adding that AI companion to give the cues to the audience who were signing up right at that cent. Right at that stage.
177 00:28:09.230 ⇒ 00:28:20.230 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, yeah, and that’s… that’s a good lead-in to the next question. So we just have a couple minutes, but I’ll ask one more. You know, given that you’re able to think of, like, a few different ways to go based on your analysis.
178 00:28:20.230 ⇒ 00:28:31.369 Greg Stoutenburg: How would you prioritize? Like, say you just… you’re gonna be able to do all 3 of those things, but you need to do them in some order, you need some rationale. How would you prioritize which opportunity to pursue?
179 00:28:32.810 ⇒ 00:28:41.509 Aakanksha Khanna: Right, so my approach is… is… I mean, I try to be as meticulous as possible. Whenever there is a problem that is given to me, I also want
180 00:28:41.510 ⇒ 00:28:55.930 Aakanksha Khanna: to have a background with what kind of client or what kind of industry I’m dealing with. That gives me an insight, and of course, what, say, metrics I’m trying to chase, that gives me a starting point that, okay, I have some idea about
181 00:28:55.950 ⇒ 00:29:08.700 Aakanksha Khanna: say, this industry, this kind of metric, this kind of audience, and then I will generally try to let the data lead me, so that I can then lead the data to figuring out a solution.
182 00:29:08.820 ⇒ 00:29:22.669 Aakanksha Khanna: So, I have a very data-driven approach. Like, no matter how marketing or growth-minded my mindset might be, I would generally want to look at the data first, because data sometimes gives cues which are in plain sight.
183 00:29:24.800 ⇒ 00:29:40.839 Aakanksha Khanna: So I would want to… I would look at what’s the… what’s… what’s… what stories are the numbers telling? What’s been the trend so far? What was the prediction that was supposed to happen? And, say, where’s the gap? Why didn’t it happen so far? A deep dive into, okay.
184 00:29:41.050 ⇒ 00:29:52.149 Aakanksha Khanna: from, say, a funnel perspective, where is the gap, or… why is there a gap, or maybe there is no gap at all. So I get those cues from the data.
185 00:29:52.220 ⇒ 00:30:05.410 Aakanksha Khanna: And then I have a hypothesis that I’ll build, that, okay, I’m trying to test, so if I’m running any experiment, I’m trying to test for, say, A, B, C. These hypotheses I want to test over a period of this kind of time.
186 00:30:05.470 ⇒ 00:30:17.200 Aakanksha Khanna: And that this is my approach. These are the solutions that I have for these hypotheses, and this is the end objective, which all tie up to, say, the main metrics that we’re trying to reach.
187 00:30:17.400 ⇒ 00:30:36.740 Aakanksha Khanna: That’s my approach for any problem, whether it’s performance, non-performance, CRM-related, growth-related, even product-related. Really, I want to pick up first on the data, look at it deeply, do as much of a deep dive as possible with whatever data I have, also account for some non-data
188 00:30:36.740 ⇒ 00:30:47.320 Aakanksha Khanna: factors that impact this data. So, say, maybe there’s a streaming error, maybe there’s a delay in the data coming in, maybe there’s seasonality factors, depending… again, depends on the industry that we’re talking about.
189 00:30:47.370 ⇒ 00:31:03.290 Aakanksha Khanna: And then incorporate those insights with this data, and then come up with, say, a very holistic solution that, hey, you know, you’re a client, you’re giving me money for giving you a solution. I will give you a solution, but this is where I’m going to start first.
190 00:31:03.470 ⇒ 00:31:11.060 Aakanksha Khanna: So that I’m not wasting the client’s time, I’m not wasting my own time, and I’m not wasting my team’s time, because it’s a very cross-functional kind of…
191 00:31:11.390 ⇒ 00:31:16.620 Aakanksha Khanna: collaboration that I would have to do, when it comes to solving any kind of complex problem.
192 00:31:16.920 ⇒ 00:31:21.789 Aakanksha Khanna: That’s… that’s probably my approach, and I think that’s… so far, that’s… that’s what’s worked for me.
193 00:31:22.390 ⇒ 00:31:33.949 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, great, great. Yeah, good to hear. Well, thank you for this, I really appreciate the time. So I’ll, you know, get back with the team, and then, whoever’s been handling communication with you will… will reach out.
194 00:31:34.830 ⇒ 00:31:44.560 Aakanksha Khanna: For sure, Greg. Thanks so much for the time. I wish we could have more time to talk more. I’d love to know about your background and, you know, your time with Brainforge, but maybe that’s for another time.
195 00:31:44.560 ⇒ 00:31:48.770 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, some other time. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Great to meet you.
196 00:31:49.180 ⇒ 00:31:51.119 Aakanksha Khanna: Thanks, Craig. Take care. Take care.
197 00:31:51.120 ⇒ 00:31:52.360 Greg Stoutenburg: Take care. Bye.