In this episode of Marketing Manifest Stations, hosted by marketer-turned-social-impact leader Manasi Narasimhan, the spotlight shifts from legacy boardrooms to startup founders in India’s rapidly evolving creator and content economy.

At just 22, Aryan Anurag leads a 100-member team as co-founder, Binge Labs, working with some of India’s most influential founders and brands.

Reflecting on his early days, he shares that he began his content journey almost casually as a curious teenager.

“I’ve been part of the content economy since I was 14 or 15, uploading videos for fun,” Anurag recalled.
That relationship with content deepened during Covid, when time, attention, and digital consumption converged in unprecedented ways.

An avid viewer of Shark Tank US, the defining inflection point for the budding creator came in 2021 with the arrival of Shark Tank in India. Watching founders transform into public personalities triggered what Anurag calls his entrepreneurial ‘aha’ moment, as he saw an opportunity to help founders build their personal brands.

“I realised these founders were going to get popular and their personal brands were going to get stronger. And naturally, many more founders would want to do the same,” he said. “That’s when I thought - why not help founders build their personal brands, backed by five or six years of my own content experience?”

That insight became the foundation of Binge Labs, building on the belief that trust is the real currency of modern marketing. In an age dominated by performance metrics and paid amplification, Anurag believes it’s not about “organic versus paid.” “It’s always organic and paid. Nothing in marketing works in isolation,” he asserted.  

The strategic core of Binge Labs lies firmly in organic community-building, he believes.

“Communities are always built organically. And that trust becomes your moat.”

Speaking of India’s D2C ecosystem, Anurag noted, “Most brands’ DNA has become performance marketing, and that’s why many are burning money.” His counterpoint: play the long game. “If you can engage audiences organically and build trust over time, you don’t need to keep running ads. Your community will buy from you.”

He cited the example of Arjun Vaidya, founder of Dr. Vaidya’s, whose personal brand scaled from 9,000 followers to over 350,000 organically, generating nearly 20 million monthly views. Similar success stories include the rapid growth of YourStory founder Shraddha Sharma’s digital presence – all pointing to how visibility compounds credibility.

Yet, operating in what Anurag calls the “most rapidly changing economy ever” comes with daily uncertainty. “Algorithms change every week. Trends change every week,” he says, adding that the challenge lies in capturing audience sentiment.

“Every day it's a new challenge, but it is a challenge that we have signed up for. And for us, the major challenge always remains: are we able to capture the right kind of audience sentiment? Because when one is making organic content, one has to make sure that one knows what people want. If people want a certain emotion at a certain time, you can't be content with something else. And, in a country of billions, you can't really track emotions. But that is what we have to do.”

“The best and worst part about social media is that there are no rules,” he observed, adding that at Binge Labs, intuition, relentless consumption of culture, and selective use of AI tools come together to decode and analyse something intangible: what people care about at a given moment.

Anurag also reflected on content’s societal impact, particularly on older audiences. While acknowledging the widespread adoption, he raised a deeper concern. “As a prominent stakeholder in the ecosystem who's been there for almost a decade now, I will tell you that while content has its advantages, it is also sometimes disturbing to see how the world is evolving,” he says, adding,

“Loneliness is going to be the next big pandemic.”

“People are consuming content, but the question is - is it voluntary or compulsive?” he reflected.

The episode culminated with entrepreneurial advice for aspiring founders. Calling success a “long-term game,” Anurag centres his counsel on three ideas: clarity of purpose, readiness to sacrifice, and patience with delayed rewards. “Sacrifice is the harsh reality of entrepreneurship,” he remarked, adding that founders must remain open to feedback.

Underlining the importance of purpose, he said, “‘Why’ is my favourite word. I don’t think people understand the importance of why. Why are you doing it? For anything to succeed, you must have a strong ‘why’. Can you do the same work for the next 10–15 years, even when you face problems every single day? If your ‘why’ isn’t strong, you won’t survive the bad days - and there will be bad days.”

Tune into the full conversation here: