# Rishikesh Ranjan _Growth Leader · Product Manager · Full Stack Engineer — in that order_ Source: https://rishikeshranjan.com/resume ## Summary 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. ## Experience ### **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. ## Engineering Projects 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. ## Writing & Community ### **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). ## Other Roles - **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) ## Skills - **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 ## Education - 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) ## Languages - English — Professional working - Hindi — Native / bilingual - Japanese — Elementary - Kannada — Elementary