I recently went one-on-one with Punit Jajodia, co-founder and CEO of Programiz.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Punit: When we first started Programiz, the business model was simple: appear at the top of Google searches, write quality content, show ads on your website, and generate revenue from the ads. Very simple. We sustained on that business model for 10-12 years. Then ChatGPT came along, and the entire model got threatened; not just us, every publisher in the world. This entire concept of publishing content for free was now challenged, and every industry responded in its own way.
But fortunately for us, we had already launched Programiz PRO by then, which was more of a premium version of programiz.com. But the problem was that even Programiz PRO was getting its users from programiz.com. And when people started shifting to ChatGPT for answers to their programming-related questions, it obviously did not send any traffic to us. Essentially, ChatGPT had copied all our content and trained its model on our content. Not just ours, but everybody’s, without sending traffic to us or without necessarily taking permission from us. So that led to a 40% reduction in traffic and revenue across both our products: the free programiz.com and the premium Programiz PRO.
Financially, we were really challenged. The team was extremely demotivated. Even the people who were writing the tutorials were like, “What’s even the point if the company is going to go downhill from here?” They didn’t say it out loud, but they probably were contemplating whether they should look for another job. And then when you are in this cycle of irrelevancy, it becomes really hard to motivate people. For some time, we were in a kind of shock state. What do we do?
So we built an AI assistant into Programiz PRO. We started using LLMs to generate initial drafts of programming challenges, but while still having humans verify all of it. Delivering AI features to customers and also deploying it internally to improve our own productivity gave me a great perspective on this reorientation around accepting AI. It also got me thinking about what skills will be needed the most in a world where the world’s information is accessible to anyone through a chat interface. That was a moment of realization: we are living in a post-AI world and there’s no going back.
By integrating AI and making the product better, we clawed back the 40% drop, but I realized that the people on my team were still scared. They built the AI features, they integrated it, but they still doubted whether Programiz was relevant anymore. I talked to other founders, and I saw the same problem everywhere. So I realized that building Programiz PRO and integrating AI is not going to be the only solution to this. I need a broader campaign to educate people about where AI fits into our work and where humans are still in the driver’s seat.
My friend Alok and I started a podcast called Post AI Nation. Alok had been teaching banks to be AI-ready by trying to upskill their employees on responsible use of AI for automating repetitive tasks, and I, as a software engineer turned entrepreneur turned programming instructor, have this unique perspective on what AI means to us from a skilling perspective. So we decided to have these conversations, throw them out in the universe, and see what comes back. The response has been great, and people are really thinking about how the broader tech ecosystem needs to evolve around not just the idea of AI disruption, but the idea of AI direction.
Currently, I am also spending a lot of time doing internal messaging, making sure that I’m constantly coaching the team on maintaining a belief that quick prototypes, websites, images, videos, and code that gen AI tools create have a place in the world, but there’s always going to be a place for nuanced software written by a human being. But that does not mean you stay away from exploring what AI assistants, co-pilots, and agents have to offer. Now is not the time to put yourself in a box.
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea and know it was worth pursuing? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?
Punit: The best ideas often come from the pain you feel yourself. You don’t need to go hunting for problems. Start where your frustration already exists, because that’s where your passion sustains you. For us, it started by solving a problem we personally struggled with back in 2011: the lack of high-quality tutorials for C and Python. We knew it was worth doing this because every search for coding tutorials we needed to learn programming would lead to random blog posts by people. There was nothing that we could trust.
As for someone trying to dive into entrepreneurship today, my suggestion is always the same: find an entrepreneur doing meaningful work and offer to be their personal assistant for free.
Founders encounter a hundred problems a day. If you shadow one closely for a month, you’ll start to notice the patterns: the bottleneck they keep hitting, or a friction point you keep solving repeatedly. That’s where business ideas live, right in the trenches of someone else’s chaos.
And I’m consistently surprised more people don’t do this. Why don’t more students message founders and say, “Can I support you in your admin tasks for free for the next two months?” Ninety percent won’t respond, but the one who does will change your career. And here’s the irony: if you offer to do it for free, most will end up paying you anyway.
This approach isn’t just for students. Even if you’re two years into a job and feel stuck, imagine how heart-warming it is for a founder to receive a message that says: “I believe in where you’re headed. I want to work alongside you. You don’t have to pay me.” That’s the person I would absolutely reply to, and I would insist on paying them. Because initiative is the ultimate signal.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Punit: It was actually really simple at the time. The internet was still much younger, and as long as your content had a certain structure, a minimum level of quality, and good images, anything could rank. So our growth path was: find keywords related to programming that people are searching for but not getting access to, and just write.
One thing we did differently was not treating the website like a blog. Obviously, certain concepts have more demand, but we didn’t do it randomly. We first built a curriculum and grouped those keywords into chapters because we were from the same background. Before, a learner would have to go to two, three, or five different places to understand just one programming concept. Nobody had covered it all.
So we said, yes, there are signals that tell us which articles should be our priority, but there are other, less visible articles that might not make money or have the same level of impressions, but they’re needed for completeness, so someone can follow the tutorials from beginning to end.
It sounds funny today in 2025 in the age of Gen AI, but this was 12 years ago. Our differentiator was pretty simple: have everything in one place, find the information asymmetry, and do the boring stuff. We specifically chose programming languages like C and Python, and focused more on technical documentation style content because everybody needed them, but nobody wanted to write them.
So yeah, you have to do the boring stuff consistently. If something is too exciting, there are already a lot of competitors doing it. What’s something boring that nobody wants to do, where the asymmetry exists, and where you can build a business model out of it? That’s the way I think about it.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Punit: I don’t really like the idea of tips and tricks. I’d rather talk about my marketing philosophy. I’m a technical guy, I’m a geek, but there was a point in my entrepreneurship journey where I realized I needed to evolve into a marketer, because that’s where the biggest barrier to growth was. I had a good team of techies, but not the same level of experience in marketing, and I believe the CEO should know marketing in general.
So I got pushed into marketing. I started asking: What is marketing? Unfortunately, I didn’t get that answer in my two years of my MBA. I’m a definition geek: unless I’m happy with the definition, I keep looking. I started listening to lots of marketing podcasts. I would spend four hours a day listening to podcasts on marketing, sales, go-to-market, product management, SaaS business models: everything about how marketing works. And I finally found a definition I love: marketing is the transfer of enthusiasm. It’s the transfer of enthusiasm from you to the customer.
But we talk too much about the transfer. You can only transfer what you have. The missing piece is: how do you make sure you and your employees have the enthusiasm to transfer? You can only take out the amount of water a well has. If I think of enthusiasm for my product as water in a well, I need a regenerative system, because my team is constantly taking enthusiasm out and transferring it to customers. If enthusiasm isn’t self-generating, the well eventually dries up.
So what is needed in the company so enthusiasm is regenerative and sustainable? What I’ve realized, through many failed experiments, is clarity: clarity about the vision and mission of the company, the business strategy, your role in that strategy, and why we are different. If every person in my company doesn’t know why we’re different from the rest, what’s the point? If I can’t convince my team, how will they convince our customers?
So my number one marketing and sales “tip” would be: define your vision, mission, values, and positioning — who are you, what do you fix, who is it for, and why is it better? Everyone in the company should have the same answers. Document this and put it on a wall. That becomes the regenerative source of enthusiasm.
But let’s also talk about the transfer. How do we transfer enthusiasm? By deploying creativity in the service of commerce. That’s the difference between an artist and a marketer: an artist deploys creativity for creativity’s sake; a marketer deploys creativity in the service of commerce.
So yes, vision, mission, values, brand voice. Who are you speaking as? Are you a big brother, a small sister, a professor, a coach? Once you figure these out and communicate them to the team, it brings out enthusiasm that’s regenerative. If you put them on the wall, people see them every day. If you don’t, what happens? If I don’t come to work one day, the well is dry.
Translate everything I’ve said into one tip: do internal marketing before you do external marketing. Sell to your own employees. Sell the idea. Sell the company vision. Because if you try to do external marketing without having done that, you’ll face friction. You’ll see the team is not as motivated as you.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Punit: The biggest trend in technology that affects business leaders is how quickly you can get to a certain volume of work. Pre-generative AI, if you had to submit a two-page assignment, you could not do it in one minute, no matter how hard you tried. If you needed to submit a 10-slide presentation, there was a certain amount of effort and nuance that absolutely had to go into creating those slides. The number of slides was proportional to the amount of effort you put in. In general, every word, every slide, every page required real work.
Now, generative AI can generate as much information as you ask for. You can say, “Generate 10 slides about momos,” and it will give you generated data. It might not be relevant to the business, but it will do that.
Business leaders need to reorient themselves around how to reintroduce some proof of work or proof of having done the work. One of the things I’ve started doing is translating every sentence of a document into Nepali. ChatGPT doesn’t do that really well. You can immediately spot that the translation is bad. Whenever I ask someone to create a document, I ask for a bilingual version, both English and Nepali. I’m reintroducing friction.
This requirement makes you think: what does this word mean in Nepali? It might not be so easy, but the advantage is now they have two different mental models to think about for every sentence. We grew up learning English as a second language, so some concepts are easier to understand in Nepali while others are easier in English.
This is one example of introducing difficulty into the creation process, so it forces the creator to think. You can’t create unlimited stuff. I’m going to catch you. The unit of work is no longer a unit of productivity. It’s a big shift. Nobody’s talking about this holistically: how do we put back the constraints of proof?
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Punit: The number one quality is raising your hand. For example, I had never edited or designed content when I took on a magazine project during my college days. I just raised my hand and said, “I’ll do it.” If you want to grow your leadership qualities, start raising your hand more, even when it feels uncomfortable.
Join a cause or community. These are all examples of stepping up. It’s hard at first, but once you get into the habit, it becomes natural.
There’s also a more strategic angle to building leadership skills. Leadership, like marketing, is the transfer of enthusiasm. First, fill your own well of enthusiasm. If it’s dry, introspect: why am I doing this? Why is it important? If you haven’t convinced yourself that this is important, how will you transfer that energy to someone else?
I talked about transferring enthusiasm, but motivational speeches aren’t enough. You have to also transfer clarity. Document your reasons, your vision, mission, values, brand voice, strategy, create structure around them, and bring people into that structure. That’s the scaling part.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Punit: Fix the structure of your meetings.
Meetings are the biggest wasted opportunities, in my opinion.
For example, during a daily stand-up with the leadership team, the team was stuck in update mode, just sharing what they did. I asked: “Tell me what you learned yesterday. One thing.” It was harder than giving an update, but feedback showed everyone preferred it.
I realized this insight could be applied across the company. So I created a meeting framework:
- Step 1: What new thing did you learn yesterday?
- Step 2: What is your biggest priority for today?
- Step 3: What potential blockers are you aware of?
I wanted this structure to stick even when I’m not at the office to remind everyone, so I created a graphic and pasted it on the office wall as a reference
That’s my leadership formula: whenever I learn something new, I document it, create a mental model and structure around it, and share it with the team. Legendary founders do this too. Jeff Bezos, for example, had every Amazon meeting start with reading a memo prepared beforehand, and allowed no presentations.
Great leaders zoom out, document best practices, and make them understandable and visual. It takes effort initially, but it becomes infinitely scalable. That’s my biggest lesson in management.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Punit: First, don’t get obsessed with external messaging. Focus equally on internal messaging. The messages you send inside your organization are as important, maybe even more important, than the messages you send outside. Many leaders get hung up on external messaging without doing enough internal messaging.
Second, never resist the urge to give something. Sometimes you feel the impulse to do something nice for an employee or someone who comes to mind, and we often kill that urge, asking, “What’s in it for me?” I believe our gut has more wisdom than our brain. Trust that gut feeling, and be a giver. Being seen as a giver impacts your personal brand and well-being. For example, I gift books to people I meet for the first time whenever I can. It’s a simple habit that gives me infinite happiness.
Third, protect your time. Early on, I gave my time to everyone, but I realized my time is valuable. I’d rather spend it on activities that energize me—reading, walking, reflecting—than with people who don’t add value or motivate me to be better. Prioritize your time and use it intentionally.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Punit: There was a time when I was a shareholder in multiple companies, and all three were struggling. I met one of my mentors and started going full into complaint mode. I shared everything: what was happening in each company, how I felt stuck, like my energy and contribution were being blocked.
He said, “Punit, you could start something tomorrow, and based on the passion and way you think, you could build a fourth company on your own and make it successful.” It wasn’t traditional advice; it was a gift of confidence. Something shifted in me after that. That small nugget changed my mindset: don’t tie your identity to your current company or the money you make. Tie it to your potential and belief in your own ability to succeed. Nobody is stopping you from doing anything.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Punit: Yes. A players hire A players. B players hire C players.
I don’t like this categorization, but it’s still a mental framework that really helps me: put only the best performers in charge of hiring.
