You can read and bookmark this page to come back and re-read later. In case if you don’t agree on something, I’d love to hear your views and get your prospective on it.

Let’s get started.

Naval's Laws:

1. The first step to being happier, is to believe you can be happier.

2. Anger hurts YOU, first and foremost.

3. What you do, and how you do it, is so much more important than how hard you do it.

4. Productize Yourself – Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do really well.

5. Find a career/job where you’re tracked on the outputs, rather than the inputs – this will allow you to control your time much better.

6. Discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something you don’t want to do.

7. When faced with a difficult choice, if you can’t decide, the answer is no.

8. If you have 2 choices to make, and they’re relatively equal (it’s 50/50), take the path that’s more difficult and more painful in the short term.

9. In times of interpersonal conflict, make the choice that will leave you more equanimous (internally calm).

10. Guilt is just society’s voice speaking in your head.

11. You don’t have to deal with anyone you don’t want to – just walk away.

12. We’re afraid of death because we fear we haven’t spent our time here on earth wisely.
    

On Reading:

1. It’s better to go through a book really slowly, and struggle and stumble and rewind, than it is to fly through it quickly just to say, "Well now I’ve read 20 books.".

2. I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them, rather than read every single book out there.

3. Read what you love until you love to read.

4. It’s far more important in life to know the basics really well across a few domains and combine that than it is to try and be a deep expert in any one domain.

5. When it comes to reading, I’d make sure your foundation is very, very high-quality.

On Life:

1. I don’t care how rich you are. I don’t care whether you’re a top Wall Street banker, if somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear and how to behave, you’re not a free person. You’re not actually rich.

2. The peace that we seek is not the peace of mind, it’s peace from the mind.

3. You have social statisticians, scientists, and researchers in lab coats, literally the best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted. your brain will get destroyed.

4. We are overexposed to everything. The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic, it is to retreat from society. There’s too much society everywhere you go. You have a society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears… It’s socializing you and programming everyone. The only solution is to turn it off.

5. To me, peace is happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want.

6. In today’s day and age, many people think you get peace by resolving all your external problems, but there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up the idea of having problems.

7. When you’re memorizing something, it’s an indication that you don’t understand it. You should be able to re-derive anything on the spot and if you can’t, you don’t know it.

8. If you’re smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, you’re not that smart.

9. Your real resume is just a cataloging of all your suffering.

10. The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do it better than anybody because you love to do it. No one can compete with you if you love to do it. Be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants, apply some leverage, put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you do, and then just crank it out.
    

On Wealth:

1. I believe everybody can be wealthy. It’s not a zero-sum game; it’s a positive-sum game.

2. People who are living far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyle just can’t fathom.

3. All the benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in relationships, life, your career, health, or learning.

4. You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. Aim to have a job, career, or profession where your inputs don’t match your output.

5. The reason you want wealth is because it buys you freedom, so you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck, so you don’t have to wake up at 7 AM and rush to work in traffic, so you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all your productive hours away to a soulless job that doesn’t fulfill you.

6. Successful people have a strong action bias.

7. Productize yourself (create a product out of whatever it is you do naturally and uniquely well)

8. Aim to become so good at something, that luck eventually finds you. Over time, it isn’t luck; it’s destiny.

9. If you’re good with computers, if you’re good at basic math, if you’re good at writing, if you’re good at speaking, and if you like reading, you’re set for life.

10. The number of iterations drives the learning curve (your speed of learning a field more so depends on iterations, not the hours you put in).

11. Get comfortable with frequent, small failures. If you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day, but in exchange, you win big later, you’ll be better off.

12. Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

13. Reject most advice (but remember you have to listen to/read enough of it to know what to reject and what to accept).

14. Results take TIME. In entrepreneurship, you just have to be right ONCE. The good news is you can take as many shots on goal as you want (usually every 3-5 years, 10 at the slowest).

15. Know that your physical health, mental health, and your relationships will bring you more peace and happiness than any amount of money ever will.
    

On Desire:

1. Desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

2. Happiness is clouded by unlimited desires. Because of this, limit the number of desires you have.

Your time:

1. Meetings should really be phone calls, phone calls should be emails, and emails should just be texts.

2. Set an aspirational hourly rate for yourself and stick to it.

3. I would encourage everyone to be RUTHLESS about not scheduling things. You will HAVE to disappoint people, but when they want your time, that’s their problem, not yours.

4. Busy is the death of productivity.

Leverage:

1. The most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication (aka product leverage).

2. Product leverage is how fortunes will be made in the digital age – using things like code or media.

3. Combining labor leverage, capital leverage, and product leverage is a magic combination for tech startups.

4. Product and media leverage are permissionless – they don’t require someone else’s permission for you to use them or succeed.

5. The robot revolution has already arrived – we just keep them in data centers/servers.

6. Coding is a superpower because it allows you to speak the language of the robots and tell them what to do.

7. You can replicate your efforts without having to involve other humans.

That’s it.

Please share your thoughts in the comments section, which quote resonated most with you and which one you found most applicable to your personal experiences.

Glad to see you here! I wanted to write about this for quite some time, I have some notes that I would like to share with you all. I'm very passionate about the legal industry and I want to build a product that will make bringing justice and going through all the paperwork easier, faster, and more affordable to every single individual. Before we continue further, if you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter, subscribe now. I promise no spam only very very useful guides on SaaS and Sales.

Subscribe now

The legal industry is one of the core parts of every business and the people. You must have visited the government office for something in your life, whether you got that parking ticket, you needed to hire an employee on H1B or you want to register a new company. In any of these cases, you either try to do it yourself or hire a legal firm to do the job for you. And then, the firm asks for all the details, you fill out the forms, sign, and process payment. Some parts are automated in this but most of the process is still manual.

We need some really good automation products solely for the legal industry.

Let's look at some of the most used legal tech tools used in the market today.

1. Clio — is legal management software. It is just like Business CRM but more focused on the legal forms

2. Lawyaw — Document automation, build contracts, and auto-populate. Acquired by Clio.

3. Documate — Same as Lawyaw.

4. Docketwise — Legal management software focused on only immigration firms.

5. Afterpattern (Got acquired) — Build handy apps for your firm, got acquired.

6. DocAssemble — Open source document automation platform.

For Individuals, there are only one or two handy tools like DoNotPay.

You see, there are only a few tools, and those who try to get in the market, get acquired right away by larger firms. Small firms can't afford costly tools and innovation is getting killed by big companies.

And, if you look at the marketing and business automation industry, there are hundreds of tools for the work. If you look at Automation products for other businesses, there are tons and tons of tools for Marketing, Sales, Marketing Automation, RPAs, and App connector platforms but the legal automation industry goes unnoticed.

To solve this problem, we can't teach all the laws, rules, and definitions of every single part of our daily life to everyone.

1. We have to make tools that should first make the legal firms more efficient and faster.

2. The government needs to start working with companies to build APIs, and integrations and find ways to exchange the data in a very secure and efficient way.

And then we should provide handly apps and tools that allow individuals to get the correct information, understand laws, and the actionable items they must do in any case.

I work/worked with some of the top legal firms and companies to build tools for the legal industry. I admire all the work done by Greg Siskind of Visalaw (building useful apps), Joshua Browder of DoNotPay (helping people fight with big companies), Jared Jaskot, and Tom Martin of Lawdroid and companies like Clio, Docketwise, etc. We still need more tools to revolutionize the legal industry.

My next SaaS is going to be something that solves the core problems of all the legal firms and helps individuals in getting work done with less money. We will look into how we can partner with the governments if we need to which allows businesses to connect to government systems.

If you're reading this and building something in legal tech, let's talk. I'm still far behind my schedule to build another SaaS, I'm very occupied but this is coming sooner or later 🙂

---

That's it.

In my next note, I will be going to deep dive into a product and how they do the customer onboarding and engagement to get more sales. We are going to talk about Dunkin' — one of the leading coffee and Donuts chains in the US.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to my Newsletter — On SaaS and Sales Automation for all the amazing insights and guides on building the SaaS.

Welcome to the "on SaaS and Sales Automation" newsletter. This newsletter is my personal notebook as I continue to build my first SaaS and learn from my mistakes.

Introduction

Whether you own an agency or a SaaS or, still planning, these notes will serve you as a reminder of what not to do and what you do, the right way. I'm not a master of something, I'm a jack of all, I have not created a unicorn 🦄 (just yet) and I never worked for as big SaaS companies. I created my own path and I learn things every day. I spend a lot of time reading, researching, and discussing with the people who have done it and then try it myself. If you ever feel this is not useful to you, feel free to unsubscribe.

So, let's get started!

Everyone talks about building products and focusing on marketing and sales, well, that's definitely true. You need to build the right product and give all your time and energy after product to sales and marketing. We often miss the most important part of the process of building a SaaS, it starts with one question — Am I building something that I'm going to use every day? or you can also rephrase this to — Does it solve my own problem first?

Build something that you're going to use every day

This is one of the most important pieces of advice that goes unnoticed when you're building. As an entrepreneur, we're always looking for scalable problems to solve. We often think of what problem someone is facing and start building. That's the wrong way to build a SaaS. It should always start with you, what problem you are facing in a situation or every day and how can you solve it. If you start building with this approach,

1. You will always love the product and continue to invest your time without actually getting bored.

2. It solves your own problem so even if people are not willing to buy it, you're going to use it for yourself. You didn't waste your time on building something people never wanted.

3. When you're focused on solving your problem first, in most cases, with some changes, it can solve problems for a large group of people or a niche.

Ok, Vikesh, this is all good but there are hundreds of SaaS and tools that solve other people's problems.

Yes, I get it. There are tons of companies and unicorns that solve the problem of the people, not theirs. But, if you go back to the early days, it all started by solving a problem they faced or a problem that X (>1000) of people were facing.

What if I'm building something that I don't use every day?

In this case, spend a lot of time validating your idea and the first version.

1. Make sure you have a good number of people (> X ), who are willing to pay for your product. ( X depends on what you're building and for who. For Enterprise it can be 100 and for B2C, it can be thousands or more.)

2. Get your early adopters on a discounted monthly or yearly subscription as soon as possible. This will speed up your product feedback and short-term roadmap. Don't sell your product on a marketplace or to someone who is not your ICP, it will kill your startup.

3. Focus on the numbers, churn is the major parameter. If you're building something that works and people want it, you should see less churn. People try and then cancel, it can be a product problem (more on that in a separate post) and if you have a working product but users are still canceling, it be either a wrong ICP or you have built something that no one wants to use.

I hope you are making a note of this. We often know everything we need to know but we need to be continuously reminded about it, to avoid the mistake.

Why am I writing about this?

I'm writing this in my notes before when we started TexAu, we were using the product here and there but not every day. When we went out in the market, sold the product in the marketplace, and started working on it we are using it every day and we know everything we need to build.

Later we realized we built many things that are simply not stable and we had a huge demand but the product was not scalable so we had churn as a major problem. I know that based on the interests and demand, we have validated our initial MVP and there is a huge market for it.

Now, we are rebuilding some of the things that we should have built in a better way from the start. This is something we realized when we started using our own product heavily.

It's just like when you cook — you don't know if it's good until you taste it.

Now we are building our new version, which is so powerful, so well created, and scales to millions of users if we need to. I will share more on TexAu V2 when we are close to our launch 🚀

---

I hope this will the future entrepreneurs who are just starting their journey. For more notes and updates, please follow notes for my future SaaS.

Thank you!

Feel free to send me a DM on Twitter or comment on this article to discuss this.

This is for anyone who is building SaaS or any digital product that you want to make big one day. If you’re selling a course or an ebook, you can skip this article and come back later when you’re doing SaaS or a product.

In this article, I’m going to talk about the pros, cons, and how to avoid the issues you may face down the line. I will keep this article short and to the point, I will be happy if even one person on the internet finds this piece useful before planning to launch their SaaS.

Well, let’s talk about the Pros and Cons first and then we will see how to make your launch the right way in any marketplace.

Scenario: You’re selling a product at $79 for one plan and the maximum one can purchase is up to $499 for more features and benefits. In the most ideal case, you’ll probably sell more around 1000-3000 depending on how better you market or how much you actually want to make.

So, $200 (Average Sell) X 1500 Customers = $300,000.

Considering you weren’t able to negotiate much on the % revenue and the marketplace took 70% from this directly from you. So the end you were left with $90,000, which is still not bad. It should be enough on hiring 1-2 devs or 1 good developer and one marketer for one year and build the product further from there.

FYI, TexAu generated over $400K+ revenue after all negotiations and this is what we received from the campaign at the end. We were able to make a good successful launch but also did many mistakes. Around $150K was ideally enough for us but we sold more1.

Ok, so now let’s look at the Pros and Cons.

Pros:

1. You will have instant $$$ to reinvest in your product.

2. You will get lots of feedback on your product which may or may not be related to your future roadmap.

3. You can get lots of reviews on multiple review sites very quickly.

4. You can grow your followers, create a community and add lots of members very quickly.

5. You get many new backlinks from different lifetime deal sites and affiliates.

6. Your website traffic will surge during your campaign.

7. You will make new friends from the community who will reach out to you during your campaign.

8. If you have a blog, you will get new subscribers.

9. If you launch on Producthunt during this time, you may get more upvotes.

Cons:

1. You may not be able to validate your idea if you built your product and launched it. People will buy your product in FOMO and you will spend a lot of time explaining to them what your product does.

2. You will have users to take care of for the rest of your life.

3. Your product valuation may decrease by 20-30% as you have hundreds or thousands of non-paying customers using your product.

4. If you didn't plan well on how much you want to charge for different plans, you will be at a loss and your server cost will be HUGE.

5. You may face difficulties in raising money in the future and investors may offer you less money if you have more Lifetime customers than monthly paying.

6. You will need more people in the CS team to handle Lifetime users’ queries if they are using your product heavily.

7. If you roll out any new product or a new feature, you will have to deal with queries from Lifetime about access and days will be spent deciding if you want to give them access or not.

8. You will burn money if you are not able to get monthly revenues and in the end, after a year or 2, shut down the company.

9. You will be spending more on tools and services from day 1 as you have lots of customers.

So, we looked at the pros and cons. Don’t worry, there is still a very good way to do the deal correctly. You first have to decide what your goal is, making more revenue (wrong goal 🚩 🚩) or making more people aware of your product and get onboard some people who are genuinely interested in trying your product and give feedback at every step.

How to avoid this problem and do the lifetime deal the right way

1. Do a very small lifetime deal only to get 500 customers who will help you in building the product and you will also have some money to invest.

2. Provide a clear copy of who your ideal customer is so that you don't get random customers.

3. Set a very detailed plan and feature access and make sure to mention what they will get and what they won't. Make sure to write if future updates and features are included or not.

4. Make a close community with these 500 members and talk to them, prepare your roadmap and build your product with their help.

5. Don't launch your Lifetime deal on any big marketplace or deal sites with 100s of thousands of users. Even if you do, that's fine but keep the codes or the total number of users, very limited, 500-800 is a good number.

6. Don't fall into the trap of numbers like $400K or $500K, you won't realize how quickly this money will go away and you will be left with nothing. FOCUS ON MONTHLY CUSTOMERS and HOW YOU WILL SUSTAIN YOUR BUSINESS NOT ON LIFETIME DEAL MONEY.

That’s all you need to know.

I was thinking of writing more on each point but wanted to keep it short. Just grasp this and make a better decision when you’re doing a Lifetime deal.

I hope this helps.

For Marketplace, I recommend Pitchground and AppSumo (no particular order or preference).

Want to discuss this? Ping me on Twitter.

Google sheet is the most powerful, flexible, and possibly the best cloud CRM you can use. By using different add-ons and functions in Google sheet, you can achieve basically everything that you want to with your data.

I’m going to write a series of articles on Google sheets and how to expand it further with all the powerful add-ons and functions it supports. We are also going to automate a lot of work using App Scripts and other automation tools that connect with Google sheet. So let’s get started 🎉

As the title says, one of the most important functions that I use frequently, almost every day is the CONCATENATE  function in Google sheet, which is used to combine two cells together.  Let’s see all the things it can do:

What is the CONCATENATE function?

CONCATENATE function is used to join two strings together. For example, if you want to join words and make "Welcome to That Automation Guy!" you can do that using CONCATENATE like this:
CONCATENATE("Welcome"," ", "to", " ", "That Automation", " ", "Guy!")

When you can run this function in Google Sheets, you can see the output in the cell as shown below,

You can also join cells together, like =CONCATENATE(A1, A2, A3) and it will join these cells together. 

Before I show you a more advanced part with CONCATENATE, you should know how to add new lines with the CONCATENATE function.

How to add a new line with CONCATENATE function

When using the CONCATENATE function, at places you will need to add new lines and you can do that using CHAR(10) function.

Something like this:

Why we use CHAR(10) to add new lines with CONCATENATE?

A new line is also known as Line Feed. The Decimal for a Line Feed is 10 as shown in the image. You can read more about this Unicode Control Code here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters#Control_codes

CHAR( ) function converts a number into a character according to the current Unicode table. That’s the reason we use CHAR(10) to add news lines in Google Sheets.

We are using to use these two messages to dynamically prepare messages or emails based on keywords in other cells. Using a Simple Google Sheet, you can personalize your messages and emails for lead generation.

INDIRECT will make your life a lot easier

The INDIRECT function returns a reference to a range. The INDIRECT function does not evaluate logical tests or conditions. This function helps lock the specified cell in a formula. The benefit of this is, we can change a cell reference within a formula without changing the formula itself.

One advantage of this function is that the indirect references won’t change even when new rows or columns are inserted in our Google Sheet.

Let’s see a few examples to understand INDIRECT:

1. Suppose A1 = 43 and using the INDIRECT function, we give reference A1 as shown below to C1 using INDIRECT(“A1”)

   

2. When I write the formula INDIRECT(“D”&4) it gets converted to D4, as you can see in the attached Google Sheet, the D4 value is 90, so the value in the formula is shown as 40.

   

3. When I write the formula INDIRECT(“C” & ROW( ) ) we are referencing to the column and using the ROW( ) function, it returns the current ROW value which is 5, so the value becomes C5.

   

You can use INDIRECT in multiple ways, to read more about INDIRECT function, refer to this guide - https://infoinspired.com/google-docs/spreadsheet/google-sheets-indirect-function-examples-usage/

REGEXMATCH helps you easily match values

REGEXMATCH is used to match any plain text in word, sentence, or phrase.

Let’s see a few examples to easily understand this formula:

1. Say, a Text in Cell A1 is — That Automation Guy!

   Formula: =REGEXMATCH(A1, "Guy")
And it will return TRUE.

2. Now let’s change our formula to this — =REGEXMATCH(A1, "[a-z]")
Now it checks whether A1 cell contains any small characters from a to z. And as our text contains a few small characters, it will return TRUE.

You can use this Regex maker website to easily make complex Regex functions – https://regexr.com/

Now, it is time to combine all these three functions and make a powerful Google Sheet template which will help us dynamically generate personalized messages.

Personalized Email and LinkedIn Messages using a simple Google Sheet and Formulas

Ian from Hyperise helped me build this Sheet, all credits to Ian for his awesome work.

As you can see in the image above, the first section of the Google Sheet, helps you modify the text and also add condition-based text for example, if the location for someone is Mumbai the message will say “a fellow Mumbaikar” and if the headline says “Growth” then the message will be personalized to “someone responsible for growth”.

There is a total of 3 sheets, the first sheet helps you prepare your message, the send sheet contains sample data and the third one contains the final sheet of all the data you can extract from TexAu.

Watch this video to understand all the parts of this template:

Email and LinkedIn Message Template - Google Sheets — Watch Video

You can use TexAu — https://www.texau.com to extract profiles from LinkedIn or Sales Navigator Search and paste everything to this Google Sheet.

I hope you found this post interesting and useful.

In the next post, I will learn how to use Google Sheet as your central CRM to store all your contacts automatically, including from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Email.

Before that guide, I will also share Behind the scenes of what was happening last week at my apartment and how I moved all my stuff to a new apartment including all the Furniture 🪑, 🛌 in just $75 USD 😉

Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive all new guides, hacks, and behind the scenes of — That Automation Guy! We are running a discount for early adopters and it is only $25 / year.

Get 50% off forever

📣 Lastly, if you need that Google sheet template, join the “That Automation Guy!” group and comment “interested” on the pinned post. 📣

That Automation Guy on Facebook

Any questions, feedback, and thoughts on this guide?

Drop your comment and let’s talk 🙏

Leave a comment

I’m so glad to see you here 🙏

I was thinking of doing something like this for quite some time and I feel, this is the right time.

In the past 3 years, I learned a lot about SaaS, Agency, and Automation. I wanted to have a place where I can share my learnings and knowledge with my users. I learn everything by doing, so everything that you will read in this newsletter is all tried and tested methods by me.

On September 21st, I wrote a post on my Facebook wall about this idea and so many people were interested in joining my newsletter.

I now have the initial audience, my friends on Facebook — who are willing to read my post and learn things together. I’m going to start writing here and share everything that I have learned and learned every day.

How much would it cost?

1. Well, my Facebook post says it will cost some $ to read but I have decided to keep it free for all.

2. You can use your email to subscribe to my newsletter and read everything for free and get automatic updates.

What you get

1. One post every week on this substack.

2. Direct access to the “Lead generation and Automation Masterminds” community, a.k.a TexAu Community.

3. Datasets for lead generation

4. Access to deep SaaS insights.

5. Behind the scenes of everything that I’m doing. ( Tech, Travel, things happening in life)

Why you should join

If you do business on the web, you should join this newsletter. My newsletter contains all learnings and mistakes I have done and challenges I have faced and how you can avoid them. As someone who truly believes in Automation as the future of work, I love to share new automation guides, tricks, and tips that can save you hours of manual work. If time matters to you, I recommend subscribing to this newsletter.

Subscribe now

FAQs

• Is there a fee to join this newsletter?
  For now, there is no fee to join this newsletter. All my posts will be free and accessible to all.

• I own an agency but not SaaS, should I still subscribe?

  Yes, almost all the strategies and mistakes I share are applicable in the same agency as well. As you know, I started as an agency and moved to product, there are hundreds of product owners who come from Agency backgrounds. If you’re doing business on the web, you should subscribe to this newsletter.

• I want to request a guide, where can I submit my request?
  Please submit your requests to hello@vikeshtiwari.com, make sure to write an in-depth explanation of what you need. This will help me in understanding what you need.

• I have an automation problem for you, can you solve that for me?
  Yes, sure. Please send me a message on WhatsApp. I will get back to you in a few hours.

That’s all!

Let’s get this started 🎉

It’s been a long time. I’m writing a blog post after almost 3 months, apologies for being away from you all for so long. I was extremely busy during my whole internship, weekdays at work and weekends were mostly spent exploring places, meeting new people, and attending events. This post is all about my Slack internship experience and how it feels like to be in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

After talking to my friends in many big companies, I can say that the Slack Internship program is possibly one of the best internship programs. Three years in college can be compared to 10 weeks of my Slack internship. Honestly, Now I feel like a developer, a real software engineer who can create something. People at Slack are very passionate, they love the product so much and value our mission of making working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. It doesn’t feel like you are working here or it’s a daily job that you need to do. You can reach out to anyone for help. I worked with our CTO very closely and our CEO used to sit one row behind my desk and guess what? He added me on Snapchat :p

First, the whole week was only orientation and onboarding process, and having a great onboarding process is extremely important. At the end of my first week, I was knowing how Slack works from the bottom to the top and started working in my second week. I worked mostly on Testing and Test infrastructure. Now I want to focus more on web/Test Infrastructure and operations.

If you are in the third year and preparing for a summer internship, prepare well and apply to companies wisely. It’s extremely important to decide what you actually want to work on and your role before you apply for the internship.

Choose a company wisely:

Many people get an internship in companies having very high pay but what they actually do there is; reply to customer emails and feed excel sheets. It’s better to work in a small tech startup with a low stipend than to work in big banks. Do what is good for your career.

Why role is extremely important:

You will see many ‘Software Engineer Internship’ posts on career websites and they don’t mention what you are going to do there. So, it’s better to tell them in your first round or apply to specific internship roles. Hopefully, you won’t struggle in your internship fixing a div element being a Backend developer.

San Francisco, A crimson bridge, cable cars, a sparkling bay, and streets lined with elegant Victorian homes—San Francisco is undeniably one of the world’s great cities. San Francisco has everything you can dream of! San Francisco is known for its cool summers the coolest summer in the US, fog, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the former prison on Alcatraz Island, and its Chinatown district.

I’d love to spend all my time in San Francisco but everything is very expensive. There are so many homeless people and it’s advised not to walk alone after 9-10 PM but I did go out at the night at 3 AM many times just to experience everything and see what actually happens in the SOMA and Tenderloin Neighborhood. You can see people buying and selling drugs, taking Marijuana on the streets even during day time. If you are moving there alone then you can definitely live in the city but with family, No! I can’t even think of living in the city with my family. I can live somewhere near SF maybe in Berkeley or Sunnyvale.

If you are going there for an internship, you should definitely live in the city. There are so many places to explore, amazing restaurants and clubs almost every two blocks.

Silicon Valley, yes it is! Whether you are sitting in a restaurant or in a cafe or you are walking on the street, you will hear people talking about start-ups, funding, and everything about tech. When you are surrounded by geeks it’s very easy to initiate a conversation, make friends and create a network. During summer most companies organize many open houses and intern events to attract talents but it’s a very good opportunity to meet new people and make friends. Now I have so many friends there and also I know someone in almost all the big companies and good startups.

If you are going there for a summer internship, there are many groups on Facebook and Slack for ‘bay area interns’ join them if you want to make the most of your internship.

That’s all!

But we aren’t trying to piss off every other generation, we are only trying to impress them. See, the other generations are in the workforce. We are the ones trying to fit in. But, sometimes we don’t fully get the chance to explain our experiences. Sometimes we are limited to a few numbers or even a sheet of paper. How can we be limited to talking about our past experiences and lessons?

In today’s recruiting world, there are two ways of searching for a student. The first is the traditional ‘Let’s check out their GPA’ and the second is the newer option, which looks at the student’s full experience. The strange part is, that most companies still use the first way.

Let’s talk about these two processes.

Method 1

The GPA approach. This is still a widely used approach to looking at college students. If a company is looking for a new grad Software Engineer, then this is the way to go. They want the best computer science students with the best GPAs because they will go by the norms and rules. Why? Because that student followed the norms to get that GPA. Yes, they busted their ass, but did they fully explore ideas? Were they most creative? Did they ask how, or why? But, an early-stage startup, might not want that 9.0 GPA. That firm is going to want that student who was creative, out of the box, and didn’t like the normal ways to do something.

Method 2

This is an innovative way. The ‘people’ way. Yes, GPA is a factor in placements, but is it the right way to judge a student? Why look at a number that only represents such a small part of the college experience? If you look at GPA only, you will miss internships, work experience, organizations they are part of, leadership within those organizations, and other kick-ass experiences in which they learn as much as they do in the classroom. See, with all of these extracurricular activities, students actually gain real-life experience. You can learn as many concepts in class, but until you apply them in your life, you won’t remember or fully understand them.

Conclusion

Either way, some companies are going to use Method 1 for a long time. That’s okay, those firms are probably larger and not ready for the change. But, the innovative companies, the ones that understand change, will be using Method 2. Why? Because they want their employees to gel personally because that’s when the most creative work is made.

Why the title “7.5 And below”?

Ok, you might be wondering what’s the logic behind the title? :p

Well, I and a few of my friends have very low GPAs and a company visited our campus for the internship. They had the criteria as 7.5 and above so we couldn’t sit for the internship. Now we see in our dreams the company job criteria 7.5 and below. :)