Case Study

Scaling a creator ecosystem, one bottleneck at a time.

Creator Acquisition • Marketplace Design • Growth Systems • Product Strategy

A bit of Context

Katha Ads is a creator-led advertising platform built around a simple idea: people trust people more than they trust ads.

Over the years, the company evolved from a small startup experimenting with user-led distribution into a platform helping brands reach audiences through creators and communities across South India.

I joined as part of the core team and spent the next few years working across creator growth, operations, product strategy and marketplace systems. Most of my work involved identifying bottlenecks, understanding why they existed and helping build systems to solve them.

Joining Early

When I joined Katha, we were still figuring things out.

The company had conviction around the problem we wanted to solve, but many of the systems, processes and playbooks had yet to be built. Like most startups, priorities changed frequently and new challenges appeared every week.

That environment taught me how businesses scale, how decisions get made under uncertainty and how important it is to stay focused on the underlying problem rather than becoming attached to a particular solution.

Cold Start Problem: Just Enough Supply

Like most marketplaces, we faced a classic cold start problem.

Without consistent brand collaborations, good creators had little reason to join the platform. Without a creator base, brands had little reason to run campaigns through us.

The challenge was made harder by the fact that we were completely bootstrapped. Every rupee spent on creator acquisition ultimately came from campaign revenue. There was no venture funding available to subsidise growth.

We decided to optimise for supply first. Rather than thinking about creators as influencers, we initially thought about them as supply. We built state-level revenue forecasts, estimated future campaign demand and worked backwards to calculate the creator base required to fulfil it.

At this stage, quantity mattered more than quality. The objective was not to build the perfect creator network. The objective was to ensure that when demand arrived, supply already existed.

Building Credibility

One unusual thing about Katha in its early days was that we barely had a social media presence.

For a company operating in the creator economy, that was a problem.

We approached this hire differently from most of our previous hires. Instead of looking for generalists we could train, we looked for specialists who had already solved similar problems and came with proven processes and supporting infrastructure.

The bet paid off. Within a relatively short period, our social media presence became one of our strongest channels for creator acquisition, community building and brand credibility.

Beyond Google Sheets

As the creator ecosystem grew, operational complexity grew with it.

Much of our campaign management still lived inside spreadsheets. Creator tracking, campaign status, fulfilment monitoring and operational prioritisation depended heavily on manual effort and institutional knowledge.

Working closely with product and engineering, we built internal systems that tracked creator activity and campaign progress across the entire lifecycle. Information that previously lived inside people's heads became visible to everyone.

Creator reliability, campaign fulfilment probability, operational priorities and risk indicators were now surfaced directly through dashboards.

The goal was simple: operational decisions should not depend on who happened to be available that day.

Learning What Quality Means

Once supply was no longer the primary constraint, the focus shifted.

The next challenge was improving campaign quality.

We moved away from automatically matching creators to campaigns and gave brands greater control over creator selection.

We also allowed creators to quote their own prices instead of relying entirely on platform-generated pricing.

These changes created a richer feedback loop. For the first time, we could clearly see which creators brands preferred, what attributes influenced selection and how pricing affected outcomes.

What Katha Taught Me

Funnel Thinking Matters

Most marketplace problems eventually become funnel problems. Small improvements at each stage compound quickly.

Visibility Is An Incentive

Money matters, but visibility matters too. Leaderboards, recognition, social proof and community status often influenced behaviour as much as financial rewards.

Data Needs Context

Some of the most valuable discussions we had were not about whether a number had gone up or down. They were about whether we were measuring the right thing in the first place.

Every System Creates New Bottlenecks

Growth is a process of continuously discovering constraints. As soon as one bottleneck is solved, another appears.

Looking Back

When I joined Katha, I expected to spend most of my time working on products.

Instead, I found myself learning about marketplaces, incentives, growth systems, operations and human behaviour.

Technology was important, but many of the hardest problems had very little to do with technology itself. They were problems of trust, incentives, behaviour and scale.