Nikhil Ashok

Nikhil Ashok

The title says marketing.
The work says product.

Bengaluru, IN · 10 yrs — B2B sales → digital marketing → organic growth → product management · MBA (Marketing) + Institute of Product Leadership

§02 Shipped, not slideware

Eleven internal AI tools. My own team runs on them.

At Position2 I lead a six-person organic-growth team for US B2B & healthcare clients — and the team's most repetitive work became my product surface. Spot the workflow pain, write the spec, prioritize with engineering, ship, measure, repeat.

TOOL/01 — keyword research automation SHIPPED ✓

~30 minutes per page. Hundreds of pages, every client, every month. So I wrote the spec and shipped the automation. The clock on the right is honest — just compressed so you don't have to sit through it.

The team's quality bar is built into the output, which is why it survived contact with the team.

runs once as it scrolls into view · hold the button to run it again

30:00MIN / PAGE

30:00 → 02:00 per page · −93%

All eleven are shipped. The build story that's public: SEO Studio — how the growth engine was built →

1ST

POSITION2 INTERNAL HACKATHON. Product strategy for a platform MVP — won against the whole company, then approved for a full engineering build with a 15-person team.

§03 The product chapter — PetPal

Everyone sells to pet parents. Almost nobody guides them.

PetPal is a guidance-first care app for first-time dog parents in urban India — built for the anxious first 180 days, when owners improvise across five-plus fragmented sources and nobody owns the guided relationship. It's my formal proof of product craft, end to end. The two widgets below aren't toy demos — they run the case study's real v1 scoring model and its real kill criteria.

IPL capstone · with Sougata Dhar & Vishnu V · a product-thinking exercise, not a launched product

Market sizing — bottom-up, every input sourced

The small, defensible number

Not the conference TAM. The beachhead, built input by input:

5,185,000 Bengaluru (GBA) households
6%×dog-ownership rate
15%×annual new-dog acquisition
69%×first-time-owner ratio
32,199first-time dog-owning households / yr

→ 3% paying capture × ₹1,999/yr ≈ ₹19.3L year-1 · full chain & sources

Falsifiable bets — written down before a line of code

Kill criteria, not features to defend

Owners will trust an app over their vet's word-of-mouth network

KILL IF <40% complete a guided action in week 1

Verified vets will onboard and stay active without upfront payment

KILL IF <3 of 5 pilot clinics stay active past day 60

Week-1 activation (2+ reminders, 1 booking) predicts retention

KILL IF D30 <20% for the activated cohort

each has a cheap test attached — that's the difference between a roadmap and a wish list

Interactive — the real v1 scoring model

Operate the metric: the Behavioral Health Index

BHI turns scattered signals into one score a scared owner can act on — rules-based and transparent, so trust survives contact with reality. Change the inputs; the score and the recommended action recompute live.

Vaccination status up to 40 pts
Logged daily behaviors up to 40 pts · tap to toggle
up to 20 pts
FAR OFF RANGEIN RANGE
62
WATCH

Score 62 — Watch. Appetite has been off — consider booking a check-up.

v1 rules-based · band cutoffs here are illustrative — model in the case study

BHI = vaccination 20/40 + behaviors 32/40 + breed benchmarks 10/20 = 62 / 100

The decision people ask about

The calmest screen in the app is the emergency screen

Every triage UX screams red. A panicking owner needs fewer decisions, not louder alarms — so PetPal's emergency flow is whitespace, one primary action, and a vet who's already been found. Flip it:

WHAT WE DESIGNED — one decision, lower heart rate

Panic narrows attention. The screen shouldn't compete with the emergency — it should lower the heart rate and point at one door.

meta: this whole chapter's palette calmed down when you scrolled into it. Same decision, applied to the page you're reading.

Mishka ate something she shouldn't have?

Stay with her. You only need to do one thing right now.

Call Dr. Rao — verified · 6 min away
What to do while you wait

BHI logged this — no forms tonight

§04 The moat — release history

Ten years of knowing exactly who the user is.

The switch isn't a restart — it's a version bump. The user research came first.

  1. v1.0 · 2016

    B2B Sales

    Quota-carrying. Learned what a customer says no to — and why.

  2. v2.0

    Digital Marketing

    Funnels, positioning, and the words users actually type.

  3. v3.0 · 2021 — NOW

    Organic Growth Lead — Position2

    US B2B & healthcare clients · team of six · and the number below.

    +36% YoY organic growth
    US healthcare brand

    trajectory stylized — the number is real

  4. v3.5

    GEO / AI service line

    Built a new agency offering from zero — market analysis, positioning, then pitched directly to US CMOs and founders.

  5. v4.0 ·

    Product Management

    MBA (Marketing) · International Certificate in Product Management, IPL.
    The longer story: about →

§05

Read the 3-minute case study — or skip it and just talk to me.

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