#021 - Ritika Mehta (@_ritikamehta) - Why founders should write

Ritika Mehta (@_ritikamehta) - Why founders should write

WHY SHE'S FEATURED:

• Started her first company when she was just 17

• Sold her second product, Marked, for $10k just 9 months after starting it

• Regularly writes awesome articles for her newsletter about the founder's journey like how she got 66 paid users for her MVP

• Won HackerNoon Contributor of the Year for Founder Advice

• Creates beautiful visualizations for her newsletter that I just love! 👇

• Has gotten retweets of her content from big accounts like Lolita Taub

Ritika has been flying under the radar, (or my radar, at least), so I'm glad she's the maker of habit this week and I can to dig through all her content. Her newsletter is a treasure trove of valuable advice and insights for founders, accompanied by these beautiful and unique diagrams and visualizations that perfectly depict the founders journey.

After digging into Ritika's journey, here are 3 strategies that seem to be working well for her 👇

3 Strategies that Changed Ritika's trajectory:

• ✍️ Writing for her newsletter and resharing the content on other publications like Medium, Hackernoon, Makerlog, & IndieHackers

• ⚙️ Optimizing her content for SEO and getting her writing on the first page of google for small keywords for example "community startup"

• 🌱 Talking with and taking care of her paid users

In terms of habits, I asked Ritika what 3 habits changed her trajectory as a maker. Here's what she said 👇

3 Habits that Changed Ritika's trajectory:

• 📣 Being online, specifically Twitter! - Basically, this was the thing that I missed when I was building my first tech product and I think maybe because of that the product didn’t work out. So, I tried to be online this time, being part of #buildinpublic movement (at least, that’s what I call it) and joining a few amazing communities. This definitely pulled out the fear of putting myself online & sharing my vulnerabilities. 

• 🌱 Writing - That's the habit I'm really proud of 😅. I never believe all these years that I can write a perfect article or newsletter. But in 2021, it was like I have to build an audience and the only way possible for me was to write and connect with the world. I wrote about my experience on Medium, and then on my newsletter. Little did I know, those not-so-perfect articles will be loved, shared, and read by so many people, opening endless unexpected doors of opportunities for me. Everyone starts from somewhere, your zero doesn’t need to be perfect. 

• 🧪 Experimenting & taking risks - I believe since I was little, experimenting with my creative mind & taking risks has made me not to worry much (about losing or winning) & get the things done. Starting with building a marketing agency when I was 17 with no help or prior work experience, building my first tech product without any technical knowledge that failed, to making an exit with my 2nd tech product. Just take risks and experiment, you never what comes out with it but one thing is for sure, you’ll learn fast.

Thanks for sharing with us, Ritika. And congrats on your second exit! Looking forward to seeing what you do next.

Follow Ritika on Twitter here 👉 @_ritikamehta or check out her newsletter to follow and learn from this amazing founder and marketer

Build new habits + stick with them

Looking to build some new habits? Harold is a quirky text-messaging bot that helps you build new habits with one text message a day. 

You can use Harold to build habits like Ritika, for example:

• Write for 10 minutes a day

• Repost content on a new publication

You'll be surprised what can happen with just 1 text message each day.

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