Hi, I’m Surdeep Singh.
I work with growth stage startups.
And I make their growth fast, easy and reliable.
Growth through Product led SEO, Analytics and CRO.
Here’s my story:
surdeepsingh.com
(2023-present)
Since 2023, I’ve begun my entrepreneurial journey.
I work as a deeply embedded growth consultant for startups.
This includes accountability to hit goals within pre-decided timeframes.
indiagold
2021-23: At indiagold, I led the growth marketing vertical.
I optimised user journey from an impression (in ads or Google organic search), to a loan disbursal. Focus was to create opportunities for non linear growth, specially using ads and SEO.
At indiagold, the challenge was proving performance marketing as a scalable growth channel.
indiagold is in the business of providing affordable doorstep gold loans.
Till I joined, the success in new user acquisition came from loan manager referrals.
Laying Foundations with Performance Marketing
I followed my fundamental ad optimization playbook to set up Google and Facebook ads.
In <6 months, performance marketing started contributing ~20% of company’s new customers.
We only served 12 Indian cities at the time. There were many online and offline interactions before a sale.
So we often didn’t meet the minimum viable scale requirements, given the limited experimentation budget.
That deepened my understanding in developing higher quality hypothesis.
It helped me manage budget better to get results within planned timelines.
Setting a New Growth Lane with Product led SEO
In May-June 2022, RBI hiked interest rates.
For lending businesses like indiagold, that meant higher prices for our consumers.
Higher prices = Lower Sales (read ‘loan disbursements’)
So we needed to rethink lowering digital CAC.
SEO was 1 possible channel but we knew it would have taken time to deliver any meaningful results.
So we came up with a new approach.
I researched how we could fulfill user search intent programmatically.
Created a product roadmap of 10+ utilities that would have been valuable to our users. Out of those few scaled well, and started generating a meaningful number of high intent leads.
We executed this without any change in Domain Authority. Primarily by creating mass personalized content with GPT4. To keep quality high, we reviewed content manually.
While Google penalises use of AI to spam, it doesn’t penalise creating value for users at high speed and scale.
We published the following tools –
- {{competitor bank}} Gold Loan Interest Rate (Comparison Pages)
- {{competitor brand}} Branch Locator
- Gold Rate Today in {{City}}
We went from 3k visitors in Sep’22 to 300k in Aug’23, all with the help of 1 ambitious engineer and 1 growth intern. While generating 2000+ high intent leads, monthly.
Graphs like the one above, are a treat to the eyes, aren’t they?
Today, I help Series A+ startups achieve similar success by offering Growth Consulting, SEO Strategy Architecture and Product-Led SEO Execution.
Mylo
2017-21: At Mylo, I used to lead FB marketing, conversion rate optimisation and web revenue.
I was introduced to the world of Product Management and Growth here.
I joined Mylo in the bootstrapped phase within a team size of 5. The most exciting part of working there was getting to learn from directly working with the founder of Mylo.
He’d push ambitious team members like me hard. But was there when they failed or needed support.
We built and experienced the network effects in the Mylo app through content and community.
For the initial years, our objective was solely to build a meaningful content and community engine, that users loved.
That was demonstrated by a D30 active user retention of 20%+, back in 2018-19. This was just 1 year into our journey of building the app.
I got the opportunity to scale user acquisition by 100x+ over 4 years. We got deep into the trenches of Facebook Ads.
We also experienced that most users came for the content, but stayed for the community.
I moved on from Mylo, when we had scaled by 100x+ over 4 years and were Series A funded.
Mylo raised a Series B round in 2022 led by W Health Ventures.
Indian Oil Corp.
2017: For a brief period, I experienced working in a government corporation.
Nothing seemed more exciting to my parents.
They had been lifers in their government jobs.
But working my whole life in a government job didn’t seem as exciting to me.
I was lucky to have gotten connected to Vinit Garg. He was just beginning his journey of building Mylo.
Joining a bootstrapped startup of a first time founder at a 60% pay cut from my Grade A officer government job, seemed like a great idea to me (not to my family though).
In hindsight, betting on myself, and an ambitious mentor, turned out well.
XLRI
2015-17: At XLRI Jamshedpur, I was off to a great start in all areas of development, except academics.
Many ambitious batchmates believed the best value of XLRI was the brand and the network.
But I also enjoyed the learning.
I enjoyed it so much that I started pursuing my interests and got carried away. My reward was a few fail grades.
Fail grades were a mirror and made me reevaluate my choices.
2nd semester onwards is when I turned this story around.
I had started with 3 fail grades and a 4.3/8 GPA but ended with 5.7/8 GPA.
I just needed to relearn ‘how to learn’.
The Idea of Becoming Multidimensionally Jacked
I grew up with humble beginnings as the son of government employees.
Majority of my parents’ lives went into providing for the fundamental needs of our family of 5.
I had opportunities to pursue a variety of interests as a child. If they were economical.
But it wasn’t until my first real job, that I had the time, money, energy, freedom and wisdom to chase my curiosities.
At Mylo, I started learning how to speak both code and business.
I wasn’t the best Computer Science Engineer, but the needs of Mylo during its Bootstrapped phase in 2017 pushed me to rethink learning coding.
I started learning Python from a course on Udemy, and loved learning it as I could put it to use immediately.
Over the next few years, I learnt I could don the hat of a Product Manager, Coder, and Growth Marketer as and when needed.
At indiagold, I got to test my thesis –
How far can a 1 person marketing show be scaled up?
Soloprenuership
Over time, I’ve started to believe it doesn’t take a huge team to deliver 10x results.
Especially in the early stages of business.
I’ve relied more on capital, code and media as more cost effective levers of scaling business, than labor.
And I also went deeper in building a wholistic life, learning from the teachings of Naval Ravikant.
And one day came across the idea of being “multi-dimensionally jacked” in one of Dan Koe’s letters.
I’ve not connected with the default path of society for the last few decades of compartmentalisation + extreme specialisation.
While that serves society and larger systems well, it doesn’t fit well with who I am.
I like to chase my curiosity on my time.
If you’ve reached this far on this page, also check out my core offers.
I help founders and growth leaders… so if you’re one –
Reduce Uncertainty as you Grow
Founder / CEO with Seed/ Series A+ funding?
Work with me as a Fractional Head of Growth.
Ready for a new job in a Growth team?
Apply to jobs in startups I work with.
 Surdeep Singh |