Rishikesh Ranjan

resume

Rishikesh Ranjan

Senior Product and Growth Leader

6+ years in AI and space tech

  • Growth systems
  • Technical product
  • Systems engineering
  • AI systems
  • Space
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Updated Sep 19, 2026

Summary

Product and growth leader who writes code. I co-founded Spaceonova (2020) and built a 20-person team there. Across CloutFlow, Airbook, StreamAlive, and ngram, I have shipped product changes, run growth experiments, built internal tools, and measured what happened.

At ngram I took the company from $0 to $500K ARR in six months. The growth work is backed by real engineering: I build products and automation in Python and TypeScript, including taketomarket, a marketing OS shipped as 40+ Claude Code and Codex skills, and second-brain, an open-source knowledge system tested across 300+ space-research PDFs.

Space has been part of my work since I co-founded Spaceonova with Shivam in 2020. Today, that work includes Mission Atlas and space-research systems, alongside the product, growth, code, and AI experience I bring to the industry.

Experience

ngram

Product Growth Lead · January 2026 to Present · San Francisco / Remote

AI video-generation platform for product and marketing teams. I lead growth and marketing, work as product manager, and build systems across acquisition, activation, retention and monetization.

Achievements unlocked

  • Grew ngram from $0 to $500K ARR in six months.

Internal tools built

  • Keyword-to-brief agent. Turns target keywords into blog titles and detailed briefs using SEO rules and evaluation rubrics, then hands the briefs to content writers.
  • Product update writer. Reviews the previous seven days of merged code and pull requests and publishes a weekly product update. Follows a writing rubric that includes user-facing changes and excludes internal and backend-only work.
  • User-query agents. Handle questions from signed-up users and people who have not signed up through separate agents.
  • GTM facts agent. Checks new product capabilities against existing messaging each week and updates outdated claims across blogs and landing pages.
  • Derived buyer agent. Uses signup and product-usage signals to identify engaged users at midsize and enterprise accounts, find managers with purchasing authority, and initiate email conversations from my personal Gmail to pursue enterprise deals. Skips smaller companies.

New things learned

  • Learned to apply AI to practical growth and product workflows.Skill
  • Learned to design AI evaluations and use rubrics to judge outputs.Skill
  • Learned to build harnesses around models to guide how they use tools and complete tasks.Skill
  • Learned what LLMs and models are, and how a model differs from an agent.Skill
  • Learned that there is no universal AI solution: the right approach depends on the task, the available tools and the outcome I need.Life lesson

StreamAlive

PLG Consultant · June 2024 to September 2024 · New Jersey, US / Remote

Growth Lead · September 2024 to January 2026 · New Jersey, US / Remote

Growth Advisor · January 2026 to March 2026 · New Jersey, US / Remote

Live audience-engagement platform for online events and webinars. I led acquisition, activation and retention, owned product and growth analytics in PostHog, and reported to the CMO and CEO.

Achievements unlocked

  • Made ChatGPT StreamAlive's second-largest source of signups.
  • Grew user acquisitions by an average of 40% quarter over quarter.

Internal tools built

  • Halo customer detector. Built a workflow to research new signups online and flag well-known users. I followed up with a personal note from the founder inviting them to a demo.
  • Programmatic SEO workflow. Built a Selenium workflow that generated around 10,000 static SEO pages featuring templates of product-generated presentations and actual product screenshots.

New things learned

  • Learned answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) to improve discovery through AI answer engines.Skill
  • Learned to use Selenium for browser automation and generating product screenshots at scale.Skill
  • Learned what content belongs on a landing page and how it contributes to an effective page.Skill
  • Learned to shape content around a specific user persona, using that person's needs to guide the message and what the page emphasizes.Skill

Airbook

Product Growth Manager (GTM) · September 2023 to July 2024 · Mumbai, India

Data-analytics SaaS. I worked directly with the technical founders as the sole growth hire, learning an unfamiliar market and finding ways to win enterprise customers. My work spanned go-to-market experiments, enterprise sales, product development and analytics.

Achievements unlocked

  • Led Airbook's #1 Product of the Day launch on Product Hunt, earning 900+ upvotes and 250+ signups with 40% activation. It was the company's best acquisition day.
  • Ran 20+ enterprise proofs of concept for plans priced at $200 to $2,000 per month and converted several into paying customers.

Internal tools built

  • AirAI. Built an AI tool that used users' database and table schemas to translate natural-language questions into SQL queries. It began as an internal tool and became a feature in the main product, letting users query their data without writing SQL themselves.
  • Lifecycle email workflows and analytics. Built event-based email triggers to support activation and retention, and set up Amplitude and GA4 to identify where users got stuck.

New things learned

  • Learned to write cold emails that open conversations with enterprise buyers.Skill
  • Learned to build AI into tools that solve user problems, applying it to natural-language SQL generation.Skill
  • Learned how to run SEO work and distinguish useful practices from approaches that do not work.Skill
  • Learned to cover multiple functions in a small team, working across coding, go-to-market and enterprise sales.Skill

CloutFlow

Growth Marketer, Founder's Office · August 2022 to January 2023 · Gurugram, India

Product Growth Manager · January 2023 to August 2023 · Gurugram, India

Influencer-marketing marketplace. In my first Founder's Office role, I worked across operations, HR, hiring and sales, with a primary focus on marketing and onboarding creators and clients. I joined as the first marketing hire and later became Product Growth Manager.

Achievements unlocked

  • Owned the entire supply side and onboarded 40,000 creators onto the marketplace.
  • Built and shipped 50,000+ programmatic SEO pages from creator-profile data using GPT-3 APIs while in the Founder's Office. The pages let brands and other visitors contact creators directly 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.

Internal tools built

  • Supabase CRM. Built a simple internal customer relationship management tool on Supabase.

New things learned

  • Learned to handle operations, HR and hiring through hands-on work in the Founder's Office.Skill
  • Developed practical experience in sales and onboarding both creators and clients.Skill
  • Learned to build a simple CRM using Supabase.Skill
  • Learned to turn creator-profile data into programmatic SEO pages using GPT-3 APIs.Skill

Spaceonova®

Co-founder (full-time) · May 2020 to July 2022 · India / Remote

Co-founder (part-time) · August 2022 to Present · India / Remote

Space-research company I co-founded with Shivam in 2020. I built teams and systems across marketing, operations and company-building, then stepped back from day-to-day work in August 2022 while remaining a part-time co-founder. We offered free webinars and paid programs for students and professionals.

Achievements unlocked

  • Helped Spaceonova reach about 120,000 students across India and beyond, delivering free webinars across 500+ schools and colleges.
  • Co-created "Python with Space Application" with a colleague while in college, teaching astronomy automation and introductory AI, machine learning and computer vision. One example used Python and computer vision to screen images supplied by IASC for potential asteroids.
  • Built and led a 20-person team across content, community, social and design.
  • Built a community-led growth program with Spaceonova clubs across 25 cities.
  • Our team signed a launch agreement with Skyroot for a planned experiment studying extremophiles in a contained, sensor-equipped environment in microgravity. The project did not proceed because we could not secure funding.

Internal tools built

  • Participant database and dashboard. Co-built a database and dashboard with a colleague to replace Google Sheets and track about 120,000 people who had interacted with Spaceonova. Connected each person's participation across webinars, masterclasses and offline events to identify repeat participants and understand user behavior. Built it ourselves because we had no budget for a paid service.

New things learned

  • Learned to use Python to automate astronomy data-analysis tasks.Skill
  • Learned to turn practical Python, AI and computer vision applications into lessons that students could follow.Skill
  • Learned to connect participant records across events and use their interaction history to understand user behavior.Skill
  • Learned that college had not prepared me for the uncertainty of startup work. I had to learn on the job and take responsibility across marketing, operations and leadership as the company needed.Life lesson

Engineering Projects

Selected AI tools, analytics systems and space-exploration projects.

  • taketomarket
    Built a marketing toolkit for founders who code, with 40+ Claude Code and Codex skills covering research, campaign creation, review and measurement. Published to npm and the Claude Code community plugin marketplace.
  • second-brain
    Built an open-source knowledge system that turns documents and questions into a cited, interconnected Markdown wiki. Coding agents maintain the wiki, trace answers to source evidence and save new knowledge for future questions.
  • second-brain-lite
    Built a lighter knowledge system that searches source files directly, answers questions with citations and saves useful findings as connected wiki entries. Supports documents, spreadsheets, presentations and images.
  • Mission Atlas
    Built a searchable catalog of missions beyond Earth and an interactive 3D Solar System explorer using Next.js, TypeScript and Three.js. Python pipelines generate planetary positions and available mission trajectories from sourced scientific datasets.
  • is ChatGPT citing you?
    Built an analytics layer over server logs that identifies visits from ChatGPT, Claude and other AI crawlers by page and provider. Sends events to connected analytics tools to track visit frequency and compare activity before and after website changes merged through GitHub.

Writing & Community

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

August 2021 to 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

July 2025 to July 2026 · Bengaluru, India

  • Host and mentor at hackathons focused on using AI in the software development process.

Other Roles

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

Skills

Growth, Marketing, Product Management & AI Systems

  • Growth & Go-to-Market

    Product-led growth (PLG), go-to-market (GTM), full-funnel experimentation, acquisition, activation, retention, referral and growth loops, lifecycle automation, and monetization.

  • AI Growth Systems

    Agents for research, content and prospect enrichment; AI evaluations and harnesses; workflow automation, RAG, and LLM applications for growth and product teams.

  • Product Management & Execution

    Product discovery, user research, requirements and user stories, roadmaps and PRDs, stakeholder management, cross-functional leadership, and KPIs / OKRs.

  • Marketing & Demand Generation

    Positioning, messaging, campaign planning, content and programmatic SEO, lifecycle campaigns, demand generation, and AI answer-engine optimization (AEO / GEO).

  • Analytics & Experimentation

    Product and funnel analytics, A/B testing, CAC / LTV, MRR / ARR, churn measurement, and event-based activation and retention experiments.

Tools & technical foundations

Analytics & automation
PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel, GA4, SQL, HogQL, n8n, webhook / CRM automation, Stripe billing
AI tools & models
Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Conductor, MCP servers & clients, Claude / GPT / Gemini APIs, n8n, lovable.dev
Languages & frameworks
Next.js, TypeScript / JavaScript, Python, FastAPI, HTML/CSS
Data & infrastructure
PostgreSQL, Redis, DuckDB, Apache Arrow, Docker, Vercel, Supabase, Railway, Pinecone
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

Education

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

Languages

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