I'm a bit of a misfit. Went from pulling teeth to selling products and services. Have enjoyed working full-time with startups rather than larger companies. Not willing to accept my age and do something safe. Love my team at the office as much I love my team at home. Have written copy, designed creative, directed videos, created websites, social media strategies, customer experience strategies, PR strategies, handled P&L, branding, rebranding, created product wireframes, written PRDs, mentored startups - ALWAYS to solve a problem or shape a customer's experience or perception. And ALWAYS dil se! Largely a generalist, I can turn on my specialist switch when I need to. Diagnosing the real problem and solving it gives me a high. Challenging the status quo gives me a high. Marketing to me is not just about creating awareness but about really empathizing with the customer and giving them what they want AND need. Marketing > campaigns, budgets. My objective always is to create fans and not just customers. 18 years of craziness, ups and downs, great team work, a failed attempt at starting up, Yahoo, Google, Zee, Tata MD - it's been a rollercoaster. But I'm not throwing up just yet. Got a long way to go, and atleast 3-4 pet projects in my pipeline for sure. My last few years have been spent trying to make lives of people with diabetes better. And this is what I've learnt - they are people. They are not their condition. Make them feel better as humans, diabetes will be taken care of. We need to manage people, not just their diseases or conditions. But underneath it all - what I've really learnt is that there are really good companies, awesome brands with magnificent teams offering good value. And that there are good customers who are ready to trust and love brands. However, some of these brands are still unable to make it for long. Or scale up. Their customers do not find them, when they need them. Or if they do, they may get put off by some rookie customer experience mistake. Never to return. Writing Google reviews that hurt for years to come. Screwing up the company's LTV to CAC ratio for good. Relate to it? If you do, it's time to take your customers seriously. But also play with them, seriously. Invest in acquiring fans, not just customers. Good branding and customer experience are the foundations for profitability at scale. Doesn't matter if you're a startup, a solopreneur or a company scaling up - get every team member to obsess over customers. Need help doing any of this, connect with me on Linkedin and drop me a message.