Aayush Gupta — Product Manager
In early-stage marketing, nobody cares about your brand guidelines. They care about whether the thing you shipped this week moved a number. That's the world I've operated in for 12+ years — environments where marketing isn't a department, it's a survival function. Where you're not handed a product to promote — you're sitting in the room helping shape the offering itself, figuring out what to say, who to say it to, and getting it out the door before the runway gets shorter. The 0-to-1 phase is messy. There's no playbook. You're testing positioning in real time, learning from what the market actually responds to, and making calls with incomplete data. The 1-to-10 phase is a different kind of hard — you've found something that works, now you have to build the systems and the team to scale it without breaking what got you there. I've done both. Twice. Once at Octos, a Sydney-based agency I helped grow from 4 people to 100+, working remotely from India. And now at Uplers — an AI-hiring platform helping startups hire top engineers from India — where I lead a team of 15+ as Director of Marketing. 3M+ engineers in our private network. 500+ companies trust us. But the numbers came after the hard early work of figuring out what Uplers even is in the market. The part that most people don't talk about: in early-stage, marketing and product blur. You don't just market the service — you're in the weeds understanding it, pressure-testing it, sometimes reshaping it based on what you're hearing. That's not a side effect of the role. That's the role. Right now, I'm deep into how AI is changing all of this — how startups hire, how small teams punch above their weight, and what marketing looks like when the tools are evolving faster than the strategies. Always open to connecting with founders and operators who are building in the early innings.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Marketing Leader with expertise in AI-driven strategies for startups.
Location: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Experience: 12 yrs 8 mos
Skills
- Growth Marketing
- Team Leadership
- Demand Generation
- Brand Building
- Marketing Strategy
- Client Management
- Project Management
- Sales & Marketing
- Brand Marketing
Career Highlights
- Led marketing strategies for rapid startup growth.
- Managed large teams and complex projects successfully.
- Expert in blending marketing with product development.
Work Experience
Uplers
Director of Marketing (1 yr)
Associate Director of Marketing (3 yrs 4 mos)
Head Of Marketing (2 yrs 9 mos)
Pavilion
Member (1 yr 3 mos)
Octos - A Search Marketing Agency
Head Of Web Operations (2 yrs)
Octos Business Solutions Pty Ltd
Project Manager (2 yrs 8 mos)
Marketing Manager (5 yrs 3 mos)
Brand Marketing Consultant (5 mos)
Educational Initiatives
Large Scale Assessment Manager - Torrent Project (1 mo)
Data Quality Analyst (1 yr)
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) at ICFAI Business School
Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com.) at GLS University
Higher Secondary at St Anns High School (SSC)