Most creators think their content is their product. It's not.

Their content is their top-of-funnel. The product is what happens after someone watches, follows, and trusts, but never gets a reason to pay. Thousands of creators in India sit on engaged audiences, solid expertise, and genuine demand, yet barely monetize beyond inconsistent brand deals. The gap isn't talent. It's infrastructure.

Anuj Niranjan, VP of Creator Growth at Topmate, has built a sales engine that bridges exactly this gap. In our debut episode of Velocity: Performance Marketing Podcast by Hawky, he revealed how Topmate's BOFU-first approach is turning creators, many of them part-timers, into consistent earners pulling ₹4 lakhs or more every single month.

Meet Anuj Niranjan: From Citibank Risk Models to Creator Revenue Engines

Anuj's path to leading creator growth at Topmate is anything but linear. An IIT Bombay engineer turned statistician, former Citibank risk analyst, cafe founder in Manali, and active F&O trader, he's someone who's built businesses, sold high-ticket cohorts himself, and personally cold-called 200 webinar attendees to land his first five paying students at ₹50,000 each.

That hands-on experience is exactly what makes his current role potent. At Topmate, Anuj doesn't just oversee growth strategy, he architected the entire sales-assisted monetization model from scratch. His LinkedIn tagline says it plainly: Creator Growth, Sales, BOFU, Problem Solving. No fluff. Just conversion.

The Real Creator Economy Problem: Top of Funnel Is Not the Bottleneck

Here's the insight most people miss about the creator economy in India. Follower count does not equal revenue.

"Creators who are more connected to their audience, who have a high trust factor, they make more money," Anuj explains. "Versus creators who just have a lot of followers. With followers, you can get brand deals. But that space is too clumsy. Your negotiating power is low."

The creators Topmate works with don't have a distribution problem. They have a conversion problem. They run webinars, attract hundreds of attendees, and then... hope people buy. No structured follow-up. No objection handling. No sales process. Just prayer and a payment link.

Topmate's intervention is surgical: own the bottom of the funnel so creators can focus entirely on their craft.

The Sales Engine: How a 25-Person Team Generates ₹4L+/Month Per Creator

Anuj's model is deceptively simple but operationally intense. Topmate places trained sales teams, mostly freshers, alongside creators to handle every post-webinar interaction: lead nurturing, objection resolution, and closing.

The results speak clearly. "A hundred percent of creators on my sales project make more than four lakhs a month," Anuj states. "But if this engine was not there, probably 50% of them might be making less than one lakh."

That's not a marginal improvement. That's a 4x revenue unlock for creators who already had the audience and the expertise but lacked the sales infrastructure to convert interest into income.

The validation journey was methodical: one creator and one salesperson first, nine sales in 12 days. Then five creators with seven management trainees hitting ₹15 lakhs. Then ten creators. Each iteration stress-tested whether the model could scale beyond a single high-performing creator.

Pull, Don't Push: A Sales Philosophy Built on Honesty

What makes Topmate's sales approach unusual in the cohort-selling space is Anuj's refusal to use pressure tactics. His framework is rooted in a single principle: create pull, never push.

When a prospect asks, "Why should I pay ₹50,000 when I can learn this on YouTube for free?", most sales teams would pitch harder. Anuj's team flips it.

"I ask them: how many courses have you actually completed on YouTube in the last four years? Usually the answer is zero," Anuj shares. "The problem is not content. The problem is that you will keep procrastinating. We are taking ₹50,000 because we refine it for you and keep you accountable. YouTube does not keep you accountable."

This isn't a gimmick. It's a trust-building mechanism that results in higher satisfaction, lower refund rates, and organic referrals that feed the next cohort. When a buyer comes in through pull rather than push, they don't second-guess the purchase.

Hiring at Startup Speed: From 30-Day Cycles to 3-Day Onboarding

Scaling the sales team is arguably the hardest operational challenge in Topmate's model. Traditional hiring through college TPOs takes a month. Anuj's projects move in weeks.

His solution: a WhatsApp hiring community of 450+ candidates, a Google Form with 1,600 entries, and a streamlined process, resume, a one-minute video clip, a call, an interview, and onboarding within three to four days. No campus visits. No week-long pipelines.

The culture layer matters too. Freshers from tier-2 colleges often arrive skeptical, burned by prior employers who didn't pay salaries or respect their time. Topmate counters that with radical transparency: webinars before onboarding that explain exactly what the role involves, what the culture looks like, and what's expected. No bait-and-switch.

What AI Means for Creators, and What It Doesn't

With 25 salespeople making roughly 100 calls each per day, Topmate now sits on a goldmine of 2,000 daily call data points across multiple creator categories and objection types. They're building an AI sales engine trained on this data to automate objection handling and lead nurturing across WhatsApp, email, LinkedIn, and Telegram.

But Anuj is clear-eyed about AI's limits in the creator space. "AI can create content for you, but the idea has to be yours. User empathy has to be yours," he says. "If you have been with your audience, your mind has been trained for your entire generation. You will have a better model than an AI when it comes to understanding your users."

For performance marketers, this is a critical distinction. AI excels at scaling distribution and optimizing conversion workflows, exactly the kind of work Hawky.ai does for ad creatives. But the creative insight, the audience intuition, the trust, those remain irreplaceably human. The winning formula isn't AI or human. It's AI infrastructure wrapped around human expertise.

Key Takeaways

• Followers ≠ Revenue. The creators earning the most aren't the ones with the biggest audiences, they're the ones with the deepest trust and a sales system to convert it.

• Own the bottom of the funnel. Topmate's entire value proposition is solving the part creators don't want to do: structured selling, objection handling, and closing.

• Pull beats push, always. Probing prospects with honest questions converts better than pitching features. Let the buyer convince themselves.

• Hire for hunger, not experience. Freshers with drive outperform seasoned hires with baggage, if you give them transparency, ownership, and speed.

• AI amplifies, it doesn't replace. Use AI to scale sales ops and content distribution. Keep the creative intuition and audience empathy human.