I've stopped trying to figure out what my job title is. I somehow always end up doing a bit of marketing, building communities, and a bunch of things that don't really have a name yet. I kind of like it that way.
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Designed and built by Jahnavi. Ingredients: 🧠, rewrites, and sleepless nights.
FIELD NOTES
hi there!
i'm a marketer / community builder / curious human.
A few years ago, I was convinced I'd spend my career in a lab.
Most of college was spent growing fungi, running fermentation experiments, taking neuroscience electives, and asking way too many questions about why living things behaved the way they did. If someone handed me a petri dish tomorrow, I'd probably still say yes.
So... how did someone with a microbiology degree end up here?
Looking back, I don't think I changed directions as much as I changed subjects.
Instead of trying to understand cells, I started trying to understand people.
Why do some products spread through word of mouth while others don't? Why do some communities quietly keep growing while others disappear? And why can two founders explain the exact same product, but only one of them makes you care?
Those questions slowly pulled me into marketing, and over the last few years I've had the chance to explore them in very different places: a stationery brand, a mental health platform, a product design studio, founders, and creative communities.
The work looked different every time, but I kept running into the same problem. It usually wasn't that the product needed fixing. People just didn't understand what made it worth choosing, and that's the part I enjoy figuring out.
I still think like a microbiology student more often than I'd like to admit.
Observe.
Look for patterns.
Question assumptions.
Run experiments.
Learn.
Repeat.
That's also why I rarely start with messaging. I'd rather read customer reviews, sit through sales calls, scroll Reddit threads, or listen to community conversations first. One good insight can completely change how a product is positioned, and once that clicks, the messaging usually follows.
Outside work, you'll usually find me dancing Bharatanatyam, painting something that looked much better in my head, hunting for new music, trying to get better at sketching, or falling over while learning to skate.
with love,
jahnavi
/NOW
Things currently living rent-free in my head.
01
READING
Understanding Comics — Scott McCloud. (I finally get why everyone recommends it.)
02
BRO, I DIDN'T KNOW THIS...
Casinos don't have clocks. Apparently, they don't want you thinking about time.
03
RECENT GOOGLE SEARCHES
Who invented loyalty programs? Why do airports all feel the same? How are pencils still a good business?
04
CURRENTLY WRONG ABOUT
"I thought newsletters were dying." Turns out people still subscribe. Just not to boring ones.
05
SIDE QUEST
Trying to understand why neuroscience shows up everywhere. Marketing. Learning. Habits. Relationships.
06
WISHLIST
Visit a mushroom farm. Go wine tasting. (Again.) Take a factory tour. Learn letterpress printing.
07
SOUNDTRACK
The Lumineers. My First Million. (My favourite podcast.) Whatever Spotify thinks I'll cry to.
When I joined Notcoy, I expected to spend most of my time working on marketing campaigns. And I did. Creator collaborations, affiliate marketing, retail outreach, product launches, emails, and a bit of everything in between.
But it didn't take long to realise that none of those things really existed on their own.
Before deciding how we should talk about the brand, I first had to understand why people were choosing it in the first place.
That question stayed with me throughout my time at Notcoy.
Why did someone buy this planner instead of the dozens of others available online?
I started where most customers leave their honest opinions. Reviews, Instagram comments, DMs, creator videos, and conversations around the brand became my starting point. Alongside that, I spent time looking at brands like Papier, Mossery, Moleskine, Archer & Olive, and Odd Giraffe. I wasn't looking for ideas to copy. I wanted to understand what people expected from the category and where Notcoy naturally felt different.
The more I looked, the more one thing stood out.
Very few people were talking about the paper quality, the binding, or even the planner itself. Most conversations were about getting their life organised, building routines, gifting someone they cared about, or finally finding something that made planning feel enjoyable instead of feeling like another task.
That's when something clicked.
The planner wasn't really the product. The routine around it was.
Once I started seeing it that way, everything else began to make more sense. Whether I was naming a product, writing an Instagram caption, reviewing creator content, designing a product page, or reaching out to a retailer, I wasn't really selling a planner. I was trying to tell the same story in different places.
After spending enough time listening to customers, branding stopped feeling like colours and fonts. It started feeling like solving a problem.
At first, I thought product names simply helped people tell one planner apart from another. The more I worked on launches, the more I realised they were doing much more than that. Before someone even read the description or saw the inside pages, they'd already started imagining the kind of experience the product represented.
That's why names like Bakehouse, Sunny Side, and Show Up For Yourself made so much sense. None of them described features. They hinted at a feeling instead. Bakehouse brought to mind slow mornings and a cup of coffee before the day began. Sunny Side felt optimistic and light. Show Up For Yourself wasn't asking someone to completely change their life. It was simply a reminder that small, consistent actions mattered.
Over time, it also gave me a simple question to come back to whenever I was unsure.
Does this still feel like Notcoy?
It sounds like a simple question, but it became a surprisingly useful filter. If something didn't feel like the brand, it usually didn't matter how clever the copy was or how polished the campaign looked. We'd almost always go back and rethink it.
CREATOR MARKETING
One of the biggest shifts for me was how I started looking at creators.
In the beginning, it's easy to get distracted by follower count because it's the first number you see. The more creators I researched, the more I realised that number didn't tell me much about whether someone could genuinely influence a buying decision.
I started paying far more attention to the people behind the audience. Did they already talk about journaling, routines, or productivity? Did their followers actually have conversations with them, or were they mostly leaving emojis? Did their content feel like a recommendation from a friend or just another sponsored post?
Building the creator database became less about finding the biggest creators and more about finding the right ones. It also meant we weren't starting from scratch every time we launched something because we already knew who would be a good fit.
One of the launches where all of this came together was the Summer Collection. I worked on creator briefs, launch messaging, and reviewed content drafts as they came in. The goal wasn't to make every reel look the same. It was to make sure the brand still felt like Notcoy without taking away the creator's own voice.
After a while, I found myself asking the same question every time I reviewed a piece of content.
Would someone believe this recommendation if the product wasn't tagged?
If the answer was no, we usually had more work to do.
Matching stories with storytellers.
A slow afternoon, on paper.Quiet moments made intentional.Introduced like a recommendation, not an ad.Where the product blends into life.Rituals people return to.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
When I joined Notcoy, the affiliate program already existed, but it felt fairly manual. Creators could share discount codes, but they had very little visibility into how their content was performing. If they wanted to know what was working, there wasn't an easy way to see it.
One of the first things I worked on was helping move the program to Shopify Collabs. Instead of managing everything manually, creators could track how their content was performing, while the team could manage applications, referral links, and payouts from one place.
Once that foundation was in place, I found myself thinking less about the platform and more about the people joining it. Rather than recruiting as many affiliates as possible, I focused on people who already had a natural connection with the brand. Existing customers who had already shared Notcoy organically and creators already talking about routines and lifestyle usually became much stronger partners than someone motivated only by a commission.
After someone joined, the work didn't stop at sending them a referral link. I wrote onboarding emails with product information, campaign context, creative references, and answers to common customer questions so creators could spend less time figuring things out and more time making content.
Looking back, the biggest shift wasn't moving the program onto a new platform. It was changing the way I thought about affiliates. They stopped feeling like another sales channel and started feeling like people introducing the brand to communities that already trusted them.
inside the affiliate program.
EMAIL MARKETING
Email was probably where I saw this most clearly.
The best emails didn't feel like campaigns. They felt like they belonged in someone's routine.
Most of that work happened in Klaviyo, where we built different journeys based on where someone was in their relationship with the brand. Someone buying their first planner didn't need the same conversation as someone waiting for a new collection to launch, just as someone who had abandoned their cart didn't need the same email as someone who'd been journaling with us for months.
Sometimes that meant welcoming someone to their first planner. Other times it meant writing around routines, wellness, seasonal moments, or experiences we knew many of our customers were already navigating.
Buying the planner wasn't the end of the conversation. It was where a different one began. When the emails felt relevant, they gave people another reason to come back, not because there was another sale waiting, but because the brand kept showing up in ways that still felt useful.
customer research, product pages & reviews.emails people actually opened.campaign insights & what actually worked.online attention, offline discovery.
PERFORMANCE MARKETING
Performance marketing was a smaller part of my role, but it changed how I looked at content once it left the design file.
I supported launch campaigns by promoting creatives through Meta Ads and tracking how people engaged with them. One thing that stood out was how often our strongest creatives were the ones that had already connected with people organically. Instead of treating paid and organic as completely different strategies, I started seeing paid distribution as another way to help a good story reach more of the right people.
RETAIL & WHOLESALE
Retail was probably the most hands-on part of my work because every conversation started long before the first email.
I wasn't looking for stationery stores.
I was looking for places where Notcoy already belonged.
Sometimes I'd search city by city for independent bookstores, lifestyle stores, museum shops, and gift boutiques. Other times I'd work backwards from brands with a similar audience, go through their tagged posts, and see which stores were already stocking them. Instagram's suggested accounts turned out to be surprisingly useful because one good store often led me to several others I wouldn't have found otherwise.
Every store that felt like a genuine fit went into a working database. Before writing that first email, I'd spend time understanding the brands they stocked, how they presented products, and why I thought Notcoy would make sense on their shelves. It meant I wasn't writing to a spreadsheet anymore. I was writing to a store I'd already spent time getting to know.
The outreach itself followed a simple sequence. The first email introduced the brand and why I thought it would fit their collection. The follow-ups helped move things forward through product samples, first-order incentives, reminders, or introductions to the right person when needed.
Once a retailer was interested, the focus shifted to helping them understand how the wholesale side of Notcoy worked. I'd walk them through the catalogue, explain wholesale pricing, minimum order quantities, and answer questions about shipping, samples, and payment terms before putting together quotations based on their order. We also used Faire for retailers who preferred ordering through an existing wholesale platform.
By then, it didn't really feel like selling anymore. It felt like helping someone decide whether it made sense for their store.
SOME NUMBERS
Affiliates onboarded
200+ in one week
Referral purchases
↑ 35%
Retail stores
300+ across US & Europe
Wholesale revenue
~$15K
Customer retention
↑ 28%
Email CTR
4–5%
Instagram followers
40K+
Instagram reach
10K–13K / post
Instagram saves
100–300+ / reel
Paid
Meta campaigns using high-performing organic creatives
When I joined Enzo, I thought I'd be working on marketing.
Which, technically, I was.
Some days I was researching guests for the podcast. Other days I was writing a newsletter, digging through Apollo, sitting in discovery calls, or thinking about how someone would experience the website for the first time.
None of it felt particularly connected while I was doing it. Looking back, though, it all made a lot more sense.
People weren't looking for a product design consultancy.
They were trying to solve a problem.
That changed how I started looking at my work.
Every founder found Enzo differently, and I happened to work on many of the touchpoints in between.
Product × People brought product and design leaders from companies like LinkedIn, Swiggy, Myntra, Jar, Zomato, and JioHotstar into conversations that most early-career PMs and designers would probably never get to have.
People like Joy Banerjee, Prashant Singh, Shayak Sen, Topojoy Chatterjee, and Saurabh Agarwal had already shared their journeys in dozens of interviews. I wanted to ask the questions they probably hadn't answered before.
Before every recording, I'd spend a few hours trying to understand how the guest thought. LinkedIn usually turned into previous interviews, conference talks, founder podcasts, product launches, and blog posts.
I wasn't trying to memorise someone's career. I wanted to understand how they made decisions before building a question bank with the team using ideas from our own community. Polls, DMs, and discussions often surfaced the questions people genuinely wanted answered.
Once the recording was over, the work usually wasn't.
After every episode, we'd host AMAs with some of the speakers and keep the discussion going inside the community. People shared jobs, AI tools, UX resources, books, articles, and product breakdowns, which kept the community active long after each episode ended.
Once we had the transcript, I'd start clipping. I almost always had more clips than we could publish, so the difficult part wasn't finding good moments. It was deciding which ideas could stand on their own.
I kept coming back to ideas that made something complicated feel surprisingly simple. A founder explaining why they killed a feature instead of shipping it. A small decision that completely changed how they thought about product.
From there, those ideas found new places to live. Shorts, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, Quora answers, and sometimes LinkedIn Ads. The format changed, but the questions people were trying to answer stayed the same.
The newsletter rarely tried to summarise an episode. Instead, it explored product thinking, UX principles, AI tools, interesting articles, and practical resources that extended the ideas beyond the podcast. It gave people another way to learn without watching the full episode.
Learning from the people closest to the problem.
How Zomato scaled Food Rescue through product thinkingReducing payment drop-offs, one user problem at a time
EARNING THE CONVERSATION
As more people started discovering Enzo, the work started changing too.
Apollo helped me find companies and the people behind them, but it was only a starting point. I'd go through their website, the founder's LinkedIn, recent funding announcements, product launches, careers pages, and sometimes even sign up for the product just to understand what they were building.
Some companies looked like a great fit until I spent a little more time researching them. Others didn't stand out at first, but a product launch, a hiring announcement, or a founder writing about a challenge they were trying to solve made the conversation worth having.
By the time I opened a blank email, I'd usually found something worth talking about. That made the outreach feel less like cold email and more like the beginning of a real conversation.
Some of those conversations ended with a polite “not right now.” Others turned into discovery calls. One of them eventually became a partnership with a leading educational institution in India, which was a reminder that the research before the email often mattered more than the email itself.
Discovery calls were where everything came together. Founders walked us through what they were building, where users were getting stuck, what they'd already tried, and what they hoped to improve. After every call, I'd document the product challenges, business context, goals, stakeholders, key questions, and next steps before handing everything over to the founders at Enzo, so every conversation could continue instead of starting over.
After a while, the same patterns started showing up across different companies. Those insights didn't stay inside the CRM. They influenced future podcast topics, changed how we explained Enzo on the website, shaped the UX Health Quiz, and made future outreach more relevant because we understood what founders were actually trying to solve.
MAKING THE NEXT STEP FEEL EASIER
By the time someone landed on the website, they usually weren't discovering Enzo for the first time. Maybe they'd watched a podcast clip, read the newsletter, or received one of our emails. The question wasn't how to convince someone to book a discovery call. It was how to help them understand their problem before asking them to speak to us.
That's why we built the UX Health Quiz as a lead magnet. Instead of sending founders straight to Calendly, we gave them a way to reflect on their product first. The quiz walked them through a few questions about their product experience before giving them a score. It wasn't there to judge their product. It simply gave both sides a better place to start.
It also meant discovery calls started with context instead of guesswork. We already had a clearer picture of where someone was struggling and what they wanted to improve before we ever met them.
That same thinking carried into the website. We experimented with messaging, landing pages, CTAs, LinkedIn Ads, and the journey around the quiz, trying to remove as much friction as possible between someone recognising a problem and deciding to ask for help. The UX Health Quiz increased qualified leads by 20%, giving founders something useful before asking them to book a conversation.
WHAT CHANGED
Product × People
5K+ YouTube views
Newsletter
400+ subscribers · ~25% open rate
WhatsApp community
500+ members
GTM
Contributed to ₹12L+ in closed business
UX Health Quiz
Launched as a lead magnet
Content distribution
Repurposed into Shorts, Newsletter, LinkedIn, Quora
I spent a long time thinking I had somehow stumbled into completely unrelated experiences. One Sunday I'd be in an old factory in Yeshwanthpur helping artists unpack their work before hundreds of people arrived. A couple of weeks later I'd be on a bus to Coorg with thirty strangers, wondering whether anyone would still be sitting with the same person by the end of the weekend. Somewhere in between I was emailing doctors, coordinating volunteers across India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, trying to convince guest speakers to spend their Saturday with a room full of students.
At the time, none of it felt connected. It only started making sense much later.
I don't remember most of these experiences because of the events themselves. I remember little moments that probably didn't mean much to anyone else. A founder spending twenty minutes talking to someone who'd stopped at their stall out of curiosity. A breakfast table that somehow got bigger overnight because nobody wanted to sit with the same people anymore. A doctor who had already finished her session but stayed back because there were still hands in the air.
Those are the things that stayed with me.
BANGALORE CREATIVE CIRCUS
Every month, an old factory in Yeshwanthpur transformed into something completely different. Artists, musicians, founders, workshops, food, conversations and more than a hundred local brands filled a space that looked nothing like it did for the rest of the month. Over a thousand people would walk through those gates, but I always found myself paying attention to the smaller interactions happening inside all that noise.
Most people only saw the carnival once it opened. I got to see everything before that — creators confirming at the last minute, vendors needing updates, brands asking where they were supposed to set up, registrations coming in, and a hundred tiny decisions that nobody in the audience would ever notice.
I still remember watching someone stop at a stall run by a local founder they'd never heard of before. It looked like one of those interactions that would last a minute or two. Instead, they stood there talking for almost twenty minutes. They left carrying something they'd bought, but what stayed with me wasn't the purchase. It was the smile they walked away with after discovering a story they hadn't expected to hear.
Nobody planned that conversation. That's probably why I still remember it. Not the footfall. Not the workshops. Just watching people surprise each other.
From a few Sundays I still remember.
Building community at BCC CarnivalBrands, culture, conversations, and conscious living
WEEKEND TRIPS · COORG, GOKARNA, PONDICHERRY
A few months later, I found myself hosting weekend trips to places like Coorg, Gokarna and Pondicherry. Every trip started almost the same way — around thirty people would show up, most of them checking their phones while pretending not to notice everyone else doing exactly the same thing.
I never worried about whether people would enjoy the place. I was always more curious about when they'd stop behaving like strangers. Sometimes it happened over breakfast. Sometimes halfway through a trek. Sometimes because two people realised they'd grown up ten minutes away from each other.
One of my favourite views was always from the back of the bus. You notice conversations you would've otherwise missed. By the time we reached Bangalore again, people were already asking, “So... where are we going next?”
From the outside, it probably looked like we were just organising weekend getaways. Nobody saw the last-minute cancellations, someone missing the pickup point, or trying to rearrange an itinerary that had quietly fallen apart.
I don't think anyone came for me. They came for the place. And somewhere over the weekend, the place quietly stopped being the reason they were there.
Hosted 30 strangers across Coorg
ROTARACT · MATERNAL HEALTH, MENTAL HEALTH & EDUCATION
As the International Service Director at the Rotaract Club of Mount Carmel College, I worked with clubs across India, Nepal and Sri Lanka on initiatives around maternal health, mental health, education and community welfare. My days were filled with speaker outreach, volunteer coordination, partnerships, registrations and more emails than I'd ever like to admit.
One of those emails eventually reached Dr. N. Sundari. We were organising a session on maternal anaemia and gestational diabetes, and after a few conversations she agreed to join us. Once the session ended, students stayed back with questions. One became five. Five became ten. She could've wrapped up and headed home. Instead, she stayed until there was nobody left waiting.
Nobody had asked her to do that. She simply cared enough to.
Around the same time, I also had the chance to represent the club during a Youth Cultural Exchange in Mumbai — one of those weekends where people from different cities somehow skipped the formalities much faster than you'd expect.
A breakfast table that somehow doubled in size overnight. A doctor who stayed long after she could've left. The conversations that were never part of the plan.
YOURDOST
When I joined YourDOST, I thought we'd spend most of our time talking about getting new users.
We didn't.
Most conversations started after someone had already signed up. Someone booked a therapy session but never showed up. Another person stopped opening the app after three days. Others ignored every reminder we sent. I found myself spending more time thinking about the people who quietly disappeared than the ones who stayed.
WE ALREADY KNEW WHAT HAPPENED
Most days started with Mixpanel. I'd usually begin by looking at how people were moving through the product, where they dropped off, and what they did after creating an account. The numbers told us what happened. The interesting part was figuring out why.
I'd walk through the product as if I were using it for the first time and keep asking small questions. Were we asking people to do too much too soon? Would changing the timing make a difference? Or did this message need to exist at all?
THE REMINDER WASN'T THE INTERESTING PART
We worked on reminders that went out after missed therapy sessions, trying to make them feel less like another notification and more like a gentle nudge from the therapist. I'd never really thought about how much it mattered who a reminder felt like it was coming from until then.
Sometimes we only changed a few words, but they landed very differently.
The same idea showed up elsewhere too. Around the same time, I also contributed to a Slack mental health bot for employees across B2B companies. It sent a simple message every day, but the question stayed the same: how do you make it feel like a person is reaching out instead of another system asking for attention?
USERS WEREN'T THE ONLY PEOPLE SEARCHING
The Customer Success team spent a surprising amount of time looking for information. The answers already existed. They were just scattered across documents, folders, and internal resources.
So I built an internal search tool that brought together more than 2,000 engagement assets into one place. Customer Success Managers could search using keywords, filter what they needed, and have the right resources sent straight to their inbox through Zapier.
It wasn't something users would ever see, but it saved people from opening folder after folder looking for the same thing.
I don't remember thinking, “I'm building an AI tool.”
I just remember thinking, “There has to be an easier way to find all of this.”
QUESTIONS CAME FIRST
I also worked on blogs, user stories, and reminders that went out after someone signed up. What I liked was that the work almost never started with, “Let's write something.”
Maybe users kept getting stuck at one point in the journey. Maybe people weren't responding to a message. Sometimes we wanted to tell a customer's story because it explained the product better than we ever could.
The writing came later.
The question came first.
Looking back, that's probably what I enjoyed most about the role. Whether I was writing a reminder, building an internal tool, or working on a user story, it always came back to the same thing: making the experience a little easier for someone on the other side of the screen.
