I see Indian startup communities on Reddit getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, which is great. But I don't see any community dedicated to D2C founders. What's your view on this? Do you think there should be one?
I see Indian startup communities on Reddit getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, which is great. But I don't see any community dedicated to D2C founders. What's your view on this? Do you think there should be one?
I see Indian startup communities on Reddit getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, which is great. But I don't see any community dedicated to D2C founders. What's your view on this? Do you think there should be one?
I see Indian startup communities on Reddit getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, which is great. But I don't see any community dedicated to D2C founders. What's your view on this? Do you think there should be one?
Before starting something of my own, I used to read a lot of startup stories. They all talked about startup culture and how founders help each other. I knew a lot of it was probably PR or written to get views, but I still had hopes.
I'm building an attribution tracking platform that helps brands track what Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. It tracks influencer marketing, SEO performance, affiliate marketing, and even WhatsApp campaigns, helping brands optimise costs and make better marketing decisions.
Over the last five days, I emailed 36 founders and sent LinkedIn messages to another 14. In my emails, I pitched my product. On LinkedIn, I didn't pitch anything I was just asking a few questions. Most of them saw the message and left it on read. I didn't track my email performance because it's a new domain, and I didn't want to risk ending up in the spam folder by adding a tracking pixel.
The end result?
Zero acknowledgement.
Before starting something of my own, I used to read a lot of startup stories. They all talked about startup culture and how founders help each other. I knew a lot of it was probably PR or written to get views, but I still had hopes.
I'm building an attribution tracking platform that helps brands track what Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. It tracks influencer marketing, SEO performance, affiliate marketing, and even WhatsApp campaigns, helping brands optimise costs and make better marketing decisions.
Over the last five days, I emailed 36 founders and sent LinkedIn messages to another 14. In my emails, I pitched my product. On LinkedIn, I didn't pitch anything I was just asking a few questions. Most of them saw the message and left it on read. I didn't track my email performance because it's a new domain, and I didn't want to risk ending up in the spam folder by adding a tracking pixel.
The end result?
Zero acknowledgement.
Before starting something of my own, I used to read a lot of startup stories. They all talked about startup culture and how founders help each other. I knew a lot of it was probably PR or written to get views, but I still had hopes.
I'm building an attribution tracking platform that helps brands track what Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. It tracks influencer marketing, SEO performance, affiliate marketing, and even WhatsApp campaigns, helping brands optimise costs and make better marketing decisions.
Over the last five days, I emailed 36 founders and sent LinkedIn messages to another 14. In my emails, I pitched my product. On LinkedIn, I didn't pitch anything I was just asking a few questions. Most of them saw the message and left it on read. I didn't track my email performance because it's a new domain, and I didn't want to risk ending up in the spam folder by adding a tracking pixel.
The end result?
Zero acknowledgement.
Before starting something of my own, I used to read a lot of startup stories. They all talked about startup culture and how founders help each other. I knew a lot of it was probably PR or written to get views, but I still had hopes.
I'm building an attribution tracking platform that helps brands track what Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. It tracks influencer marketing, SEO performance, affiliate marketing, and even WhatsApp campaigns, helping brands optimise costs and make better marketing decisions.
Over the last five days, I emailed 36 founders and sent LinkedIn messages to another 14. In my emails, I pitched my product. On LinkedIn, I didn't pitch anything I was just asking a few questions. Most of them saw the message and left it on read. I didn't track my email performance because it's a new domain, and I didn't want to risk ending up in the spam folder by adding a tracking pixel.
The end result?
Zero acknowledgement.
Before starting something of my own, I used to read a lot of startup stories. They all talked about startup culture and how founders help each other. I knew a lot of it was probably PR or written to get views, but I still had hopes.
I'm building an attribution tracking platform that helps brands track what Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. It tracks influencer marketing, SEO performance, affiliate marketing, and even WhatsApp campaigns, helping brands optimise costs and make better marketing decisions.
Over the last five days, I emailed 36 founders and sent LinkedIn messages to another 14. In my emails, I pitched my product. On LinkedIn, I didn't pitch anything I was just asking a few questions. Most of them saw the message and left it on read. I didn't track my email performance because it's a new domain, and I didn't want to risk ending up in the spam folder by adding a tracking pixel.
The end result?
Zero acknowledgement.
We are building an attribution platform for non-Meta and non-Google Ads channels, and we are looking to speak with D2C founders and marketers to better understand how they're measuring channels like influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and WhatsApp campaigns.
If you run a D2C brand comment below or send me a DM.
Your inputs will really help me build a better product. Thanks in advance!
We are building an attribution platform for non-Meta and non-Google Ads channels, and we are looking to speak with D2C founders and marketers to better understand how they're measuring channels like influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and WhatsApp campaigns.
If you run a D2C brand comment below or send me a DM.
Your inputs will really help me build a better product. Thanks in advance!
I'm running influencer campaigns for free to stress-test MicroKorant with real brands. For quite some time now I have been building MicroKorant and testing it. I have tested it in a limited local environment and now want to test it at scale.
With this product, brands can see what tracked ad campaigns like Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. Your D2C brand's influencer marketing performance, sales attribution, even the WhatsApp campaigns you ran all tracked in one place. D2C Brands can build strategies like identifying which category of influencer drives actual sales versus which one just drives engagement. It legitimately calculates ROI and helps you make better decisions.
I'm running influencer campaigns for free to stress-test MicroKorant with real brands. For quite some time now I have been building MicroKorant and testing it. I have tested it in a limited local environment and now want to test it at scale.
With this product, brands can see what tracked ad campaigns like Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. Your D2C brand's influencer marketing performance, sales attribution, even the WhatsApp campaigns you ran all tracked in one place. D2C Brands can build strategies like identifying which category of influencer drives actual sales versus which one just drives engagement. It legitimately calculates ROI and helps you make better decisions.
I'm running influencer campaigns for free to stress-test MicroKorant with real brands. For quite some time now I have been building MicroKorant and testing it. I have tested it in a limited local environment and now want to test it at scale.
With this product, brands can see what tracked ad campaigns like Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. Your D2C brand's influencer marketing performance, sales attribution, even the WhatsApp campaigns you ran all tracked in one place. D2C Brands can build strategies like identifying which category of influencer drives actual sales versus which one just drives engagement. It legitimately calculates ROI and helps you make better decisions.
Please share this with your D2C friends
I'm running influencer campaigns for free to stress-test MicroKorant with real brands. For quite some time now I have been building MicroKorant and testing it. I have tested it in a limited local environment and now want to test it at scale.
With this product, brands can see what tracked ad campaigns like Google Ads and Meta Ads miss. Your D2C brand's influencer marketing performance, sales attribution, even the WhatsApp campaigns you ran all tracked in one place. D2C Brands can build strategies like identifying which category of influencer drives actual sales versus which one just drives engagement. It legitimately calculates ROI and helps you make better decisions.
Please share this with your D2C friends
I'll be honest here, I have an ulterior motive behind this post.
I'm building a product for D2C brands, especially those using influencer marketing. Before I go too deep, I want to see whether this community actually has enough D2C founders to justify the effort.
If you're running a D2C brand, drop a comment and say hi.
I'll be honest here, I have an ulterior motive behind this post.
I'm building a product for D2C brands, especially those using influencer marketing. Before I go too deep, I want to see whether this community actually has enough D2C founders to justify the effort.
If you're running a D2C brand, drop a comment and say hi.
I'll be honest here, I have an ulterior motive behind this post.
I'm building a product for D2C brands, especially those using influencer marketing. Before I go too deep, I want to see whether this community actually has enough D2C founders to justify the effort.
If you're running a D2C brand, drop a comment and say hi.
Honest question: can someone reviewing 10 skincare brands, 6 protein supplements, and 4 earphones in the same month actually be a "UGC creator" for all of them?
Nobody uses 100 products at the same time. The whole point of UGC is that a real person used the thing and talked about it. When a creator is rotating through competing products every week, that's just paid content with better lighting.
Anyway. That's not even the main problem.
The main problem is that most brands are running influencer marketing exactly like newspaper ads in 1995. Spend money, hope it works, get a reach report three weeks later, repeat.
Compare that to how Meta or Google ads work. You know your CPM before you scale. You see which creative is converting within 48 hours. You pause what doesn't work. You're making decisions in real time with real data.
Influencer marketing has never had that infrastructure. So brands default to the only signal they can read: follower count. Which is almost completely useless as a predictor of sales.
A creator with 80,000 followers and the right audience fit will consistently outsell a creator with 800,000 followers and the wrong one. But if you're not tracking at the individual creator level unique links, click data, actual conversions attributed back to the source you have no idea which is which. So you just keep paying the bigger account because it feels safer.
What actually works (from what I've seen):
Run 3 smaller creators in parallel instead of one big one. Same product, different audiences, two week window. Look at who actually converted not who got the most comments. Pull city-level data if you can an influencer pulling traffic from Tier 2 cities is a completely different business asset than one pulling from metros, and most brands never look at this breakdown. Check audience overlap before signing anyone new. In niche categories the creator ecosystem is small and you can easily be paying three people to reach 40% more people than one of them would reach alone.
After two weeks you have enough signal. Double down on what worked. Cut what didn't.
The brands doing this are treating influencer spend like a performance channel. Everyone else is funding content creation at performance marketing prices and calling it brand building.
Edit: not trying to sell anything, genuinely find this gap interesting happy to discuss in comments
Honest question: can someone reviewing 10 skincare brands, 6 protein supplements, and 4 earphones in the same month actually be a "UGC creator" for all of them?
Nobody uses 100 products at the same time. The whole point of UGC is that a real person used the thing and talked about it. When a creator is rotating through competing products every week, that's just paid content with better lighting.
Anyway. That's not even the main problem.
The main problem is that most brands are running influencer marketing exactly like newspaper ads in 1995. Spend money, hope it works, get a reach report three weeks later, repeat.
Compare that to how Meta or Google ads work. You know your CPM before you scale. You see which creative is converting within 48 hours. You pause what doesn't work. You're making decisions in real time with real data.
Influencer marketing has never had that infrastructure. So brands default to the only signal they can read: follower count. Which is almost completely useless as a predictor of sales.
A creator with 80,000 followers and the right audience fit will consistently outsell a creator with 800,000 followers and the wrong one. But if you're not tracking at the individual creator level unique links, click data, actual conversions attributed back to the source you have no idea which is which. So you just keep paying the bigger account because it feels safer.
What actually works (from what I've seen):
Run 3 smaller creators in parallel instead of one big one. Same product, different audiences, two week window. Look at who actually converted not who got the most comments. Pull city-level data if you can an influencer pulling traffic from Tier 2 cities is a completely different business asset than one pulling from metros, and most brands never look at this breakdown. Check audience overlap before signing anyone new. In niche categories the creator ecosystem is small and you can easily be paying three people to reach 40% more people than one of them would reach alone.
After two weeks you have enough signal. Double down on what worked. Cut what didn't.
The brands doing this are treating influencer spend like a performance channel. Everyone else is funding content creation at performance marketing prices and calling it brand building.
Edit: not trying to sell anything, genuinely find this gap interesting happy to discuss in comments
