Sachin Kumar — Senior Product Manager & 2x Founder

Career Timeline

8.5 years of building, shipping, and scaling

Upliance AI

Senior Product Manager

Jun 2025 — Present

Qtopia Technologies

Co-Founder · Head of Product & Growth

2023 — 2025

Gyankaar Technologies

PM → Head of Product (Founding Team)

2019 — 2023

Deloitte Consulting

Business Technology Analyst

Aug 2017 — Mar 2019

The Present

Where the story continues

Upliance AI (React Labs Pvt Ltd)

Senior Product Manager

Jun 2025 — Present

upliance is an AI-powered smart cooking appliance that helps users cook delicious meals with guided recipes.

What I Shipped

Built the upliance 2.0 experience from scratch solving product's performance, ease of use and discovery-related issues; owned its North Star metric
Enhanced the search experience and optimized the search results using Algolia leading to an improved recipe discovery and increased search based conversion
Built health focused features such as macro tracking on weighing scale, healthy variations of recipe (high protein, low oil, etc.) to target a new health conscious cohort
Built smart, data-driven nudges to reduce the hardware-related issues and provide immediate resolution
Built agentic AI solutions for recipe creation, recommendation, support and modifications
Owned software development, acting as a scrum master, planning & executing sprints

Outcomes

Helped it improve its North Star (average weekly session per user) by 50%
Improved the search funnel (search to a cooking session ratio) by 20%
Health focused features led to a better marketing in health conscious cohort which contributed to around 20% of sales (from earlier around 5%)
With adoption of AI tools such as Cursor, building cursor rules for design system, leading to significant improvement in shipping speed of dev team
AI created recipes contributed around 8% to monthly cooking sessions

The Founder Arc

Two ventures, a thousand lessons

Qtopia Technologies Pvt Ltd

Co-Founder · Head of Product & Growth

2023 — 2025 · 2 Years

Qtopia — Real Money Quiz Game

Feb '23 — Mar '24

A real money based quiz game where one can play quizzes in different formats as per their interest and win cash prizes.

What I Shipped

Designed diverse game formats such as Quiz on Demand (play anytime, anywhere), Live Quizzes (hundreds of participants playing together), Quiz Tournaments (multi-stage quizzing competition), etc.
Built and nurtured a vibrant community of over 5k quizzers WhatsApp, and Telegram, leveraging these channels for user research and testing ideas before building the product
Introduced a Q points reward system to promote daily gameplay, boosting DAU/WAU by 20%
Scaled the platform to 16,000 users with very little ad spend
Built an automated content engine that would crawl through internet to create interesting questions and built a quality indicator engine using Open AI APIs
Analyzed retention & signup funnel using Amplitude, WebEngage & MongoDB, created notification workflows, boosting activation by 20% and WoW retention by 15%; and reduced payment drop by 20%

Outcomes

Scaled the platform to around 16K users with almost zero net spend by recovering CAC through in app purchases
Conversion of 25% acquired users into transacting users
Secured funding and incubation from STPI, Govt. of India. Incubated by GSF Accelerator and Razorpay Rize
Built community of quizzers on telegram, whatsapp and instagram with a reach of around 10K audience
Grew instagram page from 0→5000 followers organically

A2Z Test — AI Assessment Platform

Apr '24 — Feb '25

An AI-powered, B2B SaaS-based assessment tool that automates the end to end assessment process for educational institutes. It was a pivot from Qtopia.

a2ztest.in

a2ztest.in

What I Shipped

Performed extensive market research and user studies by talking to teachers, institute owners, and students across the country
Developed the full product suite [desktop + mobile apps (Android & iOS)] for students and teachers in 6 months
Reduced test creation time by 90% with AI question generators
Enabled mobile-based OMR evaluation by training Azure Document Intelligence ML models
Generated leads via Meta Ads, Google Ads, cold calling, and in-person meetings, driving adoption across 50+ institutes, converting 10% to paying customers
Built a laser-focused team of 5 individuals with a small budget

Outcomes

Reduced the question paper creation time from hours to a few minutes
Reduced OMR based evaluation time from 5-10 minutes to a few seconds

III

The Builder Years

Four years of building at scale

Gyankaar Technologies Pvt Ltd

Product Manager → Head of Product (Founding Team)

2019 — 2023 · 4 Years

GyanApp — Vernacular Social Media

Mar '19 — Nov '19

A vernacular knowledge-sharing social media app where users can express themselves in their own native language.

What I Shipped

Built a product led growth (PLG) engine by building a weekly writing competition on the product to boost user generated content
Developed a content recommendation engine, boosting Reads/DAU by 50%
Built a collection feature enabling users to explore and read similar content pieces tailored to their interests
After a thorough analysis using Clevertap and Metabase, reorganised the category and subcategory for better recommendation
Built a writers' community on social media platforms to bring quality content creators on the platform

Outcomes

Increased the user generated content (UGC) by 5x through simple writing competitions
Brought the user acquisition cost (CAC) to 1/3rd through writing competition based ad campaigns
Improved the North Star metric Reads/DAU by 50%

PBPagarBook — HR-Tech for SMEs

Nov '19 — Jan '23 · 3+ Years

A B2B SaaS-based Human Resource Management tool — attendance, payroll, and compliance for SMEs through web app, employee app, AI facial recognition app, and multi-lingual mobile app.

What I Shipped

Built the first version of the mobile app from scratch after conducting in-depth user and market research across India
Owned product roadmap and helped scale the product to 10M+ users through strategic growth initiatives, referrals, business owner communities, building multi lingual app
Built the employee app for blue collar workforce — photo and location-based attendance, leave management, salary slips. Drove adoption by over a million employees
Developed subscription-based desktop & mobile apps, achieving $3M+ ARR
Built AI-powered facial recognition PagarBook Lens for attendance — 100% increase in revenue per employee, 2.5L+ daily face scans
Built a fully digital microloan product for early salary access — 22K+ loans disbursed
Introduced one-click bulk salary payouts enabling ₹150Cr+ annual transactions, reduced 90% payment failures
Launched in Bangladesh — 200K users and $50K ARR in one quarter
Automated operations infrastructure — 20% increase in renewals, 30% in net dollar retention

Outcomes

Impacted 10M+ SME owners and blue collar employees — $3M+ ARR
Scaled PagarBook Lens to 300K+ faces per day
Processed ₹150Cr+ in annual payments

Leadership

Managed a team of 5 PMs and 2 analysts
Launched Bangladesh operations — built team of 10, $50K ARR in a quarter
Built and handed off a 10-person Customer Success team
Led crisis response: replaced failed biometric machines with PagarBook Lens

The First Steps

Where it all began

Deloitte Consulting, Hyderabad

Business Technology Analyst · Strategy & Analytics

Aug '17 — Mar '19 · 1.5 Years

Deloitte is a consulting firm. Worked in tech consulting under strategy & analytics division.

What I Shipped

Led on-prem to Snowflake cloud migration and built Tableau dashboards to enable data-driven decisions for a US asset management client
Automated high-volume accounting workflows using RPA (Blue Prism), saving thousands of manual hours for a retail client
Built ETL pipelines with Informatica for a UK insurance client, powering management dashboards and business reviews