Developing kid's interest in salads

As an evening snack, I prepared a bowl of salad yesterday for my 2 year old daughter. She loves steamed sweet corn and tomatoes. Along with these two core ingredients, I also added steamed green gram sprouts, cucumber and carrots, with a dash of salt, pepper, lemon juice and chaat masala.

She loved the way I shake the bowl to mix all the ingredients together. I let her eat on her own, using a spoon. As she was carefully picking out sweet corn and tomatoes, I also showed her the other veggies. I started a conversation with her, asking her the colors of the vegetables and she answered them right. She then started picking sprouts and cucumber on her own and ate a few spoons. She isn't a big fan of raw carrots but I added it anyway, just to ensure she takes a couple of bites at least. To my surprise, she did pick a few of the pieces and chewed them, without spitting it out.

I wanted to share what worked for me and my child, in this whole experience:
- I engaged her during the salad preparation process. She saw me chopping the vegetables, while sitting on the kitchen counter. This intrigued her and developed her interest towards the food.
- I gave more importance to the vegetables she likes and complemented them with other vegetables I want her to try
- She took the cup and spoon and fed herself. Because of the freedom to explore, she was willing to try other vegetables as well
- There was a good interaction opportunity for us, when she asked me to shake the bowl and when I asked her about the colors of different vegetables.

Hope these small tips are useful for other mothers.

2013 in review

Although my blogging frequency has been quite low, I definitely would like to keep up the tradition of reviewing the concluded year. It feels nice to know that I can go back to get a glimpse of how the past 8 years were.

I read this interesting quote somewhere - "We overestimate how much we can achieve in a day and underestimate how much we can achieve in a year". 2013 was a productive and most importantly, an emotionally peaceful year. It started off with completing the long pending tasks (ones that are important but not urgent) such as dental treatments, health checkups, passport renewal and getting a new passport for D.

D has grown quite fast, from crawling to walking to running. She speaks so much and sings a lot of nursery rhymes. She is no longer a small baby but an individual with her own interests and wishes that "must" be fulfilled at any cost. She is in that phase where if she doesn't get what she wants, she will throw a big tantrum. At the same time, she does so many cute things that can just melt us and cheer our hearts. It feels like living my childhood all over again with her.

She has started going to a play-school nearby. Though it took her a while to settle down, it is a major milestone for us as a family. She is picking up English words and can recognize alphabets, colors, vegetables and fruits.

On the professional front, I got back to working with an early stage startup focused on a domain close to my heart. Nutrition and healthy living led me towards HealthifyMe. I reached out to the founders and we worked out an option of me working from home. Talking about remote work, I have lots to write about, which I shall do in a separate blog post. It has a been an interesting comeback after a 2 year break, with lots of learnings and opportunities. I also managed to attend Nasscom Product Conclave this year. It was wonderful to catch up with my ex-colleagues from Yahoo! and Cleartrip.

The most important event on the personal front was my brother's wedding. I'm very happy for him to have found his right partner for life. Spending a week in Chennai with the summer at its peak, the wedding ceremonies and most importantly, D's stranger anxiety with our other family members and relatives - challenging but memorable experiences.

With a 2 year old, we didn't travel much outside the city but we roamed a lot within the city. D loves outdoors and she made sure we go "tata" every other day - be it for ice creams, cakes or just grocery shopping. We took a short trip to Mysore in March which was D's first ever trip outside Bangalore. She was quite excited and loved the zoo. We took a "real" vacation in Orange County which was relaxing.

Reading took a big hit this year as well. I just managed to finish one book "Life is what you make it" by Preeti Shenoy. A good read. I started reading "Immortals of Meluha" but after pushing through 200 pages, I realized it's just dragging and I gave up. This year, I'm extremely serious about getting back to reading.

The other aspect that I need to pay more attention this year is towards my health. I have been falling sick more often than I usually am and on top of it, I have not been exercising as well. Though I'm conscious of what I eat, I need to incorporate exercise regimen somewhere into my daily schedule.

I'm starting 2014 with lots of hope and excitement. There are many new areas I want to explore, one of them being baking. My new microwave oven has arrived !!

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy new year. Don't think about resolutions but identify 2-3 themes of your life which deserve your attention and go for them!

The Orange County experience

The only vacation we took this year was a trip to Coorg in early Sept. Finally I managed to pen down my experiences. Husband and I had been planning for a vacation for quite some time since it's been 3 years since our last one at Swaswara. We wanted to go to a place which is toddler friendly in terms of food, space and distance from Bangalore. D is 2 years now and she loves being outdoors. We enquired a few places in Kerala but the thought of taking a flight or a train was scary with D screaming within a few minutes after we board a flight/train.

So we decided to go for a drive nearby which is not more than 5 - 6 hours. We had earlier went to Mysore and it was comfortable, driving down with a toddler. We called up Orange County and bookings were done for a 3 night package. Since I had mentioned to them that this is our wedding anniversary special trip, they wanted to make it special.

The day before our trip, we were packing our things and D was quite curious and interested to see all suitcases being brought down from the loft. My travel checklist came in handy, especially when packing all the essentials for D.

On the morning of our trip, hubby and I woke up quite early, packed some sandwiches and got dressed. It was a pleasant surprise that D also decided to wake up early at 5:30 AM that day. Guess the excitement of a vacation caught up with her as well!

The drive was smooth, with some new songs added in my iPod for company. We followed the ritual of having our breakfast at Kamat. D was quite calm and slept through most of the journey. Except for the last 20 odd kms where we had to drive through bad roads, the drive was mostly smooth. We reached Orange County around 1 PM and we were welcomed with traditional music and glasses of cold coffee.

The resort is vast, nestled inside coffee plantations and with 3 different restaurants inside the estate. We were taken to our "county cottage" through a buggy ride (just like a golf cart). D was highly impressed with the ride and started calling the buggy as "auto" (like an auto-rickshaw).

The cottage was spacious, with a huge bedroom opening up to a balcony, along with a clean bathroom. After a quick shower, we headed out for lunch at the "Granary". It was a multi-cuisine buffet with an elaborate spread. The heavy lunch and the long drive pushed all three of us towards a nice afternoon siesta. We then roamed around the resort a little and had some snacks and tea. I just loved the ambience of their reading room - perfect location overlooking the paddy fields, comfortable chairs and they also serve coffee. Too bad, I couldn't spend much time there. With an active toddler who wants to explore all the time, there's no way to sit and relax with a book :-)

We had dinner at the "Pepper Corn" restaurant that night. This place serves some nice continental spread, along with barbecue starters. For a vegetarian like me, it wasn't that impressive. Also the candle lights and darkness was a little spooky for D. This is ideal for a couple but not for parents :-)

There is also a South Indian vegetarian restaurant "Banana Leaf", where we had a sumptuous lunch the next day. More than the food, I liked the location of this place, with nice views of plantations. The waiters also ensured D got a separate bowl of kichdi, wherever we had our meal.

In terms of activities, we started for a plantation walk in the evening but since it was for 2 hours, carrying a toddler around didn't sound like a good idea and so we dropped off in between. The village walk in the morning was really good, where our guide took us to a nearby village and a coracle ride across Cauvery, followed by some hot chai. D also loved this walk since she got to see many goats, dogs and cows.

The pond inside the plantation has a lot of fishes. We grabbed a bag of puffed rice from the restaurant and fed them. D was excited to see so many fishes but her main activity was to create a mess by spreading the puffed rice all over the deck and wiping them with her hands.

Hubby and I also went for massages, taking turns and baby-sitting. There is a small nook which is a play area for toddlers, with teddy bears and other soft toys. There are also other indoor games like caroms, chess and ludo which the older kids might enjoy. In the evenings, there were some dance events by native Kodava dancers which we loved, including D.

The team had arranged a surprise for our wedding anniversary, with a cake and a gift. When they came to know it was D's 23rd month birthday (yeah, we celebrate month birthdays too!!), they surprised her with a cake too. D got quite excited to see everyone singing for her.

Being our first vacation with D, it was a memorable experience at Orange County. Everyone was very courteous and friendly. Perfect location, peaceful atmosphere, pleasant weather, excellent food - what more do we need in a vacation!! I'm sure we would go there again, after few years once D is old enough to appreciate the trees, birds and nature.

Notes from Nasscom Product Conclave - Oct 2013

I participated in the Nasscom Product Conclave event from Oct 28th - 30th. It was my first professional networking event in the past 3 years. It was a good experience, interacting with industry experts and peers. Also, it was great to catch up with many of my ex-colleagues from Yahoo! and Cleartrip.

Though I was there on all 3 days, because of the distance, I couldn't spend as much time as I would have liked to. Here are the notes from some of the sessions I attended:

Day 1:

Growth Hacking workshop by Ravi Trivedi - one of the best sessions I attended. He was extremely clear and focused on the topic. I only wish we had more time. 1 hour was just not enough.

Growth hacks

- are short-lived

- Requires limited spend

- Focused towards rapid growth

Three ways:

- Inbound marketing - customers convert better

- Conversation marketing - make sure to check if the customer is ready

- Organic customer acquisition (organic search)

3 step marketing plan:

- Identify your target market

     - Get as niche as possible

     - 18-35 years old => too broad a definition

- Create your messaging

     - For your target audience

     - Create messaging based on what the customer care about

     - broad messaging => drop off rates are high

     - good benchmark for Bounce rate - < 40 to 50% of traffic

     - bounce rate impacts SEO

- Pick 3 marketing tactics

     - Criteria to use => Highest ROI and volume

     - Vanity metrics - don't track (good to have but not actionable)

     - 90% of Google analytics metrics are vanity metrics, especially if you are in SaaS

     - "If you want big improvement in results, be ready to make big changes"

- FB returns - measure by CPA, as the audience can be targeted extremely well

- Twitter acquisition costs - lower than Adwords or FB (case study - for a travel company)

- Running contests in twitter - very effective

- Share compelling content at relevant moments

- FB PPC - greedy algorithm, will exhaust the budget quickly

- App store optimization - Google+ +1s have an impact on search results on app searches in playstore

- Microconversion v/s Macroconversion

- LinkedIn groups => quite effective to reach B2B target audience

- Goal of Initial marketing spends - to figure out CPA and filter out noise. Spend in short bursts

- similarweb.com => research tool that has traffic data similar to Alexa. Can also do keyword research

- Look into getclicky, hittail

- In Adwords, do add sitelinks to increase CTRs

- Google has 97% of search market share in India

- 53% of clicks go to first rank in Google organic search results => focus on your SEO

    - Target long tail / mid tail keywords where competition is less

    - Use FAQs to target SEO keywords

Design workshop by Sunit Singh - Though I have worked with Sunit in Cleartrip, we haven't collaborated together on a product. Having seen the magnificent user experience in Cleartrip's mobile app recently, I definitely wanted to hear more from him.

He took us through two case studies to illustrate the basics behind good design -

redesigning a boarding pass and redesigning a credit card statement. It was an interesting and collaborative exercise with other participants, though it could have been a little shorter on time.

Some of the points I jotted down:

- Reduce the effort to find information

    - Who needs this info? (Passenger in the case of a boarding pass)

    - What is most important? (Requires gate number, flight number, boarding time and seat number in that order)

    - What is the context? (Passenger needs to know which gate he needs to board the flight from, needs to know the seat number once he is in the flight)

Once these 3 questions are clear, from a design standpoint, we need to link business objectives with user needs

    - What do you want the customer to do? (Could be a promotion or an ad displayed in the boarding pass)

Design process:

- Set design goals

- Group the information

- Start the design

Day 2:

Panel discussion on the art and science of building successful product teams

- Hire people for attitude, not skills

- Find out why they want to join your team, what is the overpowering reason?

- For outbound effort like talking to customers and investors, experience is important

- Very strong ICs can be strong team players

- A product manager has a good idea of who the customer is, lives and breathes customers, see how they solve their problems currently

- Consumer product - attention for 30 sec

- Product culture is extremely important

- Identify your dominant trait - new idea to conception, scaling the product, maintain the customer base

- Product person -

     - notices good products, competition, user experience.

     - Understands how customers use the product.

     - Tries to validate with proxy experiments.

     - Focuses on scaling and sustainability at a later stage.

- To scale, you have to delegate => have trust in your team => then let go of the ownership

- Communicate / network with transparency

- Should have strong points of view to conduct experiments and be accountable for results

Discussion on Start up product management - MVP and hypothesis testing

- Define hypothesis in less than 7 words

- Assumptions => Hypothesis => Data needed to prove the hypothesis => Minimum work needed to get that data (loved this point !)

- Social Q& A => Aardvark => used email to test the MVP

- What can you do without a line of code?

- Build => Measure => Learn => Listen

- MVP resistance by pilot customers

    - Remove friction

    - Champion the customer with 2 weeks of trial

Tips and tricks for building a successful mobile app by Rohit Singal

- Brainstorming phase

    - One line description of your app

    - Excitement (Others should contribute to your idea and not just say "It's good")

    - Impact

    - Name of app

    - team

- User experience and specs

    - Focus

    - Friction

    - First minute magic

    - Design guidelines (Follow Android / iOS7 design guidelines)

    - "Mobile apps should not come with a help menu"

    - Use unique features of the mobile OS

            - G+ login necessary for Google app reviews for featured list

            - Actions within notifications (Android specific feature)

    - Gamification

    - Invite hooks (Make the incentives contextual)

    - Social hooks

    - Notifications - meaningful, customized / personalized

- Development

    - User acquisition and analytics SDK - plan ahead. Look at Mixpanel, swerve, chartboost

    - "Listen more to your happy users"

    - In app rating form - when you should display, what should be the message?

    - In app user feedback form - very important. give a channel for users to vent their frustration

    - Pivots and iterations

    - MVP or 1.0? Apps are unforgiving

- Prelaunch marketing

    - User acquisition and building a community

    - Temporary and launch website

    - Twilio - sent SMS of app download link

    - App video

    - App store screenshots

    - App store description and app store title - very important

Mobile app showcase event:

We demoed our HealthifyMe Android app and it gave us a good opportunity to share what we do in the health and fitness space.

Day 3:

SaaS startups showcase event:

Among the many startups that demoed their app, the ones that caught my attention were bookpad (document management software) and DoCircults (online circuit simulation).

Small screen, big impact:

Three startup founders (awaaz, sound of silence and janacare) talked about how they are leveraging the power of a mobile phone to create social impact.

The afternoon sessions were more for the entertainment factor and not much of real value, especially the panel discussion on scaling your startup.

Traveling from South to North Bangalore, battling the traffic in Outer Ring Road was such a pain. Wish the next year's event is somewhere closer.

Nutrition for infants and toddlers - Part 1

At the beginning of the year, I set out a goal for myself to share with other moms on what I have learnt during the last 2 years, when it comes to feeding my little daughter. I'm neither a doctor nor a nutrition expert. So please use the tips shared below at your own discretion and consult with your pediatrician.

I plan to write this topic in a 3 part series. In the first part, the main focus will be on nutrition in the first 6 months after your baby is born. I can complete the post in a single phrase - "breastfeed exclusively for 6 months"

But to reiterate the importance and to share my experience, I think a few more lines is necessary. Even before my daughter was born, I made a commitment that I will breastfeed her and I was quite strong about it. Since I decided to take a break from work much earlier than delivery, it gave me time to read up and understand the benefits of breastfeeding. Towards the middle of the third trimester, I started to include oats, bottlegourd, fenugreek leaves (methi), spinach and masoor dhal regularly in my diet. These foods have helped me maintain a good supply of milk for my new born.

Once my daughter was born, the nurse at the hospital helped me to give the first feed within an hour after delivery. This early feed helps the baby to feel the mother's warmth and also learns to latch on quickly. The lactation consultant clarified a lot of questions around breastfeeding. The initial few days were extremely painful but once you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature to you as well as your baby.

After we brought our daughter home, for nearly a month, I couldn't sleep for 2 hours at a stretch. She would wake up for feeding many times in the night and I used to feel extremely exhausted due to lack of sleep. Though elders in the family suggested that I should start bottle feed, I resisted that temptation. Once the baby gets used to the bottle, I learnt that it becomes very difficult for the mom to nurse the baby. Thankfully, my supply was also good enough to exclusively breastfeed my daughter, without the need for bottle feed.

Regarding my diet, my doctors advised me to take normal foods that I would eat anyday, with no excess ghee, no hard lentils (channa, rajma) or vegetables (cauliflower, potato) that can cause bloating. I also used to take a tsp of roasted ajwain seeds after lunch and dinner. That was quite helpful to prevent my baby become colicky.

When my daughter was around 4 months, there was pressure from elders in the family to start introducing other foods. Though I resisted for a month, I eventually succumbed and started other foods when she completed 5 months. Wish I was more strong and continued exclusive breastfeeding for 1 more month !

To other moms, please bear in mind that there's certainly no hurry. Your child has his/her whole life to eat solid foods. So there is no need to rush into introducing other foods. Wait for the completion of 6 months, be strong and do not give in to pressure from others.

If you need to get back to work after 3 months, you can still use a breast pump. Talk to your doctor / lactation consultant and understand how you can continue to nurse your baby. Keep formula milk as the last resort.

Breastfeeding also helped me to reduce my pregnancy weight easily. As for my daughter, she didn't fall sick many times (touchwood!) and she has been an active and happy child. Until she was 22 months old, I continued to breastfeed her, along with regular foods.

To summarize, start preparing your mind and body for breastfeeding your baby even before delivery. It's the best gift you can give him/her. Be strong, believe you can do it and most importantly, do not take stress. The post partum period will have an upheaval of emotions. Keep yourself calm without any stress or tension. Get your husband to support your decision to breastfeed your baby.

In the second part, I will talk about the next exciting and challenging phase - introduction of solids.