Rishikesh Ranjan

Growth and product lead who also writes the code. Over the last 5+ years I've run acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue at five startups — usually wearing the PM hat and the growth hat at the same time.

At ngram I took the company from $0 to $150K ARR in three months. The growth work is backed by real engineering: I build the product and the automation behind it in Python and TypeScript, and I've shipped open-source projects that get into the hard parts — keyless signing and transparency logs, envelope encryption and row-level security, a time-series database.

I'm equally comfortable writing software, leading a growth team, or doing PM work. On the side I build developer tools — like taketomarket, a marketing OS shipped as 40+ Claude Code & Codex skills.

ngram · Growth Lead, Product & Growth (current)

January 2026 – Present · Remote

AI video-generation platform for product and marketing teams (customers include Salesforce, HubSpot, PayPal, and Snap).

• Took the company from $0 to $150K ARR in its first three months, running growth and marketing solo while also acting as product manager.
• Built user-referral loops that compound, so acquisition keeps getting cheaper as signups grow.
• Own the whole revenue funnel — acquisition, activation, retention, monetization — and prioritize the roadmap around what actually moves revenue.

StreamAlive · Growth Lead

June 2024 – March 2026 · Remote · PLG Consultant → Growth Lead → Growth Advisor

Live audience-engagement platform for online events and webinars. Reported to the CMO and CEO.

• Ran 30+ experiments across the funnel that tripled monthly signups and improved acquisition metrics 40%+.
• Grew AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity from nothing into our 3rd-largest signup source by working out how the product gets discovered and cited by LLMs (AEO / GEO).
• Built a "halo customer detector": it enriches every signup via API, scores fit against our target accounts, and fires personalized outreach — so inbound that used to slip through now converts.
• Designed and shipped quizwithstreamalive.com end to end off a hunch about search demand; it's now a standalone acquisition channel.
• Owned product and growth analytics in PostHog, and ran our referral, influencer, affiliate, and programmatic-SEO programs.

Airbook · Product Growth Manager (GTM)

September 2023 – July 2024 · Mumbai, India

Data-analytics SaaS. Reported directly to the founders.

• Led the company's #1 Product Hunt launch — Product of the Day, 900+ upvotes, 250+ signups at 40% activation — its best acquisition day ever.
• Ran 20+ enterprise POCs ($200–$2,000/mo) and converted several into paying customers.
• Built event-based email triggers that lifted activation and retention 30–40%, and set up the analytics stack (Amplitude, GA4) to find where users got stuck.
• Rebuilt the landing page and the app's UI from scratch in Webflow.

CloutFlow · Product Growth Manager

August 2022 – August 2023 · Gurugram, India · Growth Marketer (Founder's Office) → Product Growth Manager

Influencer-marketing marketplace.

• Owned the entire supply side and onboarded 40,000 creators onto the marketplace.
• Built and shipped 50k+ programmatic SEO pages and grew organic traffic 10×.
• Helped close 7-figure (INR) brand deals with Mamaearth, Minimalist, Himalaya, Apollo 24/7, and Snitch — several became published case studies.
• Ran the marketplace launch with the CEO (positioning, messaging, go-to-market) and built the company's online presence from scratch as its first marketing hire.

Spaceonova® · Chief Marketing Officer

May 2020 – January 2022 · India · Head of Marketing → CMO; later Advisor to the CEO (2022–2025)

Edtech / space-education platform.

• Joined as the first marketing hire and was promoted to CMO; built and led a 20-person team across content, community, social, and design.
• Onboarded 40,000+ students and doubled revenue quarter over quarter.
• Built a community-led growth engine — Spaceonova clubs across 25 cities and 100+ schools and colleges.
• Partnered with 100+ Tier-1 and Tier-2 colleges and ran webinars for 100,000+ students, converting 5,000+ into paid programs (INR 1M at a 5% conversion rate).
• Stayed on as Advisor to the CEO (2022–2025) on strategy and fundraising.

Open-source and production systems — Go, Python, TypeScript.

• taketomarket (npm, 13★) — a "marketing OS" for solo founders and developerneurs: 40+ spec-driven Claude Code / Codex skills where every campaign ships behind a positioning-invariant quality gate. Published to the Claude community plugin marketplace.
• SkillLedger (Go, Python/FastAPI, TypeScript) — supply-chain integrity for AI skills: Sigstore keyless signing, a Tessera transparency log, OPA policy gates, and a Dockerized stack (service, log, and Postgres).
• is ChatGPT citing you? (TypeScript) — a multi-tenant SaaS that pipes AI-crawler traffic into PostHog, Mixpanel, or Amplitude. Envelope encryption (KMS → per-tenant DEK → AES-256-GCM), fail-closed row-level security, Stripe metered billing in integer micro-dollars, and a Redis hot-meter reconciled against an append-only Postgres ledger.
• beFindable (Python, TypeScript) — an AI-visibility and social-listening platform for agencies: tracks how brands show up across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, with multi-tenant RLS, Stripe and Dodo billing, GA4 OAuth, and scheduled PDF reports (FastAPI, Supabase, Railway).
• SporeDB (Python, PyPI) — a bioprocess time-series database built on Apache Arrow and DuckDB: automatic phase detection (PELT / BOCPD), a PromQL-style query language that compiles to DuckDB, InfluxDB and OSIsoft PI connectors, and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 audit trails.
• productgrowth-logdrain (TypeScript, Next.js) — a Vercel log-drain receiver that verifies HMAC-SHA1 signatures in constant time, filters AI-crawler user agents, and forwards anonymized events to PostHog.
• skills-by-rishi / product-ideas (Claude Code skills) — a published set of Claude Code skills (including an adversarial, ATS-aware resume rewriter with multi-persona review) plus an autonomous agent that mines HN, Reddit, and GitHub daily and ships scored product write-ups to Slack / Telegram on a cron.

Experimenting With Growth (productgrowth.blog) · Author (current)

August 2021 – Present

• A newsletter for GTM engineers and founders — 1,000+ subscribers. I write up growth loops, GTM automation, and PLG playbooks from experiments I've actually run.

GrowthX® Host Club · Host (current)

July 2025 – Present · Bengaluru, India

• Hosted an AI Automation Sprint — guided 34 growth leaders building their first n8n / Relay.app workflows in one session.
• Hosted a 24-hour Vibe Coding Build-a-thon — mentored 25 non-technical growth leaders to ship working prototypes (Cursor, Claude Code, ChatGPT, bolt.new, lovable.dev).

• naas.ai — GTM Consultant (2023–2024)
• Hex-Star Universe — Growth Advisor (2023–2024)
• Nervos Network — Community Manager, India (2022–2023): built a 1,000-member community around the L1 blockchain.
• Vync Entertainment — Web Developer & Marketing Consultant (2020–2021)
• Medito Foundation — Google Online Marketer (2020)
• Qualki — Marketing Associate (2019)
• Socialiency Advertising — Marketing Associate (2018–2019)

• Software Engineering — REST APIs, microservices, system design, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), automated testing, authentication & authorization (OAuth2, RLS), data pipelines, async / event-driven architecture, concurrency, cloud deployment
• Languages & Frameworks — Next.js, TypeScript / JavaScript, Python, FastAPI, HTML/CSS
• Data & Infrastructure — PostgreSQL, Redis, DuckDB, Apache Arrow, Docker, Vercel, Supabase, Railway, Pinecone
• AI / LLM — LLM application development, agentic workflows, prompt engineering, RAG, web scraping & enrichment, AI answer-engine optimization (AEO / GEO)
• AI Dev Tools — Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Conductor, MCP servers & clients, Claude / GPT / Gemini APIs, n8n, lovable.dev
• Product & PM — product discovery, user research, requirements & user stories, roadmapping & PRDs, A/B testing, stakeholder management, cross-functional leadership, KPIs / OKRs
• Growth — product-led growth (PLG), go-to-market (GTM), full-funnel experimentation, activation & retention, referral / growth loops, lifecycle automation, programmatic SEO, CAC / LTV, MRR / ARR, churn reduction, demand generation
• Analytics & Automation — PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel, GA4, SQL, HogQL, n8n, webhook / CRM automation, Stripe billing

• IIIT Bhubaneswar — B.Tech, Information Technology (2018–2022)
• Y Combinator — Startup School, Startup Growth (2022)
• Seth Godin / Akimbo — altMBA (altmba53) and The Marketing Seminar (2022–2023)

• English — Professional working
• Hindi — Native / bilingual
• Japanese — Elementary
• Kannada — Elementary