236K views. The first video in company history to pass 100K.
The Hiring Anthem was Uplers' first brand ad, made for founders in India who had never heard of us. It also brought in our biggest new client.
The Hiring Anthem · 60 seconds · Watch on YouTube
A brand nobody in India knew.
Uplers had grown on outbound and was known to NRI founders hiring in India, but barely known to founders building in India. Its newest product, pay-per-profile hiring, had only ever been sold outbound.
As the first brand manager, I needed founders to know the name before we asked them for anything. So the first ad wasn't a form. It was a film.
“Dhoondte raho.” Keep searching.
A founder's hiring grind, staged as a full-blown Bollywood office musical. His own team narrates his downfall in song, and Uplers arrives as the one-line resolution.
The chorus, “Dhoondte raho” (“keep searching”), is an earworm and an insult at once: it's exactly what a founder is condemned to do without help. The product doesn't appear until second 50. The pain does all the selling.
Observational, middle-India office humour: real cubicles, chai-stained desks, deadpan reaction shots.
An anthem that builds like a stage musical: crowd chorus, brass swell, choreographed chaos.
A soft, hopeful resolution where the brand finally steps in.
An early cut had the Uplers rep appear cold at 0:50, which read as an ad interrupting the film. The fix: a yellow mug sits unnoticed on the founder's desk from the opening frames. At the reveal, that yellow becomes the light. The brand feels like it was in the room all along.
Every frame was cut to this 60-second music grid.
18 frames. Tap one to jump there.
Fully AI-generated, directed like a film.
- Write the film. Concept, lyrics and an 18-frame storyboard timed to the second against the track.
- Lock the cast. A character bible for five characters plus an ensemble, with one hero portrait each, reused as a reference in every frame so faces never drift.
- Generate in Higgsfield: image, then video, then lip-sync, one frame at a time, with a shared style suffix for the camera, lens and lighting of each section.
- Cut for every placement: a 16:9 master, a 9:16 crop plan, a 15-second chorus cutdown for Reels and Shorts, and a 6-second bumper.
It kept climbing.
Weekly YouTube views, organic and paid, 27 Jul to 13 Sep.
Views peaked at 60.9K in a single week and have since passed 236K. On LinkedIn, the same video reached founders and co-founders at early-stage companies, and one of them, a recently funded voice AI company, became a client.