I recently sat down with Sanjay Kathuria for a long conversation about personal branding and the marketing mistakes that quietly kill businesses. One story from that episode has stayed with people more than anything else I’ve said this year, so I want to write it down properly.
We ran a campaign for a brand. We brought in a creator with three million subscribers. The video went out and did nine million views.
Nine million.
For any brand, that number produces a particular feeling. It feels like winning. It looks extraordinary in a deck. It gets screenshotted and sent to the founder.
Conversions from the sales link: zero.
Not disappointing. Not below target. Zero.
And it wasn’t one creator. We ran four, each with two to three million followers. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty million views in total. The revenue attributable to all of it was nothing.
That campaign taught me something I now repeat to every founder I work with: views are a vanity metric, and they will happily bankrupt you while making you feel successful.
Relevance is God
Here is what I would do differently, and what I now recommend by default.
I would rather work with a creator who has ten thousand followers and pulls a thousand views, if those thousand people are actually your buyers.
A thousand relevant people will outperform nine million irrelevant ones every single time. Reach without relevance is just noise with an impressive number attached to it.
Most brands get this backwards. They optimise the content and treat distribution as an afterthought. In practice it’s the reverse. You can make good content and still get nothing if it lands in front of the wrong audience. Relevant distribution is the harder problem, and it’s the one that actually determines whether money moves.
The failure mode that’s worse than zero sales
Zero sales is an expensive lesson. But there’s a worse outcome, and I watched it happen.
There was a brand in Jaipur selling kurtis. Small operation, steady business, roughly fifty orders a day. Like most small brands, they were chasing virality. They wanted the reel that changes everything.
They got it. One reel took off overnight and they woke up to five hundred orders.
This is the moment every founder says they want.
They were a team of two.
They couldn’t answer the phones. They couldn’t reply to messages. They couldn’t fulfil the orders, because their manufacturer had no capacity to scale. No pre-orders had been placed, there was no asset-light model in place, and there were no backup distributors lined up for exactly this scenario.
So five hundred customers had paid, and then heard nothing. They couldn’t get anyone on the phone. Their orders didn’t ship.
Around three hundred of those five hundred buyers left negative Google reviews.
The brand shut down.
Read that sequence again. Virality did not grow that business. Virality is what killed it. The reel that was supposed to be their breakthrough became the event that ended them, because success arrived at a scale they had no ability to absorb.
Build the capability before you build the demand
The lesson from both stories is the same, and it’s unglamorous.
Before you spend a single rupee generating demand, ask whether you can service it. Can you answer the phone at ten times current volume? Can your manufacturer scale, and have you actually pre-arranged that, or are you assuming it? What happens on the day something works?
Demand you cannot service isn’t growth. It’s a liability with a countdown timer attached. And unlike a failed campaign, which costs you money, an unfulfilled surge costs you your reputation, permanently and in public, on the review platforms your future customers will read.
So the order of operations matters. Build the capability to absorb demand. Then build relevant distribution. Then, and only then, worry about scale.
Most founders do this in reverse and wonder why the big moment didn’t change anything, or why it made things worse.
Watch the full conversation
Sanjay and I covered considerably more ground in the episode: what personal branding actually means now that a founder’s face is often the brand’s fastest asset, why go-to-market has compressed to the point where patience is no longer a viable strategy, and what to track instead of views.