Why I sat in a brand manager's office in 2022 and decided to build gOGig

I did not set out to build a tech company. I set out to find a problem worth solving, and a problem found me.

In 2022, I was a year out of Samsung R&D, talking to founders, brand managers, and operators across multiple industries. I was looking for a structural problem in the Indian economy that was large enough, unsolved enough, and ignored enough to commit a decade to. That afternoon in Bangalore, in a senior brand manager's office, I found it.

It was the brand manager's own question, asked half to the room and half to himself. On his desk were photographs. WhatsApp forwards. Excel sheets. PDFs. The proof he had asked for. He flipped through them with the expression of someone who had stopped expecting the proof to mean anything.

The moment everything changed

I sat in similar rooms over the next several months. Different brands. Different categories. Different cities. Same scene. The same question. The same folder of photographs. The same resigned acceptance from people whose job it was to verify execution they had no infrastructure to verify.

Every CMO and brand manager in India was approving crores in on-ground spend and then receiving a WhatsApp folder as the only proof. Not because they wanted to. Because no other system existed.

It was not malice. It was structure. Nobody had verified proof. Everyone was operating on trust. And trust, at scale, across hundreds of campaigns and thousands of field executors, breaks. Not in dramatic ways. In small, repeated ways that compound into the difference between what brands pay for and what they actually receive.

That afternoon, walking out of that office in Bangalore, the engineer in me kept circling back to one question. The same question that has shaped every line of code we have written since.

Why isn't there a system for this?

The path to that office

To understand why I could not let the question go, you have to understand the path that led me to it.

What I learned in seven years at Samsung that I could not unlearn

Samsung was not the obvious path to building a BTL verification platform. But the seven years there shaped how I approached the problem in ways I could not have planned.

1. Hard problems require systems, not heroics

India's BTL industry was full of heroic operators who held things together through sheer force of will. None of them scaled. Samsung taught me that the answer to a heroic problem is not a more heroic operator. It is a better system.

2. Real engineering ships, even when it is unglamorous

Mobile technology, the part you actually use, is mostly invisible engineering decisions stacked on top of each other for years. The same is true of accountability infrastructure. Nobody sees the verification engine. Everybody benefits from it.

3. The biggest opportunities are the ones nobody is calling opportunities

In 2022, 'field execution intelligence' was not a phrase anyone used. There was no category, no analyst report, no venture pitch deck. The absence of the term was the opportunity. If everyone had been talking about it, someone else would already have built it.

4. Distribution and adoption matter more than technical elegance

The mobile teams I worked with shipped products to hundreds of millions of users. The technology mattered less than the friction at the first touch. That lesson translated directly to gOGig. We built on WhatsApp because field teams already used WhatsApp. Friction at adoption is the silent killer of every accountability platform.

The co-founder who made gOGig possible

What gOGig is today

Three years after that afternoon in Bangalore, the question that bothered me has produced an answer that more than two dozen Indian enterprise brands now rely on every day.

What we built, in plain terms

The moment I knew we had built something real

There is a specific type of moment that founders wait for without knowing they are waiting for it. The moment when the customer's relationship to the product moves from convenient to necessary. It happened for me on a phone call earlier this year.

A client called and said something I will never forget.

That sentence carries more in it than any growth metric we could put on a slide. The client was not telling us they wanted to stop using gOGig. They were telling us they wanted to use it deeply enough that they needed time to absorb what it was showing them. That is the moment a product crosses from useful to indispensable. It is also the moment a founder knows the years were worth it.

The five things I believe about this category, three years in

Blind Trust is the largest invisible cost in Indian marketing

It is bigger than media inflation, bigger than agency margins, bigger than any single line item on a CMO's spreadsheet. It is invisible because everyone in the chain is structurally incentivised to keep it invisible. Naming it was the precondition to ending it.

The category had to be created, not extended

Existing software categories (retail execution, field service management, field sales software) all touch parts of the problem. None of them was designed for India's specific structural realities. We had to name a new category. We called it Field Execution Intelligence.

Distribution is the moat, not the technology

Anybody can build geo-tagging. Anybody can train an image fingerprint model. The hard part is getting hundreds of thousands of field executors to actually submit through your platform every day. WhatsApp-native architecture is the unfair advantage that compounds over time.

The buyer is the CFO as much as the CMO

For two years, we sold gOGig to marketing teams. The shift happened when finance teams started reviewing marketing accountability under BRSR and audit committee oversight. Now most enterprise deals have at least one CFO or finance head in the room. The product hasn't changed. The buying conversation has.

India will define this category for the world

India has the largest informal physical economy of any major market. India has the WhatsApp penetration. India has the regulatory framework now pushing accountability. India has the agency density and the verification depth. The category will be defined in India and exported from India. That is the bet we are running.

The things I wish I had known in 2022

1. The first customer is the hardest. The second is the second hardest.

Every founder thinks the first sale is the breakthrough. The truth is that the second sale, made without the founder energy of the first one, is the real proof that the product works.

2. Industries do not change. People inside industries change.

Trying to convince an industry to adopt verification is a slow death. Finding the specific CMO at the specific brand who is ready to lead the change is a different problem entirely, and that one has answers.

3. The product is the marketing

Every time the platform catches a discrepancy that saves the client money, the client tells two other people. We have not spent on demand-generation marketing in any serious way. Verified outcomes do the marketing for us.

4. CFO conversations take ACVs from lakhs to crores

When the CFO joins the buying conversation, the deal stops being a marketing efficiency tool and starts being a financial control. The contract values follow accordingly.

5. India is not waiting for global validation to move

For years, Indian buyers wanted to see a global comparable before adopting a category. That has changed. Indian CMOs are now comfortable being early adopters of categories that are larger in India than they are anywhere else.

If you are reading this

If you are a brand running offline campaigns and relying on vendor reports, I want to show you what your ground reality actually looks like.

Your first campaign on gOGig is completely free. No contract. No commitment. Just real verified data from one campaign you would have run anyway. The number that comes back will become the most useful piece of brand intelligence you receive this quarter.

If you are a founder thinking about building in this category, I am happy to share what we have learned. If you are an investor curious about how the category will develop over the next five years, the conversation is open. If you are running BTL, OOH, field force, or trade activation at scale and you are tired of WhatsApp groups going silent and reports arriving too late, talk to us.

DM me on LinkedIn or book a demo on gogig.in. The question that started gOGig is the same question I want to help you answer for your own brand.

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