
CEO @ReferRush | @thewtfund winner | @ucla math & philosophy | a deep thinker with shallow desires
Growth
Joined May 2012
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And meta is smarter . Why put money into an unknown risk channel?
It is easier and smarter …
Affiliate marketing is not a viable channel for many companies given the unit economics and the influencer culture in India
Because all they do is meta…
All every D2C brand in India does is meta
When 30% of eCom in America is affiliate
But they ignore @referrush
Because meta is easier
ReferRush in 10 years will be massive.
Every brand in the country
Millions of Indians sharing products for a commission
Game theory shows that the long game isn't a strategy most people can execute. That's because it tends to require a negative short-term position in exchange for a real advantage later. Most people cannot commit to this because their threat-detection system reads current loss as an existential failure. And that's vicious short-sightedness. It leads them to optimize for visible progress and sacrifice their real position. The people who constantly win rarely have better information. Instead, they accept that losing now will pay off later. Never quit a game before it starts.
ReferRush is your only answer
More soon.
Some interesting takeaways from Meta's lastest earnings call:
Price per ad rose 14% while impressions rose only 10%, so auctions are getting more competitive faster than inventory is growing. - While Meta is suggesting this is a good thing, I actually believe this is part of the problem. Meta has become SO good at hitting middle and bottom of funnel (in-market segments). This is a BIG reason why you see these sudden CPA spikes. Meta just runs out of steam.
So what do you do? Honestly it's running more reach and frequency campaigns. Every brand in which I have them on has stable performance. 5-10% max ft your top creatives ran in custom placements (no audience network etc) and using a custom audience.
It works. But don't think you'll see it impact you for at least 4-6 weeks. It takes. time. TRUST it and just let it run.
Test longer, descriptive copy. - Meta gave a reference to a syrup brand that massively improved performance because their ad copy was rich, descriptive. In theory, it makes sense right? The LLMs LOVE when you're descriptive and Meta is no different.
I'd 100% be testing longer form ad copy if you haven't already. Almost all the brands I manage have 4-5 paragraph versions of ad copy as a dynamic copy paired with a short version. These same to hold stable performance.
CREATORS!!! Partnership Ads grew 97% year over year to a $15B+ annual run rate. - If you haven't invested in partnership ads yet, and you're going into BFCM without a plan for them, start NOW. Every brand I work with that saw massive growth this year is heavily invested in creators. If you're not doing it, you are paying higher prices.
Lastly, this one is one I see Meta talking about a TON but very few mention here. They even talked aobut it last night again via Muse. Product feed and catalog quality become a competitive advantage. With agentic shopping slowly increasing advertisers absolutely need to make their product feeds better. This means video, more imagery, more enriched copy etc.
For years we just slapped Flexify up or just used the basic catalog from Shopify. The brands enriching the data I have to imagine will slowly become better as agentic stuff takes off.
Ok, that's my two cents. Back to waiting for my sports card in the mail.
Because all they do is meta…
All every D2C brand in India does is meta
When 30% of eCom in America is affiliate
But they ignore @referrush
Because meta is easier
The genius you believe in before he believed in themselves is 20x the genius he really is
@samposwal @kanishktwt a pleasure to keep bringing this vision to life with the two of you
They’re not ready for what’s coming next.
I’ve come to the conclusion that people who fantasize about “moving away and starting a farm” don’t actually hate the rat race.
They just don’t love the fight enough.
The sun and moon are lovers condemned to opposite skies. So they created life between them, that something might love across the distance they never could.
As a CEO, you have to be fucking militant about execution.
@ReferRush runs on discipline. Something I learned from my father who forced me to wake up everyday at 530am to get my karate black belt.
We have protocols for everything: standups, product, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success. Clear owners. Clear deadlines. Clear accountability.
And I’ve never seen our team ship this much, this fast.
The lesson I’ve learned is simple: great people become exponentially more effective when the operating system around them is excellent.
I believe it’s only a matter of time.
Over the next 2–3 years, we’re going to build ReferRush into the defining software company for D2C commerce in India by enabling tens of thousands of affiliates, creators and customers to sell products they believe in and earn a commission for doing it.
We’re opening up an entirely new distribution channel for Indian brands.
To every founder who believed in us early: thank you.
To everyone who didn’t: thank you too.
Thanks for following the journey.
I cannot wait to show you what we ship over the next year.
The sign up form at @ReferRush is one our best performing touch points.
In India there are many window shoppers so the sign up form turns into a way to get them to still bring more sales with the added trust factor
India’s talent problem is because of our VCs
Our smartest people leave because too few companies here are trying to do things worthy of them.
And I think Indian VCs deserve the blame.
If we keep funding incremental companies with visible ceilings, we shouldn’t be surprised when our most ambitious people go abroad to build the future that excites them.
A lot of D2C founders complain to me about the quality of talent in India.
But I think many are diagnosing the wrong problem.
Exceptional people exist. The question is: why would an exceptional person spend the next 5 years of their life building your company?
I’ve found it easier to recruit great people for an ambitious problem than for a simple one.
When @ReferRush was “referral SaaS for Indian Shopify brands,” it was a perfectly good business.
But the ceiling was visible and exceptional people could see it too.
Now we’re trying to build something much larger: a marketplace where any Shopify brand in India can be discovered and sold by thousands of people, while brands build their own communities of affiliates, creators, customers and salespeople.
Suddenly, the calibre of people who want to work with us has changed dramatically.
It made me realize something about D2C companies too.
If your ambition is to build a ₹100–200 crore brand selling another version of an existing product, you may build a fantastic business.
But why should the best engineer, designer, operator or marketer in the country dedicate the prime years of their career to it?
Great talent has an opportunity cost.
They can work almost anywhere.
So naturally, many of them gravitate toward problems where, if they win, they can do something extraordinary.
Founders often think:
“First I need exceptional people, then I can be more ambitious.”
I increasingly think it works the other way around.
Become ambitious enough to deserve exceptional people.
Then you might be surprised by how many of them show up.
34,000 is a lot of money for a lot of people and little money to a small number of people
34,000₹ today equals to
> 1bhk rent in Pune / Bengaluru
> 1 bk rent in Mumbai
> 2 months of whey isolate supply
> 45 days of petrol
> A week trip in Goa
And that is the same amount was paid to tiger's shooters. Yes, just 34k those kids decided to almost delete someone from earth.
34,000₹ only. I am not sure about you but this is very scary and concerning.
An underrated part of a lot of Indian airports is that they all follow the same design system for colors and signage
Notice this the next time you travel from one airport to another!
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination when awake?
—Leonardo da Vinci
ReferRush
Peter Thiel has a theory most founders ignore: your company name predicts whether you'll win or fail.
"I believe very strongly that the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success."
His framework, in his own words:
PayPal worked because it felt human. "It was the friend that helps you pay." Friendly, transactional, trustworthy — the name did sales before the product did.
Napster was doomed from the start. "You nap" — the connotation was sleep, theft, something illicit. The name telegraphed exactly what regulators and labels would eventually come after it for.
The deeper point isn't aesthetics. A name is a compressed signal — about your market positioning, your customer relationship, and how the world will narrativize you when things go wrong.
Names expose founder psychology. A name that sounds aggressive or antisocial is usually a tell that the founder hasn't thought hard enough about how their company will be perceived at scale.
Most founders treat naming as a branding exercise. Thiel treats it as a predictive test.
Vikram Pai retweeted
When you find yourself stressing about the competition or thinking the market is saturated, remember that high performance is extremely rare. Most people are fat, sick, in stacks of debt, pessimistic, addicted to their phone, and cry like babies. There’s zero competition. You can literally achieve any big goal you want while everyone else just dreams about it.











