Gautam Madhavan, CEO & founder of Mad Influence, on building the largest creator economy in the world

The Indian Startup Show

Content is king! Today my guest is Gautam Madhavan CEO & founder of Mad Influence and influencer management agency. They do more than just connect creators and brands. They do digital marketing, social media management, content authoring, and providing consulting services to businesses.

They are trying to create the biggest content companies in the world. In this episode he talks about how he got this off the ground by seeing the shift from Blogging to Vlogging 2017/18, realising the power of video and was laser focussed on tiktok in the early days before it was popular. He explains why you shouldn't plan too much when starting up.

Talks about dealing with uncertainty in the early days and hiring strategies. Advice for all you budding social media creators (Don’t do it for the $$). Building an AI platform for content creators and why you shouldn't worry about the algorithms. Thoughts on Twitter for content creators.

Talks about who are the upcoming social media influencers in India. His favourite content creators. Talks about research, conversation rates and analytics. Talks about how they Influence the influencers and why you cannot learn this at University, it’s all about building relationships. And he gives great advice on building relationships (be transparent) and why they don’t poach clients/creators/staff.

He talks about what he looks for when choosing social media influencers (it's not just the numbers) And finally we talk about his favourite campaign promoting the movie Bachchhan Paandey which got a billion organic views which involved kidnapping a bunch of influencers on a train.

In this conversation we also talk about:

• Running India’s & Asia’s biggest content creator festival in Goa (2023)
• First mover advantage.
• Being down to earth and humble.
• Short video culture.
• What excites him most about building this company.
• Why he prefers content creators instead of social media influencers.
• Getting support from Mum and Dad.
• Bootstrapping
• hiring advice

And much more

Links

https://www.madinfluence.com/home

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music by Punch Deck.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7kdduxAVaFnbHJyNxl7FWV

Hosted And Produced by Neil Patel

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Music by Punch Deck.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7kdduxAVaFnbHJyNxl7FWV