SuperBeings can uplift the best version of YOU.

As quoted by John C. Maxwell, “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” Sometimes it becomes difficult to manage your team, but that doesn’t make you any bad. Not just that, we’ve even got a solution for this. 

SuperBeings is an integrated continuous performance and employee engagement platform for growing organizations. Given the right environment and inputs, each human could be the best version of themselves and SuperBeings let this happen through options like setting up OKRs, performance management systems and employee feedback mechanisms. Have a more insightful view on the start-up through the interview with Gaurav Bhawani, Co-founder, SuperBeings.

Below are the questions –

Give a brief info about your startup?

We’re building SuperBeings, an integrated continuous performance and employee engagement platform for growing organizations. 

SuperBeings helps companies execute well by ensuring teams are aligned and are working towards organization’s goals, and also enables leaders to understand and remove blockers of their teams to help them perform at their best

What made you start your startup and what problem does it solve?

Over the course of our careers, working at MNCs like Amazon, Morgan Stanley and startups like Licious and Cleartax, we saw first-hand how organizations struggle with driving performance and engagement as they scale. 

Both Performance management and Engagement are generally limited to an annual cycle which is retrospective at best and a “check in the box” exercise at its worst, which leads organizations to chase problems of the past and limits the outcomes they can achieve. 

Moreover, while driving performance of a team is the core job of a manager, most platforms today look at it just from the HR teams’ lens.

Today, what’s needed for an agile business is a platform that not just helps them track performance or engagement annually but works with them in real-time to drive performance and engagement.

Tell us about yourself, your previous jobs/ventures? What were you doing before this startup?

I’ve spent most of my time working with Startups. I was leading retention and growth marketing efforts at Licious for two years before starting SuperBeings, prior to that I worked with Cleartax and Housejoy. With Cleartax I worked on scaling their marketplace business and with Housejoy led three major categories. 

Fortunately, working at high growth startups gave me the opportunity to grow myself. I found myself in situations where I went from leading a team of 3 to 37 people in 3 months in one of the instances, and to hiring 50+ people within 7 days of joining in the other. 

While these experiences constantly pushed the boundaries for me, they also gave me the opportunity to experience the problems we are solving for today at SuperBeings. Both as an employee and as a team leader.

Where is your startup based? Why do you think that is the best place for you?

We’re based in Bangalore, India as it gives us the best of both worlds. It has the highest concentration of rapidly growing companies that need a solution like SuperBeings and also has the right talent to take SuperBeings beyond India and SEA. As we scale we’re looking at setting up offices in the US and SEA as well. 

As a startup founder, what are you paranoid about? What keeps you awake at night?

Two things primarily, Growing fast(er) and building the right solution. I think that’s the balancing act that each founder has to master. On one hand you want to take the platform to as many users as possible as quickly as possible, but on the other hand you’ve to be absolutely certain that the platform is actually solving for the needs of your core users. 

Who are your competitors and how are you better than them?

We’re taking a slightly different approach by integrating continuous performance, engagement and leadership development on a single platform and as a result we have some competition in each of these spaces. For example in performance management and engagement we compete with players like Lattice and Cultureamp whereas in Leadership coaching and development there are established organizations like CCL and BTS. 

How hard is it to have a work-life balance as a startup founder and how do you manage it?

It’s more work-life integration than balance for me honestly. That’s how it has always been, but what changed is that work actually takes over everything else in life at times, which might not be healthy. I just make sure that I consciously get some down-time every week that could be spent with family and friends or just away from tech and people. It helps me keep focus and function better overall. 

Have you raised funding? If yes, then we would like to know the details. If not then please tell us if you are looking to raise.

We raised a seed round a couple of months back, the round was led by Endiya Partners and we also got backed by Axilor Ventures, Cloud Capital and great founders like Rajaraman Santhanam (Founder, Chargebee), Shanmugam Krishnasamy (Founder & CTO, Freshworks), Sanjoe Tom Jose (Founder, Talview) and Piyush Shah (Co-founder, InMobi Group) 

We’re not actively raising right now but we have ongoing conversations with potential investors and will raise when the time is right. 

What’s the biggest misconception people have about you? Why do they have that? What’s the reality?

That I am always in control, I’ve generally been asked a lot about how do I keep my cool in high pressure situations. 

However, it’s more to do with overthinking and playing out all scenarios in my head before we get to the high pressure situation. The reality lies somewhere in between.

What gets you excited about this company?

It’s just the change that we could bring in how the world works and in the lives of employees at large. That, and the feedback we’ve been receiving from companies that we’ve been working with. 

Tell us how a day in your life looks like? Your schedule for a day right from the time you get up till you hit the bed at night.

It’s fairly well slotted these days, I get up around 6:30 – 7. The day generally starts with a workout or a walk followed by some coffee and breakfast. I get to my workstation around 9:30 and the first couple of hours go into follow up tasks from the previous day and team huddles.

This is followed by sales or customer calls that take 3-4 hours each day.

The evenings are generally for  things that might need more thinking / research – like product design reviews, marketing metrics or setting up experiments.

I also make sure to spend some time with my cat towards the end of the day and typically close it off with a book or netflix depending on how the day’s been. 

Tell us about your team and how did you meet each other?

All three of us spent about a decade working with both enterprises and startups before we got together for SuperBeings. 

Yash and I have the standard config (an Engineering + MBA profile), he went to IIT BHU and ISB and has worked at companies like Morgan Stanley and Amazon, I did my engineering and went to IIM Indore for my B school and have spent most of my time with Startups, most recently with Licious and Cleartax. Yash and I worked together at Housejoy and have know each other since 2015

Kunal probably knew better, he did his engineering in computer science and then went on to do his masters from Columbia, he was with Yahoo and Comscore in the US and then worked with Appnomic systems when he came back. 

In late 2019 we bonded over our experiences as Team leads across both large and small companies and realized that the same problems exist in most organizations as they scale. That led to the idea of SuperBeings.

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