After an amazing 1.5 years of building IndiGG from the ground up, I have decided to move on to work on my next calling.
When I first joined IndiGG, it comprised a modest 2 member team led by Siddarth Jain - when I first spoke to him in late 2021, the mandate was clear - to shape Indigg into India’s largest distribution conglomerate. We connected immediately and he offered me to lead IndiGG - at that point we were still in the pre-launch stage at that point - seeing it grow from a modest trio to a thriving 75+ people team today fills my heart with unexplainable joy.
It’s been an incredible journey backing the best founders, giving them early-stage cheques (we invested in over 50 early-stage deals during this period), and working closely with them to solve UA and building a community where they feel welcomed, loved, and appreciated.
While I take great pride in our achievements so far, I get more fulfillment from cultivating a genuine team-first ethos and building a community-centric culture that remains the foundation of this business to this day. We knew from day 1 that teams make and break orgs - especially the first 5-10 hires - they had to be dreamers, believers and borderline obsessed with the IndiGG vision and the team we put together did just that. They put together the grunt work and worked tirelessly against all odds as the industry started getting questioned by skeptics but nothing stopped us from working even harder and staying resilient to build a future where gamers are emancipated with property and human rights.
IndiGG didn’t start out as a product-first business - we started out as a community-first org which allowed our community to shape the tools, products, and games they wanted to get introduced to, and the more I chat with founders and teams both in pre-PMF and post-PMF stages, I am realizing how this slowly built in defensibility in our business - most products in Web3 will become commoditized at some point as competition intensifies but the community they build will continue to be the moat and we are proud to have a community first DNA from day 1.
When I joined, we had <2000 members in our community - today we have north of 300k members - we paved the path to grow from 2000 to over 300,000 members organically and cracked the code for word-of-mouth growth with zero marketing spend.
I have also had the privilege of representing IndiGG on multiple global forums and talking about how India is the next superpower in the gaming frontier - attaching links here for anyone who is interested to learn more -
Grateful to have had the privilege of working with very talented people and forward thinkers in the space and all the cool things that we built along the way.
Shoutout to -
Siddharth Jain for believing in me when nobody else did and trusting me with strategic and operational autonomy to lead the show - to all the founders, do whatever you can to work closely with Sid Jain and Joel John who are building decentralised.co and are the most forward thinkers in the space.
Sandeep Nailwal for being a role model and trusting me early on to bring me on the IndiGG bandwagon - thanks for doing everything you do to push the space forward and help builders and founders unconditionally.
Manish Agarwal for letting me stay on the leadership team after the acquisition and being brutally honest about the biases in my thinking and bringing renewed clarity, vigor, and enthusiasm to the team with the new IndiGG thesis
Ishank Gupta for being a great operator and supporting me through the transition
Gabby Dizon for being a visionary in the space and paving the way for so many founders teams that are working in gaming toward a common vision to push the space forward and make it mainstream
And to all the other team members, community folks and multiple founders that I have worked closely with - I have learnt immensely from each one of you and will cherish all the times we spent together, virtually or in person. Unfortunately can't name everyone but you know who you are if you are reading this. I would go above and beyond for all of you whenever you need me
Wishing all the best to the team who are working incredibly hard to build the future of gaming. I'm confident it is in good hands under the guidance of Manish Agarwal and the rest of the leadership team.
I'm more bullish than ever on the space, and in particular on the innovation that web3 brings to games beyond ownership and earning and I am working harder than ever to continue to work towards my new 0 to 1 story and work heads down on the existing gaps in the space.
As someone who has seen the space evolve so closely, it is the best time to build new distribution channels and growth stack for Web3 - whether it's new and novel methods of UA, measurement tools to optimize campaigns, better intelligence engines that allow for a more granular understanding of player behaviors, reputation engines that allow users to port their identity and give them more control over their data, thus allowing advertisers with hyper-personalized targeting through composability and transparency and so many more areas
I strongly believe new forms of marketing and growth tools in this decade will be created by entrepreneurs and a new era of consumer and SaaS companies will be built which will capture all the value from incumbents
DM me if you are interested in solving the above problems
And as always, excited to continue working closely with founders to help them with intros and helping them achieve their inflection point through marketing, product, and community strategies.
On to the next one <3