I'll say something that sounds wrong at first.
Distribution is 10 times more valuable than your product.
A doctor with 200,000 followers has 300 patients walking in every day. He had to hire more doctors because he couldn't see them all himself. Same clinic.
Same skills.
Completely different outcome — just because more people know him. For D2C brands this should be uncomfortable to read. You can have the best formulation, the best packaging, the cleanest ingredients. But if nobody knows you exist — none of that matters.
The brands that figured this out early in India didn't just build products. They built audiences first. Then the product had somewhere to land. Creator marketing is not a campaign. It's how you build distribution.
Whatever Zomato did is does not matter the money probably wasted forthem to bring LimeLight on everyone.
but do you think will you gonna click a picture and share in social media?! if it's a clear cut probably not so you have not think about it.
I don't know why when someone says that you can't do it my internal voice is that you will definitely do it but somewhere I have to keep quiet because it's hurts
4 years ago I read a line from Naval Ravikant.
"Learn to build. Learn to sell. If you can do both, you're unstoppable."
Noted it, thought "yeah, makes sense," moved on.
1/n
7/ There's also something about founders doing their own sales that nobody mentions.
When a call goes badly, you feel it differently than a sales hire would. You go back and actually change something — the positioning, the onboarding, how you explain the product.
3/ No training. No techniques. No real idea what a sales pipeline was supposed to look like beyond a spreadsheet.
Just me on calls with founders who had actual budgets and, reasonably, a lot of skepticism about an agency they'd never heard of.
I was not good at it.