These 2 pics are 11 years apart. In these 11 years, I have had a job which takes about 55-60 hours of work per week. There is also fair bit of travel involved and I have a young family at home. And I am a big time foodie and also have a sweet tooth

Over the last few years, many working professionals with similar time constraints have approached me for help to begin/scale their fitness journey. Written this thread which I think will be beneficial- both educational as well as actionable- for all such folks

Here you go👇 Broadly there are 3 core building blocks to physical fitness- Nutrition, Exercise and Recovery

1. Nutrition:

The most important law of nutrition is that if you consume less calories than what your body uses for basic metabolism and other activities(exercise, sports etc), you will lose weight

You can calculate your maintenance calorie intake ( by inputing your age, height, current weight and activities) in any calorie calculator. Many such calorie calculators are available for free online

If you consume calories which are equal to your daily energy expenditure, you will be at the same weight. If you are in surplus, you will gain. If you are in deficit, you will lose

For every 7000 calorie deficit, you will lose 1 kg. It is pure science. To be in a 400-500 calorie daily deficit will be a healthy and sustainable way of losing weight. This way you will lose 2 kg/month

But not every weight gain or less is equal. And hence, macros also become important

Nutrition consists of 3 macros- carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Whatever your total calorie intake is, 20-30% should be from protein, 30-60% from carbs, and 10-30% from fats

So, now basis your goals, you know what your calorie intake should be. You also know you’re your macros should look like. So Create a diet plan and start counting your calories. There are enough free resources/apps to help you count it. Quantify diet as much as possible. 100 gm rice is much better than 1 bowl rice.

And while you create a diet, create something that you think you will enjoy and is also sustainable.

In my case, when I travel, I usually skip one meal so that rest of the meals I can enjoy local food to the fullest. Because I have a sweet tooth, have specifically kept calorie budgets for few desserts every week

And diet also includes everything I love- butter chicken, mutton biryani etc. Life is too short to eat boring food. I agree these are not perfect nor are best practices and definitely not for people who are into fitness professionally, but the best diet otherwise is what you can adhere to for a very long time and you can enjoy it too.

So while nutrition is the most important building block of physical fitness, it is only 50% of the job. If you do only this, you will lose fat, but also muscle. But the goal is to retain and even grow muscles as we lose fat. This is where exercise kicks in

While Brand Tracks are important to measure the brand health of consumer brands, it might not always be possible for early-stage brands to commission brand tracks

But you can use freely available data to measure the strength of different aspects of your brand

Here is how👇 A Brand Track typically provides 3 things:

a) Brand Awareness Metrics: Top of mind, spontaneous & total awareness

b) Brand Funnel: Awareness to consideration to purchase to preference

c) Brand Imagery/Associations: Emotional & Functional associations of your brand

Other than the popular use cases of brand & performance marketing, Google & FB can be used by founders & CXOs to solve critical business & marketing problems in a cost and time efficient manner.

Here are 3 most relevant use-cases ( and how to do so) which I strongly recommend 👇 a) Category and Competition Analysis

Whenever brands need to enter a new category, they have to understand the category in depth. The 2 tools I use are:

- Google Keyword Planner

- FB Ads Library

If you want to win with Meta ads in today’s world, forget about narrow targeting and instead,

“Let your creative do the targeting for you”

And not just win in perf mktg, Meta ads can help you test creative concepts, target segments & much more

Deep Dive below with an Example👇 After the ios14 updates, Meta’s ( By Meta, I mean FB/Insta ads) ability to understand the user’s behavior outside of when they are using the app/website has drastically reduced.

What does Product Market Fit( PMF) mean and look like for consumer brands ? What are the metrics to understand status of PMF?

I have been asked this question frequently by both founders & VCs

Here is how I think about PMF & 10 metrics to measure PMF for consumer brands👇👇 First things first, the definition of PMF itself needs to be slightly changed for a country like India.

There are 3 big differences when you think of India compared to any other country

Can there be a one-size fit all approach for paid media for all brands? Absolutely no

But, can there be a basic paid media strategy template which works for most digital first consumer brands in the 0-100 cr journey?

I think, yes. And this is how I would go about it 👇👇 There will be primarily 4 factors which decide the media strategy

a) Consumer Buying Journey

b) TG

c) Business Objective & Budget

d) Competition

“The problem with market research is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say”-David Ogilvy

For any consumer product( tech or brand), a step by step process to improve the odds of getting market research right 👇👇 I would broadly classify research inputs into 4 parts

1. Formal Commissioned Research
2. Analyzing Publicly Available Reviews and Comments
3. Informal Observations & Interviews
4. Post Launch Customer Interactions

Updated thread collating my tweets that deep dives into multiple aspects of scaling digital first consumer brands

Written primarily from first hand experience of growing a brand from 0 to 1000 cr ARR in 8 years in a capital efficient manner

Read & RT if you find it useful 👇 I have structured it into 5 different parts

1. E-com and Marketplaces

2. Digital Media/Performance Marketing

3. Brand Building, Marketing and ATL

4. Offline Sales and Distribution

5. Miscellaneous ( Dashboards, Metrics etc)

Brand Awareness & Distribution/Availability? One cannot thrive/survive without the other.

But which one to scale up first/how much? Equivalent of the Cold Start problem for consumer brands

A Framework to navigate this journey, and the key metric to measure in the journey 👇👇 This is the typical problem that a digital first consumer brand faces:

Brands reach a certain scale online( D2C+marketplaces) and then realizes that to reach the next level, they have to be present in offline multi brand counters( GT, MT etc).

Compounding channels are those where profitability increases with scale. The 3 most compounding ones are GT, EBO and Amazon. And for new age consumer brands, the easiest compounding channel to crack is often Amazon

The Amazon Flywheel, and how to get it moving

Explained Below👇 Any compounding channel can be seen as a flywheel.

Flywheels( compounding channels) are difficult to get started and moving, but once they start moving( consistent sales), the force( spends) required to maintain/accelerate the flywheel reduces significantly.

In most categories, cracking General Trade( GT) will be key for digital first consumer brands for both scale/profitability

Since starting in 2018, we have built a reach of 15000+ active counters pan India

Some learnings, and a roadmap for brands to scale up GT distribution👇👇 1. Why GT?

Primarily 2 reasons:

a) It is still the largest channel in most categories in India. And channel mixes don’t change overnight in any category and brands trying to have a significantly different channel mix compared to category at scale usually results in higher CAC

Over the last 8 years, I have interacted with more than 3000 Indian consumers with HHI greater than 5 LPA through a mix of POS interactions, home visits, pre-sales and service calls

12 observations/trends which could be relevant for founders building in consumer brands/tech👇👇 1. The Indian consumer is not price conscious, but value conscious. Show them the value, and they will shell out a premium.

But creating, communicating and delivering value consistently is what makes people pay a premium for brands

In an ideal world, the brand with the highest top of mind awareness should have a disproportionately high market share.

But, it isn't happening. In fans, a brand with 40% TOM has a 10% market share.

Here is why, and why there might be a case of re-looking at how we measure TOM? First things first, what is TOM?

TOM for any category is measured by asking, “If you think of X category, which brand comes to your mind first?”

If you ask this question to 100 people, and 35 people say Brand A, we say the TOM for brand A has a 35% TOM in category X

“Top of Funnel ads/awareness campaigns should be more brand led/emotional and not talk much about the product/product USP”

This is one of the most common bullshit you hear. And many founders fall for it.

A thread on why this is wrong, and how strong brands get built👇👇 Firstly, I don’t blame any founder for falling for this. You try and remember any good ad, and chances are that they won’t be talking about the product much

These are also the ads that win all awards and hence gets everyone interested and get their creative juices flowing

Over the last 12 months, we have increased our business on Flipkart by almost 150% and are one of the market leaders on the platform. Today, 2 out of 5 fans on the bestseller list on Flipkart are Atomberg fans

Without compromising on any of our brand fundamentals

Here is how👇 One of the biggest myths that digital first founders/CXOs have about Flipkart is that it is impossible to scale on Flipkart if you have a premium product( which is absolutely false unless you are a super-premium brand).

The number of digital first consumer brands doing 100 cr ARR have increased in the last 5 years. But the journey from 100 to 500 cr is different

For founders to track fundamentals, and for VCs evaluating investments in such brands, here are 17 metrics that will help 👇👇 Distribution Metrics

1. Retailer Throughput:

Similar to how D2C brands analyze customer cohorts at M1, M3 etc, start tracking retailer cohorts too. Retailers take time to get used to the brand/product/team.

When you are building a brand (even a business), many folks over-index on emerging trends which might not last more than a decade

Instead, if you focus on things that haven’t changed for 100 plus years, the odds of building a successful brand goes up

Here are my top 8🔽 1. People appreciate good service and want to be valued as a customer

With customer centricity a core value and delivering superior CX a pillar for building the brand, this public praise for our brand( we get lots of such mails everyday) got all of us beaming

A short thread on using service as a lever for brand building👇👇 In a lot of product categories( auto, electronics, appliances etc), the moment of truth for customers is when something goes wrong with the product

Most brand associations get built through that experience

And that is why after sales service is a big lever for brand building

One FAQ I get from D2C brand founders:

“Till now, we have been selling on Amazon /Flipkart as a seller. Now, approached by the aligned Alpha sellers of Az and Fk ( RetailEz/Appario/Omnitech Retail etc). What to do ?”

Pros and Cons, and how we navigated the transition 👇👇 Pros of Working with an Aligned Alpha seller:

1. Replication & Warehousing: All of these sellers are well replicated and get allotted significant space in all of Amazon’s warehouses.

A Media first approach to creatives is absolutely critical for your campaigns succeed in today's world

If you have a creative/campaign which is not aligned with your media plan (branding or performance),means setting yourself up for failure

Explained below👇👇 This is how advertising campaigns were traditionally conceptualized and created:

There were Business Objectives which was being translated to a Marketing Objective which was then translated to a Communication Objective.

Basis this, a brief was created.

Print ads can be incredibly creative/impactful and make you take notice

I often look up print ads for creative inspiration. Here are few that i really liked( will keep adding in the thread)

1: Sugar Free Lollypops 2. A road safety ad by Opel