2. Harnessing India’s Cost Advantage in Content Writing
- Sairam Krishnan Head of Marketing, Atomicwork
One of my hottest takes is that Indian startups have a significant cost advantage in producing content.
Yes, you can use ChatGPT to create content, but Google will find a way to penalize it. But in India today, you can pay someone as low as 40K INR as a retainer fee and ask them to contribute 5 – 6 thought leadership articles. You will get so much more bang for your buck. It’s also the same with video and audio editing.
The same content would cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US, but it would be nothing in India. It's barely noticeable on my marketing budget.
You can easily find good writers in the country. Start with reaching out to journalists. They always want to enter the Content space because it pays more and is less annoying.
Moreover, they are journalists, not college grads, so you can be sure of quality over quantity, which is what you need when you are starting to create content. You don’t need 30 bad articles a month, you need at most one good article a week.
This is an advantage in the market I identified early on, and I have been using it ever since. I now have a network of journalists I can reach out to.
To find these writers, look at all the people writing about your specific field. Look at publications like YourStory, Inc42, and other tech writing platforms. You will easily find four or five people who are writing about the same domain over and over again. Start from them.
When you recruit these writers, you still need to leave sometime, say six months to a year, for them to familiarize themselves with your business, brand, and product. Even I couldn't write about ITSM on the spot without working in it for a long time.
But once you give them this time, you have this talent that’s constantly available to you. The thing is that they are still paid much less than tech, and that is the advantage.
As a founder, you will have to edit this content at the start. It’s your story so you need to be hyperaware of what you’re projecting out to the world.
This can be difficult, which is why you need to formulate some content and editorial guidelines. You need to be very clear about the storylines and narratives you’re pushing.