Garima Kaushal 🐶

Never underestimate how much time and effort you can waste by trying to automate a process you do not understand manually.

So important to have something in your life that you suck at it - while seeing others around you do it brilliantly. Fills me up with hope and inspiration and tells me it’s possible to do it I just have to work hard at it and I’ll get there one day, too. 💪🏽

Ran a 10k at night last weekend (mujhe saans aur neend donon nai aayi)

I’ve been spending time thinking about content and how to scale it. There are more tools available now than ever before. Writing, editing, repurposing, distribution. Most parts of the process can be sped up. On paper, this should make everything easier. In reality, the bottleneck hasn’t changed much. What still matters most is judgment. Knowing what is worth saying, what to leave out, and what will actually resonate. Knowing when something feels genuine and when it doesn’t. That part is difficult to systemize. It is also difficult to hire for. So even with better tools, the pace at which good content gets created does not increase as much as expected. Still trying to understand what scaling content really looks like in this environment.

Check out what happens when I like this short about my dog on YouTube 😆

just a girl and her laptop, scheduling marketing campaigns for the month in a coffee shop

In the first couple of years at sploot, most of our discussions lived on paper. Notes in notebooks, rough diagrams, a lot of arrows and underlining. At the time, everything felt clear. Looking back at those pages now, it’s hard to make sense of them. We still use pen and paper quite a bit. In 1:1s and high-level conversations, it’s the easiest way to think through something. You can sketch ideas quickly and change direction without friction. But that only works in the moment. For product decisions and anything that needs to scale across the team, we’ve had to move to structured documentation. Writing things down properly has changed how we work. It forces clarity. It helps people align without needing to be in the same room. It also makes decisions easier to revisit later. The shift has been gradual, but noticeable. Pen and paper is still where most ideas begin. Documentation is what allows them to be carried forward. In pictures: some of the whiteboard / paper scribbles I took photos of over the years that I only vaguely remember context for now 😬

@jspujji UGC

I recently spoke to a Head of Growth at a brand doing $50M+ in revenue. He told me +50% of their winning ads were made by people they've never met. No agency or contractor. One marketing assistant is finding, briefing, & scaling these creator programs through a system most brands haven’t scaled yet. Today, their ROAS and % of new web visitors have never been higher. So I asked him to break down the operational blueprint behind how they run it: He sent me this guide with everything brands need to know about the UGC system: — How Meta and TikTok's new algo rewards embedded creative signals — The exact org design behind high-growth UGC programs — The specific hooks and landers that convert Reply with "UGC" and I'll DM you the guide.

We’re hiring 2 social media + content interns at Sploot! You’ll help us build content people genuinely enjoy and keep coming back to. A few things that matter to us: - You’re disciplined enough to work in a hybrid setup (freedom comes with ownership) - You ideally have a dog at home (you’ll just get what we’re building) - You use AI + Canva + Edits / VN like second nature - You genuinely enjoy creating content (having ~1000+ followers on your personal Instagram is a strong signal) Baaki sab, we’ll teach you :) This will be fast-paced, with a lot of experimenting and figuring things out as we go. If you’ve been looking for a place where you can actually learn by doing, this might be a good fit. Drop me an email on hiring@sploot.tech with your resume, why you'd like to join, and your socials. Let's talk.

back to my wfh office (my neighbourhood @BlueTokaiCoffee)

There’s a number that bothers me more than CAC or conversion rates. The gap between orders placed and orders fulfilled. Every time I see it, it stings a little. It’s not just lost revenue. It’s marketing money spent, team effort put in, and then a broken experience at the end of it. What makes it harder is that both sides of the business are right. Operations needs more demand. Volume helps stabilize supply and makes the system more predictable. Marketing needs better fulfilment. It’s difficult to scale spend when the experience isn’t consistent. So you end up going back and forth. More orders will help fix it. Better fulfilment will help fix it. Both are true. Neither is sufficient on its own. What this actually needs is coordination. Marketing has to push enough to create pressure. Operations has to keep up enough to protect trust. If either side overdoes it, things start to slip. Still working through what the right balance looks like.

Badminton with the Sploot sports gang! 🏸

Things I'm excited about in the next few months: 1. Scaling our organic content engine across Instagram, YouTube, and blogs. Long time coming, but it’s finally starting to take shape in a more structured way. 2. Revamping our web experience. It’s been feeling fragmented for a while, and that usually shows up in subtle ways for users. 3. Moving towards faster resolutions for customers in no-fulfilment cases. Right now, there are still a few hoops to jump through, and that friction adds up.

Music has been doing a lot of heavy lifting in my life for years. I was studying for board exams with music playing in my ears. It used to drive my parents a little crazy, but it somehow worked. That habit just stayed. Now, one of the first decisions I make every workday is what the background music is going to be. Mellow techno or tech house when I need to focus. Writing, product thinking, anything that requires me to disappear into my own head for a bit. Alternative indie or indie pop when the day feels lighter. Inbox, reports, work that is a little more social. It sounds like a small thing, but it genuinely changes how the day feels. So when we started working together in an office, it felt obvious to me that there would be music playing. That turned out to be less obvious than I expected. Some people need silence. Some people get distracted by lyrics. Some people have very strong opinions on what should or should not be played at 11am. At some point, you realise you are not just building things, you are also negotiating playlist rights and acceptable volume levels. There is also this strange voice that shows up sometimes and wonders whether work is serious enough if it feels this enjoyable. I am still trying to unlearn that one. Because when I look back, some of my most productive days have also been the ones that felt the easiest to get through. We probably do not talk enough about these small, very human ways of regulating ourselves while still doing hard things. Reminder to self: seek joy daily, because it makes the hard stuff easy. Featured: The trusty Marshall speaker that's kept our office musical over the years.

Bougainvillea everywhere

productivity hack (you heard it here first): wired headphones hooked to your laptop so you can’t move and get distracted

Everyone is talking about AI in abstract ways, but for me the shift has been much more operational. Over the last few months, we’ve been rebuilding parts of our systems at @wesploot with one goal in mind: keeping end metrics visible at all times. Not buried in dashboards, not dependent on someone pulling a report, just accessible whenever needed. AI made that possible. It’s not just about automation or speed, it’s about visibility. For the first time, I can see what’s happening across the business without waiting, guessing, or asking. And more importantly, I can ask better questions because the answers are actually within reach. Tools like Cursor have quietly changed how I interact with data. Writing queries used to feel like a hard boundary, and now it feels approachable, even intuitive on good days. I catch myself saying I’m “coding” now (which only really lands when I say it to my non-tech friends 😭). But underneath the joke, something real has shifted. The distance between having a question and getting to the answer has reduced dramatically, and that changes how you run a business.

For the longest time, partner onboarding at sploot felt slow, manual, and slightly chaotic. Every week we tried to push a few more partners through thinking scale would come from doing the same things faster, but it didn’t. A few weeks ago, we made a small change to how onboarding works: simplifying steps, removing dependencies, and getting clearer on what actually matters on day 1. As a result, we onboarded 3x more partners per week than usual. Same team, same demand, just a different system. More to come. 💪🏼

I have a feeling every generation goes through this and is quietly convinced they are the first ones to discover it. Ours just happens to be documenting it in real time. I’ve been noticing a shift in how I relate to my parents. It doesn’t come from one big moment. It shows up in small, slightly uncomfortable ways. I catch myself saying things I used to argue with. Almost word for word. Usually after taking a longer, more expensive route to arrive at the same conclusion. The things they worried about make more sense now. The way they approached decisions feels less arbitrary and more like something shaped by experience I didn’t have yet. At the same time, I also notice things I didn’t earlier. The habits that haven’t changed in years. The opinions that feel slightly out of sync with how quickly things move now. The parts where they are still figuring things out, even if they don’t frame it that way. Somewhere in the middle of this, the dynamic shifts. They’re still my parents, and I still slip into that version of myself around them more easily than I expect. But there are also moments where they ask what I think and actually pause. Long enough for me to realize they might genuinely consider it. Moments where I’m explaining something new, and they’re trying to process it without immediately dismissing it. Those conversations usually take a bit longer than either of us plans for. I’ve started to notice this same pattern show up at work. A lot of what gets described as a generational divide feels, up close, like the same thing playing out in a different setting. People with more experience leaning on what has worked. People with newer context pushing for what feels more relevant now. Both sides are reacting to a version of the world that keeps shifting under them. There’s no clean resolution to it. You don’t fully move to one side. You don’t fully reject the other. You just get better at holding both, even when they don’t fully agree.

aisa desh hai mera :)