Before Sindhu Biswal built Buzzlab into a performance marketing powerhouse serving brands like Razorpay, Wakefit, and Swish, he spent 11 hours a day composing music and helping local bands promote themselves online. That early crash course in content creation, audience psychology, and scrappy growth tactics became the foundation for something bigger: a content-led growth agency that doesn't just run ads, it builds entire growth pipelines from scratch.

From Music Producing Dreams to Marketing Reality

Sindhu's journey reads like a series of pivots that accidentally formed a straight line. "At 14, I dreamt to be an astronaut but figured out I didn't have superpowers to nail mathematics," he shares in our Velocity conversation. That realization led him to a music production house at 18, where he learned his first lesson in marketing: distribution matters more than creation.

"I didn't go to college (mostly) and spent 11 hrs of my day at a music production house learning how music is produced," Sindhu explains. But more importantly, he started helping musicians and bands promote their work online, long before growth hacking was a buzzword. This hands-on experience with organic reach, audience targeting, and content virality laid the groundwork for everything that followed.

By 2015, he'd co-founded Dogether, a Facebook Start program-selected startup. By 2018, he was at Paytm Insider, scaling events through content and community. And by 2019, he was helping FilterCopy and Pocket Aces, two of India's largest digital media channels and refine their growth models.

The Unplanned Path to Performance Marketing

Most founders tell polished origin stories. Sindhu's is refreshingly chaotic. "I think I'm an outcome of a lot of random serendipity. There has been no plan," he explains. "My background is technically I was supposed to do music. So I was working in a music record label when I was doing my BBA."

While his peers attended lectures, Sindhu was mixing, mastering, and learning the technical aspects of sound engineering from 9 AM to 8 PM. But the real education wasn't in music production, it was in client management, project delivery, and meeting timelines. "I had observed how a client is handled, how a project comes, how a project is delivered, how timelines are met," he recalls.

This operational foundation proved more valuable than any marketing course. When his co-founder from Ogilvy Dubai approached him about building a decentralized social networking app called Dogether, Sindhu became CMO, despite having zero formal digital marketing training. They scaled to 1.5 million monthly active users but couldn't crack revenue. The app pivoted, issues emerged, and Sindhu moved on.

Then Paytm Insider hired him. "I had no idea about digital marketing," Sindhu admits. "I was running Meta ads, 50,000 rupees Meta ads. That's it." But his boss became his mentor, teaching him the foundational principles that transformed him from product marketer to full-stack growth practitioner.

The FilterCopy Education: Growth Meets Content

Sindhu's breakthrough came at Pocket Aces, where he led growth for FilterCopy, Dice Media, and Gobble. The role didn't exist when he joined, it was created over a cup of coffee. "The founder said, okay, there is a concept in the US called growth. And I want you to take your product principles, entrepreneurship principles, and performance principles, apply it on content."

This experimental hire became the foundation for everything Buzzlab does today. Sindhu wasn't just running performance ads for web series, he was analyzing content data, testing thumbnails, studying retention graphs, and building frameworks that didn't exist in the Indian market. "There was no one in my peer group doing the same thing as well," he notes. "There was no course available."

The work made him a known name in creator and production circles, but it also typecasted him. "A lot of my PR was happening around Sindhu is the media marketer, and I hate to be typecasted," he explains. "I just want to be able to be the best marketer who can sell anything. I just don't want to be a SaaS marketer or this marketer, that marketer."

So he moved to Bangalore, joined YC-backed Betterhalf as one of the first growth marketers, then went to Jupiter, a fintech app. After that came consulting work across 40+ companies in diverse categories, from astrology to Hong Kong-based SaaS to AI agent companies. He also advised Raj Shamani's Finance With Sharan.

The Content Analytics Thesis That Built Buzzlab

After years of context-switching across industries, Sindhu identified a fundamental shift happening in performance marketing. "The world is moving towards heavy predictive content analytics, content marketing-driven playbooks," he observes. "And this goes back to the very basic simple principle of marketing, right? Marketing was always content and storytelling. Tools are just a way to do that."

When he founded Buzzlab in 2024 with co-founder Sushant Sadamate (after 127 coffees, as their website notes), the vision was clear: "We control the entire pipeline of growth. Creative analytics + video production of ads + influencer marketing + retention marketing + performance marketing, to generally move marketing."

This isn't a traditional agency model. Buzzlab operates like a media house that happens to do performance marketing. They've built an in-house creative studio, launched a Creative Data Science Hub, and assembled a 15-person team that blends data scientists with content creators. The result is what Sindhu calls "engineered content", creative work informed by predictive analytics rather than subjective opinions.

"Content teams and growth teams rarely speak the same language. That's why content often feels too subjective," the Buzzlab website explains. The solution? Marry data science, AI, and storytelling into frameworks that move metrics across the entire marketing funnel.

Why Creative Analytics Beats Campaign Analytics

The industry insight that drives Buzzlab's model is simple but profound: creative fatigue, not audience fatigue, is killing performance campaigns.

"Performance Marketing has moved from campaign analytics to creative analytics," Sindhu emphasizes. Yet most agencies still obsess over audience segmentation, bidding strategies, and funnel optimization while treating creative as a constant. Buzzlab flips this, they treat creative as the variable and optimize everything else around it.

This approach manifests in several ways. First, they produce content at media house scale, enabling rapid testing cycles. Second, they use influencer marketing as a creative testing lab, what works with influencers informs paid creative. Third, they've integrated retention marketing and performance marketing into a single feedback loop, so learnings compound rather than staying siloed.

The portfolio proves the model works. Beyond the flagship clients mentioned earlier, Buzzlab has worked with Super.money, Fyers (scaling performance marketing video production), Ember, Totem, and Acko (where they built a content IP featuring R. Madhavan). In November 2024, they launched their own media house. By January 2025, they'd brought on Pharmeasy to build a full-funnel growth marketing playbook.

The Underrated Metrics and Skills That Drive Growth

Ask Sindhu about underrated metrics and he doesn't hesitate: "Cost per share. I have been saying this metric since 2018. It is still relevant. I don't think it will go out of the way for the next 10 years."

While most marketers obsess over CPM, CPC, and CPA, cost per share measures something more fundamental, whether your content is worth spreading. It's a proxy for creative resonance that cuts through platform algorithm changes and audience shifts.

On underrated skills? "Script writing. Anyone who reads Seth Godin or Philip Kotler, they will always say all marketers need to be good writers, and that still doesn't change." In an era of AI-generated content and automation, the ability to craft compelling narratives remains the ultimate performance driver.

Sindhu also shares a framework he recently learned from a strategist who worked with MrBeast, Alex Hormozi, and Gary Vaynerchuk: the difference between contradicting views and contrarian views. "Always have a contrarian view as a hook and your videos will work beautifully well," he explains.

The example he gives is instructive: Instead of starting with "Hi, my name is Surendar. I'm the founder of Hockey AI. We do this, this, this," which wastes the critical first six seconds, start with a contrarian hook: "Performance marketers and brand marketers do not go well with each other. They are the worst enemies of each other. That's why we have built Hockey.AI. I'm Surendar, founder CEO."

The first approach assumes the audience cares about you. The second gives them a reason to keep watching.

What's Next for Content-Led Growth

As performance marketing costs continue rising, CPCs have increased 30-100% across key industries according to recent reports, the brands that win will be those that crack creative production at scale. Not more media spend. Not better audience targeting. Better creative, tested faster, iterated smarter.

Buzzlab's model points toward where the industry is heading: agencies that don't just buy media but build entire content engines. Teams that blend data science with storytelling. Systems where creative, influencer marketing, and performance campaigns operate as one integrated machine rather than separate departments with different KPIs.

"The very basic simple principle of marketing, marketing was always content and storytelling," Sindhu reminds us. "Tools are just a way to do that." In a landscape where every platform, every algorithm, and every targeting capability is accessible to everyone, creative becomes the only sustainable competitive advantage.

And creative at scale, informed by predictive analytics, built through integrated pipelines? That's what separates agencies that survive from those that define the next decade of performance marketing.

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