In this interview, Mohit Mamoria shares practical productivity hacks and strategic frameworks for founders. He recommends a passive Gmail filter that automatically archives any email containing the word "unsubscribe," keeping the inbox focused on important messages—a technique he used in the early version of his product Mailman. He advises founders to adopt a dual planning horizon: short‑term 6‑week sprints for execution and a long‑term 60‑year vision, avoiding intermediate timeframes. For solo founders, he proposes a 100‑day rule to validate ideas, suggesting that if an idea shows no promise after 100 days, it should be dropped. He discusses current challenges scaling Mailman, specifically positioning the product for paid traffic and capturing attention from users who aren’t actively searching. Mohit cites three key resources: the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things for building companies, his mentor Bharani (founder of 91mobiles.com) for personal clarity, and the broader influence of his network. He defines success as a "parallel maker"—someone who runs multiple ideas simultaneously, aiming to quickly test and either discard or pursue them, targeting an 80% execution rate of ideas. He emphasizes rapid iteration, suggesting founders should aim to launch and evaluate ten ideas, using the 100‑day window to decide whether to continue or move on. Throughout, his tone is conversational, enthusiastic, and encouraging, offering actionable advice for founders seeking to boost productivity and accelerate idea validation.
Chapters
Any other kind of, you know, general maybe productivity apps or routines you recommend to say new founders? Maybe they're looking to maximize their output. help them make better decisions or boost productivity, um, while running a company?
I'll— yes, I'll tell you one, um, which is— so I'm, I'm— so I'm fan of those productivity hacks or tips which are passive, which once you do it, you set it and forget it. If you have to do it actively, it's a habit-building thing. It's not really a trick. So another trick is last year so many new newsletters came in, so many new newsletters. We have shared our email across on the internet much more times in the last year than ever before. So what has happened is a lot of emails are just circulating around, and all somebody needs to send you an email is your email address. So one hack is just create a filter in your Gmail or any inbox, any email service, with the word unsubscribe. So any email which contains the word unsubscribe, automatically remove it from your inbox and move it to another folder, say newsletters or marketing or anything. So this is one folder that you will check whenever you want to check, not actively. So you will only get, say, important emails in your inbox. Everything which has the word unsubscribe will be moved to this inbox that you can check once in a day or twice in a day. Again, a passive tip, passive trick. Just once set it and forget it. And honestly, this is one thing, this is one logic that we used in the first version of Mailman. So when we wanted to figure out, hey, which are important emails and which are not, non-important emails, we were looking for just unsubscribe word in the email. If it has unsubscribe word, we would say it is not important. If it, if it didn't have unsubscribe word, we would say, hey, this is important to you. So this is one of the logic that we actually built in Mailman. Now it's a much complex logic now, but yes, this is something you can accomplish using just your inbox filters.
No, that's genius. I used to use an app before, I think they shut down, it was called, I think, Rollup, and I loved it because it would just take all those things that are subscribed to and unsubscribe me. And then now I have to do them. I am doing them manually. It's like I come in, I unsubscribe from everything. So That's brilliant. I'm going to do that today. So thank you for that tip, Mohit.
Yes, fantastic.
Awesome. So Mohit, just want to switch gears, kind of moving more to kind of the rapid fire, maybe a little bit more personal questions to help founders listening in.
Okay.
Starting off, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known and maybe would tell your 18-year-old self or maybe college grad before launching your product?
Okay, one thing, do not have uh, plans for 2 years, 3 years. My biggest learning was either to plan for 6 weeks or 60 years, nothing in between. And planning for 6 weeks had been working great for anything that I have done— building products, building teams, trying out new marketing ideas. 6 weeks is kind of the sweet spot that I figured out myself. Not quarter, not month, 6 weeks. Either plan for 6 weeks or 60 years, nothing in between. Just keep an eye on the bigger picture and then do small, small incremental stuff in 6 weeks.
Love it. Um, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Mailman? Meaning, what's keeping you up at night these days?
Same thing, uh, marketing positioning. We are still trying to figure out the positioning for the paid traffic. I mean, if somebody's not even looking for us, how do I grab somebody's attention and make them aware of this problem and then also pitch the solution? This is a threefold problem. Uh, we are trying with— we are trying multiple things. Um, Um, hopefully one of them will work soon enough. But yes, one, our current challenge and our biggest challenge right now.
Nice. Um, who or what would you say are the best 3 resources? It could be books, you know, it could be people, mentors, or people you follow. I'm assuming Andrew is in there. Who you say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years outside of Andrew? Maybe anybody else or any books you recommend? Yes.
Um, one book that had been sort of like a Bible to me, uh, of building a company is this book called Hard Thing About Hard Things. I read this book when I was young, uh, 23-year-old guy, and I had to hire people like who were 30-year-old, 35-year-old. I had like— there was no resource who would tell me how to hire, um, people who are senior to you, who are older to you. I, I hired some of my friends. There were these— there was no other resource who would tell how to fire your friends. So these are things that that book told me. There, there are specific chapters. So Hard Thing About Hard Things is one thing that I reread every single year, and every time I do it, I get something out of it. Talking about person, I would give all of the credit, uh, of my vulnerability discussions apart from Andrew to Bharani. Bharani is the founder and CEO of this company called 91mobiles.com, an Indian company. My first boss, my first investor, my lifetime mentor. There had been times when I have cried, cried in front of him, and there had been times when I have spoken More just about like beyond business with him, and why I like talking to him is because he has never given me any answers. So this is interesting because whenever I gave went to him with questions, he has always asked me more questions so that I get more clarity about myself, which no which nobody else did. Nobody else did. He everybody tried to give me answers. Everybody tried to. Give me direction, but this one person tried to point all of these questions back at me so that I can figure out who I am really. So that was my biggest, biggest, biggest achievement that I was able to meet somebody like him who would make me realize who I am.
Right. Love it. Love it. We'll add him to the add those to the show notes for people to check out. Maybe say hi.
Absolutely.
Mohit. You've had different kind of levels of success from an investor to founder to entrepreneur, now kind of, you know, another journey back into the game. What does success mean to you today, whether that's personally, financially, business, life? There's no right answer.
Yeah, okay. So, you know, I wrote this one word in my Twitter bio, which is serial maker, that I love making stuff. So maker is okay, but, uh, and serial is okay, politically correct. But in all honesty, I am something that I like to call parallel maker. I mean, I need to have multiple things going on to keep me occupied. And, um, while I'm doing all of this stuff, I am always coming up with new ideas. Right now, I'm not able to execute all of those ideas on my own because I do not have enough resources. I do not have enough people that I'm working with that I can execute those ideas. But, and it's not that I want to execute those ideas. I just want to see those ideas executed, even if failed. I just want to put those ideas to rest. Uh, over the, over the last few years, that list has grown too big. It's like 50+ ideas now. And success to me looks like, and I was right now, I'm able, uh, to execute a few of them, uh, using some, uh, developers, by hiring some contractors. I'm able to put some of those ideas to rest. Just by executing them and seeing if they're working or not. My success to me would look like if, if an idea comes up, the time that it takes me to execute that idea and put it to rest, either up or down, either throw away or pursue it, uh, not personally, but this idea should be pursued. So in that context, that would be success to me. And over last few years That gap is actually shortening. I mean, earlier I used to spend months and months just thinking about ideas and not doing about anything because I was not able to. Right now, if I have some ideas, 10% of them I'm actually able to get it executed and see if there is any potential in it or not. But I want to be there where at least 80% of the ideas I can actually put it to test, see if it is worth pursuing or not. See Elon Musk, crazy idea. He gets somebody to work, uh, And if it is dead, he throws it away. If it is working, he has a new company. I do not want to own all of these companies, but just want to see those executions happening.
Nice. Do you have— just adding to that, do you have a kind of sweet, kind of figured out timeline of how long, you know, from idea to launch to figure it out, get it out there until— and then making a decision in or out? Or is this, you know, I'm glad it's out, it's not working, I'm glad it's done, or should we continue doubling down? What's the right metrics or things you look at just to make that decision?
Just for me, it's 100 days. I mean, 100 days I think is a good enough time that you can take, um, you, you can do anything with the idea. 100 days is like the top upper limit. If something is still not working after 100 days, uh, like if there's zero hope of possibility, uh, I would just think practically and I would move on.
So 6 weeks if you have Andrew, 100 days if you're, if you're on your own. How much are you investing? How much time are you putting into that in those 100 days? How much would you invest?
Yeah, oh, I mean, I mean, 100 days, you're just doing one thing. Just, um, just taking this idea and either saying this is a hit or this is a miss. Just doing this. This is, this is for somebody who is just looking for ideas and trying to do something, trying to do something. I would say instead of waiting for a long period of time just to find the perfect idea, do 10 ideas. As they say, 9 out of 10 startups fail. So the only way to make a successful startup is to do 10 startups because one of them will succeed. So The whole point is how quickly you do those 10 startups.
Okay, so let's just do the quick math there. So you can do, you know, 100, even if you just focus on one. You know, people take 3 years just to finally execute because they get stuck in their head. You can do 3 in a year, and in 3 years, if you're— if the numbers are just against you, you should be a success, right? So keep going, keep going. You should have something.
You should have something to pursue for next 10 years.
