Why Most Startups Get Marketing WRONG | The Marketing Couch | Ep 19

Ashwin is the CMO at Innovapptive, but his journey from business development to sales to marketing gives him a rare perspective on the entire customer lifecycle. Before Innovapptive, Ashwin spent nearly seven years at MoEngage, where he built its marketing function from scratch as the company grew from $4M to one of India's leading customer engagement platforms.

In this conversation, Ashwin shares the hard-won lessons from building marketing at high-growth startups—including the surprising role of luck and timing, why marketing should amplify (not discover), and how to build authentic brands that align with founder beliefs rather than marketing spin.

My biggest takeaways:

1. Luck and timing are understated factors in startup success—the product must hit the market at the inflection point when customers are ready
2. The secret sauce is two things: an A-class team and relentless focus on what matters to the customer
3. Marketing should be an amplification function, not a discovery function—if you're using marketing to figure out product-market fit, you're too early
4. Authentic brands align with founder beliefs, not marketing spin—your brand is what your founders genuinely believe, everything else is just noise
5. Simpler might be better in martech—the evolution isn't always about adding more tools
6. Hire for hunger and ownership—look for people who won't say "I did my job, someone else didn't do theirs."
7. AI is creating anxiety across all functions—not just marketing—because nobody knows how things will look 6 months down the line

Brought to you by:
The Marketing Couch—Real conversations with B2B marketing leaders, startup founders, and growth experts tackling the challenges they face every day.

Where to find Ashwin:
👉 LinkedIn:   / ashwinsl  

Where to find Jaydip:
👉 LinkedIn:   / jaydipsikdar  
👉 X: https://x.com/jaydipsikdar

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00:00) Introduction and Ashwin's background
(00:04:09) The secret sauce: luck, timing, and execution
(00:08:20) Can Marketing control the brand experience across customer touchpoints
(00:15:45) Where is B2B Marketing going in 2025 and beyond
(00:18:40) What mistakes early-stage startup founders and marketers make
(00:24:50) Initial high-impact marketing investments for early-stage startups
(00:30:45) Founder branding at an early stage
(00:37:35) Ashwin’s CMO Charter for Innovapptive
(00:40:10) Early Marketing charter at MoEngage
(00:46:35) Marketing bets that did not yield results
(00:48:00) Early B2B SaaS Marketing trends
(00:50:25) Brand-building activities at MoEngage
(00:56:35) Balance between events vs digital investments
(00:59:38) Ashwin’s Marketing Tech Stack
(01:06:30) Early experiments with AI in Marketing
(01:08:15) Ashwin’s career track
(01:11:45) B2B Marketers’ challenge today
(01:18:30) Ashwin’s hiring secrets

Referenced:
• MoEngage: https://www.moengage.com/
• Innovapptive: https://www.innovapptive.com/
• The importance of timing in startups
• SEO vs. AI-generated search results
• Developer perspectives on AI implementation

If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe and share it with a friend who's navigating the messy, uncertain world of B2B marketing.

What's your biggest marketing challenge right now? Drop a comment below—I might cover it in a future episode.

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