Early

Who are we? This is who we are

There in a few, Mumbai!🏠 @TalentedAgency @TheNewThing_in @early_partners @MktgStack

Some of the most interesting storytelling in the country is happening on phones right now, and it deserves a bigger screen. @indiascrollfest is an event co-created by @TalentedAgency's new IP division (more on this in a few weeks) & our Grid agency @MktgStack

Behind glass buildings, earnings calls, and business headlines are the people, hunger and grit that shape every business to be unique. We told this story - as one of their kind. Work for @gocashfree shaped with At Odds Media, Sanjna Krishnan & Rohan Shetty aka Shor Music

Made with pride at @TalentedAgency 🇮🇳

16:9 is dead. 9:16 deserves a stage. Introducing Indian Scroll Festival - India's first vertical film festival. A celebration of the short-form content that took over our feeds, our culture, and our attention spans. more at indianscrollfestival.com

Plum's Humanise asked me to write about the real parts of the ceo job @TalentedAgency. So I wrote about.. · Making decisions with incomplete information and calling it conviction.. · Saying no to someone and then revisiting it mentally 17 times because it didn’t match your own people-pleaser personality... · Spotting potential in a colleague and doing less about it than you’d like.. · Slowly realising your attention is shaping everything, including the wrong things.. · Attempting to stay calm while running internal simulations of everything going wrong..

1. THIS is how buying domains should be celebrated. 2. THIS is how websites should be announced. Indianscrollfestival.com

Okay Bangalore Stop doomscrolling alone and come do it with us 👀👀 We're renting out a movie theatre to put short form creators where they belong - on the big screen I'm not saying this is like the Oscars, but you can expect a red carpet, the paparazzi, the Indian version of @ConanOBrien and food that's better than Wolfgang puck

We’re making our most important hire this year at @TalentedAgency. Someone to scout, vet, and build a living network of the best creative consultants in the country. If you know the ecosystem better than LinkedIn does, tell us at join@talented.team JD: talentedagency.notion.site/The-most-impor…

one of the things that i struggle with as a founder who runs a company named 'early' is that everyone - partners, clients, team - wakes up later than me :( .

A man walks into a bar in Brussels and is handed a menu of over 2,000 beers. He's pleasantly surprised and proceeds to taste close to 35 beers over the weekend. This variety of choice works out very well for the man, but who wants to deal with filtering, comparing and deciding between hundreds of toilet covers or staplers or heck even white tshirts. Those are the kind of choices most of us have to make in a day. And so we don’t. We don’t really do the work. We either buy cheapest or we buy some brand we’ve even vaguely heard of or we use that other timeless hack - phone a friend and buy whatever they tell us to. OR we postpone the decision and just don’t buy and live with whatever we have. For all the promise and possibilities of AI, Shopping UX is stuck in the past. Every marketplace is the same with a ‘chat’ layer simply added to the experience (I’m looking at you, Amazon’s Rufus AI). Early experiments (Myntra gpt and Shopify’s own shop.app) were just wrappers and didn’t integrate well with the existing CMS which means it was either a search short cut or long ass gpt advice without the products to match it. An AI based shopping UX requires a complete systemic overhaul right from how data is organised to how people will interact with it. Is it worth doing? Well, Cart drop off rates haven’t changed much (still around a whopping 70%) and it’s extremely hard for a legacy player to do this. So there’s a big opportunity if you’re a new marketplace or brand with a large number of skus, and either some complexity of choice (beauty) or at the other end - large amount of choice in a commodity category (grocery) Sometime in 2001, there used to be a website called Just buy this one. Maybe too ahead of its time but sounds just about right for the age of AI now. Looks really fun too :)

or me, sugar isn’t the enemy, bad fat is. I’ve had cholesterol issues since I turned 40. I'd like to have convenience food that has protein without the artery clogging fat and tastes half decent. And I'd LOVE to have low fat desserts. Roughly 30% of Indians have high cholesterol. Sounds like a massive market but the actual number of people who are motivated to change is much smaller. In our consumer work with an Indian mithai brand at @early_partners we’ve seen this play out repeatedly. People get diagnosed, they say ok i'll do something about it, so they pop a pill and go right back to eating sweets. (and Zero sugar is not the answer). Thats why Varun Bahl maybe right when he responded to MYPB's peanut powder pitch on Shark tank by saying that the market maybe too small (as compared to peanut butter). If you define the market as “people with cholesterol,” it’s huge. If you define it as “people who are aware and actively looking for alternatives” it suddenly shrinks. Could 'bad fat' become the next wave in healthy convenience food? (and i don't mean Keto) I'm really hoping.

Twelve years of building, stumbling, learning, and growing — all leading to this moment. 💚 Watching our first brand ad together wasn’t just emotional; it was grounding. A reminder of how far we’ve come… and how far we’re ready to go. ✨ Here are a few moments from that day. #Pickyourtrail #SooperHitHoliday @HariPyt

Just look at those detailssss 🥹 LOVE the production design & art direction in @TalentedAgency's newest "Tailormade holidays" campaign for Pick Your Trail.

For a family, a holiday is about fitting everyone’s wishes into a plan that feels right for all. Our next film shows how @Pickyourtrail brings those holiday dreams together through complete customisation. Presenting our second Sooper Hit Holiday film, a holiday made for all. #Pickyourtrail #SooperHitHoliday @HariPyt

Building @TalentedAgency taught me this: calm is a real strategic edge. Not soft, not slow. Calm. It’s an operating system. Margin as stability, clarity over chaos, urgency used sparingly.. all core tenets of a calm company. Why I think that the services companies that endure will be calm: substack.com/home/post/p-17…

For a couple, a wedding outfit isn’t the only thing that deserves to be made just for them. And our new brand ad shows why their first holiday should feel just as tailor-made. Presenting @Pickyourtrail 's first-ever Sooper Hit Holiday film—customisation in a world you wouldn’t expect. #Pickyourtrail #SooperHitHoliday

My way of managing stress also includes writing or perhaps over sharing about how I manage it. Wrote about my return to regular therapy here linkedin.com/posts/meghanab…

Note to all founders (including me) : You're human. You're not made of teflon. NOBODY is managing stress well. There's no super human champion type out there running a successful company and also in amazing mental health. NOONE. Seek the help you need. Do it for you and your biz.

If you picked up The Hindu this morning, you’ll already have seen its new brand platform: Written by Journalists. Very proudly, a @TalentedAgency & @PGAditiya original. And a gentle reminder of what the press, at its best, ought always to be. @the_hindu has done one thing for 147 years: take its readers seriously. For a craft built on trust... rigour, responsibility and respect for the reader become the baseline. And in a way, this campaign is simply the truth, spoken plainly. It also delightfully happens to be the very line that won Talented the pitch last year, and over the months since, as the conversation around news has become even louder, it feels sharper and more urgent than ever. With everything going on around the world, it might even feel slightly… defiant? Over the next few weeks, you’ll see this platform come alive through films, outdoor, and more. But it began this morning, with a single truth. The Hindu. Written by Journalists.