I’m Mandar. Ten years on the digital side of consumer businesses — ecommerce, marketplaces and paid media, inside brands and inside agencies, across eight industries in India and overseas.
This site is for people at the very start — a company under a year old, or an engineer, designer or maker who knows the product inside out and the digital side not at all. Teardowns, plain-language reports, calculators and checklists. All of it free.
Pune, India
Storefronts, marketplaces, ad platforms and the plumbing behind them — in India and in overseas markets.
Platform names and logos are the trademarks of their respective owners, shown to describe the tools I work with. No affiliation, partnership or endorsement is implied.
Bring one real problem. I’ll tell you what I’d do, based on having done it — or tell you honestly that I don’t know. No question is too basic; every single one of mine was, once.
Sign in with your email so I know where to send the confirmation. Takes ten seconds, and it opens the rest of the site too.
Sign in to request a callComplete breakdowns of real situations, written for someone who has never run an ad. Free to read, no sign-in needed.
I have spent most of my career on the agency side. If you have just started something, you probably should not hire one of us yet — and here is what to do instead.
Read itAdd a feature image to a post and it appears here instead.
Six months of clean conversion-rate growth, and flat revenue. The metric was improving because the top of the funnel was dying — and the improving metric was what hid it.
Two years running ecommerce for a high-value catalogue. What moved the number, what lost, and why cheap-purchase advice is actively harmful above ₹10,000.
The economics look broken because brands measure them against the wrong thing. Reframing the channel — and the obligation that reframe puts on you.
An afternoon with three columns in a spreadsheet found 15–30% of an ad budget sitting in the wrong place — and a brand quietly bidding against itself on 90% of its keywords.
I’ve spent ten years on the digital side of consumer businesses, in Pune — building and running ecommerce, marketplaces and paid media, both inside brands and inside agencies, across eight industries and in markets outside India.
Most of what I know came from people who answered my questions when they had no reason to. And the information that helps someone starting out is usually locked in a deck, a paid cohort, or somebody’s head. That seemed like a waste, so it’s here instead — free, with nothing to buy at the end of it.
If you built something good and the digital part is a fog, you’re exactly who this is for. If it helps, tell someone else who’s starting out. That’s the whole business model.
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