Nissar Kumar Behera · Growth product leader

I build the things that make consumer products grow.

For 12+ years I’ve worked on consumer fintech, crypto and now consumer AI, in India and Southeast Asia. At CoinDCX I rebuilt the referral product, started the creator channel and ran the futures business as its P&L owner. Today I build my own AI products on WhatsApp and do the growth work on them myself.

Portrait of Nissar Behera
Bengaluru, India · Open to relocation

Where I’ve worked

Inside companies

ARR for a futures business, 0-to-1 in 18 months
$72M
of new users from referral, at $1.5 CAC
20%
creator channel, to 9% of revenue
30x
See the company work

On my own

AI products live on WhatsApp
2
unique users acquired
71K+
revenue in the first 45 days
~$9K
See the products

Company work

What I built as head of growth

I led growth at CoinDCX for three years, then at Ajaib. Each number below moved because of something I built or rebuilt there.

CoinDCX

India’s largest crypto exchange

Head of Growth (AVP)

Jul 2022 to Oct 2025 · Bengaluru

  • 9-person growth team
  • $10M annual budget
  • P&L owner, futures

Rebuilt the referral engine

Referral became the cheapest acquisition channel we had, and it replaced paid spend.

Referral share of new users

5%to20%

At $1.5 CAC

Launched the creator channel

I started the creator and influencer channel from nothing. It became our second-largest source of new users.

Creator share of exchange revenue

0.3%to9%

30x growth

Ran the in-house experimentation platform

We used it to lift onboarding conversion and cross-sell by 60%. I also set up the company’s first consumer insights pod.

Onboarding conversion, indexed

100to160

+60% lift

Scaled the crypto futures business

India’s first crypto futures business. I owned the P&L, which meant keeping retail demand and market-maker liquidity in balance.

Futures ARR

$0to$72M

0-to-1 in 18 months

  • Revenue growthI grew core revenue 90% with a new product line on cross-chain and fiat rails. A fiat-to-crypto on-ramp and a tiered loyalty programme added another 35%.
  • Incentive economicsWhen the 1% TDS and 30% VDA tax came in, I reworked incentives and pricing so growth held on a reset cost base.

Ajaib

Indonesia’s leading investment platform

Head of Growth

Nov 2025 to Apr 2026 · Remote

  • Team of 8
  • Lifecycle, CRM and partnerships

Built the creator and referral pod

I put the acquisition pod together from scratch and led a team of 8 across lifecycle, CRM and partnerships.

Pod share of total acquisitions

7%to18%

In 3 months

Shipped the lifecycle strategy

I wrote and shipped the lifecycle (CLM) strategy for a market that was new to the team.

Onboarding-to-activation, indexed

100to111

+11% lift

My own products

Then I started building the whole product

Two AI products that live in WhatsApp and take payment by UPI inside the chat. I built the onboarding, the generation pipeline, the payments and the acquisition funnel myself.

unique users acquired
71K+
revenue in 45 days from launch
~$9K
per sign-up
~$0.11
CAC
~$0.50

Both Tara products combined

Tara AI Studio

Founder · 2026 to present

Send a reel and one photo. Get the reel back with you in it.

I call this part Make me viral. You copy the link to a trending Instagram reel and send it to Tara on WhatsApp with one photo. She sends the reel back with your face in it, doing the same moves. The same photo also gets you ten animated stickers, a storybook starring your child, or a retouched portrait, each paid for by UPI in the chat.

Tara AI StudioMake me viral · 26 s
A reel link and one selfie went in. The second half is the reel that came back.

What else it makes

  • Animated sticker: laugh
  • Animated sticker: love
  • Animated sticker: namaste
  • Animated sticker: party
  • Storybook cover: Sara’s Red Raincoat
  • Storybook page with the child drawn into the scene

How a sale happens

  1. For stickers and books, you send a photo. Tara checks it, makes one free avatar, and you approve it or ask for a fix.
  2. One pay message arrives in the chat, with a UPI QR and a pay button.
  3. Once the payment lands, the job starts. The stickers or the book arrive in the same chat a few minutes later.

What I built

  • Make me viral. Higgsfield Genjutsu redraws the reel around the photo you sent, and the result is upscaled before it goes back. The video here came from one selfie.
  • Sticker packs. One avatar becomes a pose sheet, then ten two-second clips, each keyed into a WhatsApp sticker under 500 KB.
  • Storybooks. There are four human-written books. The pipeline draws the child into pre-made pages and typesets a 14-page PDF, or cuts a video with narration, music and sound effects.
  • Photo edits in four styles: natural glow, studio portrait, model photoshoot and cartoon.
  • A fallback chain across four vendors (Vertex AI, fal.ai, OpenRouter, Higgsfield). The job saves each vendor handle before it waits, so a crash resumes the job and I don’t pay for it twice.

Stack

  • Node.js
  • Express
  • PostgreSQL
  • WhatsApp Cloud API
  • Higgsfield Genjutsu
  • Gemini
  • fal.ai
  • Seedance
  • ffmpeg
  • Razorpay UPI
  • Railway

Tara Jyotish

Founder · 2026 to present

A Vedic astrology reading, done over WhatsApp chat.

Tara is an AI astrology assistant. She asks for your birth details in conversation, works out the chart with Swiss Ephemeris, and sends back your kundli with one free reading. After that you buy her time in ten-minute blocks over UPI.

Taraonline
  1. Namaste

  2. Namaste 🙏 I’m Tara, Vedic and Nadi Jyotish. How are you today? What can I help with?

  3. Marriage

  4. Marriage guidance, sure, share your name? Then we’ll look at your chart together

  5. Meera

  6. Meera, and your date of birth?

  7. 10 June 1990

  8. Meera 😊 And please tell me the time of birth, because that is what shows where the planets stood and makes the reading far more accurate.

  9. 11:45 at night

  10. Got it, and where were you born? The town or the district, whichever you remember

  11. Cuttack

  12. Just confirming: Name: Meera Date of birth: 10 Jun 1990 Time: 11:45 PM Place: Cuttack Is this correct?

  13. Yes, correct ✅

  14. Ok, Cuttack, generating your chart based on this location Give me a moment...

  15. Meera’s kundli

  16. I looked at your chart... something really stood out.

  17. A free reading goes here. The model writes it from this chart.

  18. There is a good deal more in your chart than this 🙏 In a proper sitting I can look at it properly. ₹51 for 10 minutes.

  19. Scan with any UPI app, or pay using the link below 🙏 ₹51 · 10 minutes

  20. Got it 🙏 We have 10 minutes now, tell me what’s weighing on you most.

This is the live English onboarding script. Tara’s lines are the product’s real copy. Meera is made up.

How a sale happens

  1. You give your name and your date, time and place of birth, in any order. Tara confirms them on one card.
  2. The server calculates the chart and sends the kundli image with one free reading.
  3. A UPI QR in the chat buys ten minutes, and a session clock tracks the paid time.

What I built

  • Tara replies in the user’s own language and script, across eleven languages. The ad someone clicked decides the language of her first reply.
  • Planet positions come from Swiss Ephemeris and a JSON knowledge base. The model only writes the reading.
  • The paywall sits in the chat: a Razorpay link and a UPI QR, with price ladders pinned per user by where they came from.
  • One account can hold several family charts and match two of them.
  • If a message signals distress, Tara replies with a helpline in the user’s script and never bills for it.
  • Ad click ids are captured on the first message, and purchases go back to Meta through the Conversions API.

Stack

  • Node.js
  • Express
  • PostgreSQL
  • WhatsApp Cloud API
  • Gemini on Vertex
  • Swiss Ephemeris
  • Razorpay UPI
  • Railway
  • GitHub Actions

Founder & CPO · Mar 2026 to Sep 2026

RinnWealth

Automated home-loan prepayment. Pre-launch.

I defined the product, the pricing and the partner integrations on UPI Autopay and BBPS rails, and owned GTM and unit economics.

Axis Bank and Setu signed on as launch partners. I also led the NPCI approval path, in a category that had no playbook.

  • UPI Autopay
  • BBPS
  • NPCI
  • Axis Bank
  • Setu

Work history

Everywhere I’ve worked, newest first

  1. 2026 to presentBengaluru

    Founder, Tara AI Studio and Tara Jyotish

    Two AI products on WhatsApp that I built myself. 71K+ unique users and ~$9K revenue in the first 45 days.

    Details above
  2. Mar 2026 to Sep 2026Bengaluru

    Founder & CPO, RinnWealth

    Pre-launch fintech for automated home-loan prepayment. Axis Bank and Setu signed on as launch partners.

    Details above
  3. Nov 2025 to Apr 2026Remote

    Head of Growth, Ajaib

    I built the creator and referral pod, which went from 7% to 18% of acquisitions in 3 months, and led a team of 8.

    Details above
  4. Jul 2022 to Oct 2025Bengaluru

    Head of Growth (AVP), CoinDCX

    I ran referral, the creator channel, the experimentation platform and the futures P&L, with a 9-person team and a $10M annual budget.

    Details above
  5. Nov 2019 to Jul 2022Gurgaon

    Associate Managing Consultant, Mastercard Data & Services

    Scaled a B2B analytics platform to $1M MRR in 4 months across several country markets.

    Advised issuers, acquirers and merchants across APAC and Africa on GTM, consumer value proposition and pricing in a two-sided payments network.

  6. Dec 2018 to Nov 2019Mumbai

    Senior Consultant, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu LLP

    Launched the state-sponsored Mumbai FinTech Hub with the Maharashtra IT department. It channelled $150K in grants to 40+ startups.

  7. Jul 2017 to Dec 2018Mumbai

    Senior Consultant, PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt Ltd

    Cut $1.2M a year in operating cost for a global investment bank by deploying AI/ML, OCR and NLP across its legal and compliance operations.

  8. Aug 2011 to Jun 2015Chennai

    Senior Systems Engineer, Infosys Limited

    Built automation that saved a Fortune 500 F&B client $172K a year.

What I work with

Product-led growth
Referral programmes and incentive design, creator distribution, onboarding and activation funnels, lifecycle/CLM, loyalty, app-store growth (ASO)
Experimentation and data
A/B test design, guard metrics, cohort analysis, self-built funnels and dashboards, SQL, Mixpanel, Amplitude
Unit economics
CAC/LTV, payback, pricing and incentives, P&L ownership, budget allocation
Consumer AI
Generative AI products, conversational onboarding, AI image and video generation pipelines, in-chat UPI payments
Payments and regulatory
UPI Autopay, BBPS, NPCI approvals, FIU-IND, VDA tax regime

Education

  • MBA (PGDM)Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta2015 to 2017
  • B.Tech, Electrical & Electronics EngineeringBiju Patnaik Institute of Technology, Odisha2007 to 2011