Welcome to The CMO Journal

In 2011, I was fresh out of business school when I was hired by a tall man who said he’d pay me to write. This was Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of a two-room startup in Chennai called Freshdesk. As the company grew, so did I, leading content marketing teams for Freshdesk and then for our ITSM product Freshservice.

In 2016, I was on a break, when Paras Chopra, CEO of Wingify, asked me to come lead marketing for their new product. I learnt everything that I needed to from scratch, built a zero-attrition, world-class marketing team, and grew a product to an ARR of $3 million in 18 months.

In 2018, I went back to Freshworks to do something that Indian startups have never done: Run international branding campaigns. I led the team, was part of the Failsforce campaign, and helped put together the Freshworks customer conference, Refresh.

In 2020, I joined Accel, the global VC firm that first took a bet on Freshworks, where I was the Marketer-in-Residence. I had the opportunity to work on a global brand, a bunch of amazing people and with the next generation of Indian startups.

In 2022, some of my old Freshworks colleagues started Atomicwork with Vijay Rayapati, another former founder from the ecosystem. I was only too happy to get on the startup train again with the gang. Startup marketing is what I know to do, and I’m delighted to be back in the game.

Why write this, though?

Because of two things: One, there is a lack of detailed reading on software product marketing and branding in India by practitioners, which is the gap I hope to bridge, and two, writing is how I have always learned things. From the research and conversations that I will do and have to write this newsletter, I hope to become a better marketer.

Other places you can find me

You can find me on Twitter, and this is me on LinkedIn. My blog is here.