Left a fantasy-sports exit to build livestreaming for grassroots matches no TV crew would ever film.
500K matches streamed
I turned our buyers into the story. They shared it for us.
A zero-budget brand credibility program: I interviewed the founders who are Uplers' ideal customers, published their stories, and let them carry the brand into their own networks.
20+founders interviewed and published
₹0spent on the program itself
YCShark Tank, Sony-backed and Series A founders among them
1:1every founder researched, interviewed and written up by me, with outreach automated
01 — The brief
Ads buy attention. I wanted rapport.
Founders building in India barely knew Uplers. Paid campaigns could put the name in front of them, but they couldn't make a founder like us.
So I built a program around the founders themselves: give them a stage, tell their story well, and let the people we wanted to reach hear about us from someone they already trust.
02 — The system
Automate the outreach. Hand-make everything else.
- 01FindHand-pick founders building tech products, SaaS and AI first, across tier-one and tier-two cities.
- 02ReachAutomated: PhantomBuster sent the LinkedIn requests and Instantly ran the emails. The conversations that followed were all mine.
- 03ResearchThe company, the founder and their market, before every call.
- 04InterviewTheir story, their co-founder, their industry insight, and what keeps them going.
- 05WriteA long-form feature on the Uplers site, in their voice.
- 06AmplifyA LinkedIn campaign on every story, which founders reshared to their own networks.
03 — The founder wall
Who I've interviewed.
Fourteen years making other studios’ games to earn the right to make his own, now funded by Sony.
Picked from 400 applicants
Giving infrastructure the memory it never had, so outages stop repeating the same way.
Ex-Yellow.ai engineer
A regulator switched off their YC fintech, so they followed their users to the next problem, door to door.
6,000+ listings a month
Four childhood chess rivals turning kids’ screen time into skill time.
5,000 students, 30 countries
Building India’s own voice AI stack instead of stitching together American APIs.
Pre-seed, Venture Catalysts
An AI agent that runs influencer campaigns end to end, not just creator discovery.
Angel-funded, team under 10
04 — What happened
Founders became the distribution.
Founders loved being featured and reshared their stories with their own networks, which are exactly the people Uplers wants to reach. The brand started showing up in founder circles through founders, not ads.
It was never meant to generate leads, and it still brought in an inbound one. Here's what founders said, in public:
10founders shared or reposted their feature on LinkedIn
225+reactions on five of the posts pictured below
“Founders rarely get to see their own story told back to them clearly.”
“Every story needs a good storyteller.”
“Thank you, Ruhi Salhotra, for such a thoughtful interview.”
“Thankful to Uplers team and Ruhi Salhotra for beautifully capturing the story.”
“Thank you for this amazing article, well written.”
05 — What I learned
- The best brand content makes your customer the hero.
- Research before the call is what makes founders open up on it.
- Unscalable work, done well, builds what money can't buy: trust.
06 — The skeptic's corner
Why run something that brings in one lead?
Because leads weren't the job. The goal was rapport with founders who'd never heard of us, and a library of stories sales could use. The lead was a bonus.
How did you pick the founders?
Founders building tech products, mainly SaaS and AI, across tier-one and tier-two cities in India: the same people Uplers sells to.
Who wrote the features?
I did. Outreach requests were automated with PhantomBuster on LinkedIn and Instantly for email; the research, interviews, writing and publishing were mine, and each story runs under my name on the Uplers site.