Building creator marketing before it had a name

smallcase, 2019 to 2022

The first three creators said yes. In December 2019 the first video went live, from Rachana Ranade, and the app went down under the traffic. I was given fifteen days off because there was nothing to do until the infrastructure caught up. That was the proof, and it arrived in a form nobody had modelled.

Six months in I was running thirty creators alone, end to end: scouting, scripts, negotiation, invoicing, payments. By March 2021 it was a team of four managing sixty to seventy creators and accounting for 30 to 35% of directly attributable signups. I was also assistant brand manager on smallcase's first company-wide brand campaign, at a budget crossing ₹15Cr. That's where I actually learned PR, performance marketing, ad production and market research.

I was included in the smallcase Ownership Program, the youngest person to receive it.

Punch, 2024 to 2026

The second time around, the same problem at a different scale and inside real regulatory constraints: an eight-figure rupee creator-acquisition program at a discount brokerage, three product integrations shipped natively into the trading app, not sold as ad reads, and a referral program rebuilt on a behavioural read. The numbers, the deal structures and the constraints each one was built inside are on the Punch page.

The thing I understand about this channel that most growth people don't is that creators are not media inventory. They're small businesses with their own risk, and the deals that work are the ones where their upside is real.

What six years in this channel actually taught me

• Product integrations beat ad reads, consistently. Across the mix I ran, the integrations were far and away the most effective format, and they're also the hardest to sell internally because they need engineering time, not budget.
• Price is a catalyst, not a driver. I watched Punch cut brokerage from ₹20 to ₹1 and I watched trading frequency rise roughly 2.5x with no real effect on whether traders made money. Expert traders don't switch platforms on price alone unless they already like the product. That call was not mine, I was not in the room for it, and it is one of the more expensive things I've learned by watching.
• Most of the industry still can't attribute this channel honestly. Reconstructing Punch's own creator data across sixteen spreadsheets surfaced nine contradictions in numbers that were being treated as settled.