Startups · The argument
You don’t have an awareness problem.
It’s the diagnosis every founder reaches for, because it’s the only one you can fix by spending money.
‘Nobody knows about us yet’ is the most comfortable thing a founder can believe, because the cure is a budget. The uncomfortable alternatives — they know and don’t care, they care and don’t trust you, they trust you and the product isn’t ready — all require changing something harder than a media plan.
Awareness is almost never the constraint. Legitimacy usually is.
Nobody has heard of us. Fixable with budget. Comfortable. Usually wrong.
They’ve heard of the category and don’t trust it yet. Fixable with proof. Uncomfortable. Usually right.
Crypto in India in its biggest year had no awareness problem whatsoever — everyone was talking about it. It had a legitimacy problem: the category felt risky and slightly disreputable to ordinary people. More awareness would have made that worse, not better. The work had to make it feel legitimate enough to try.
Zepto had the opposite constraint and the same lesson. Quick commerce barely existed as a category, so broad awareness spend would have been expensive noise for a behaviour nobody understood. Making one neighbourhood believe first — Bandra as a live brand ecosystem — beat telling a country something it had no context for.
Where I’m vulnerable: in genuinely winner-take-all land grabs with network effects, being known first really can be the whole game, and the founder blitzing on awareness while I philosophise about legitimacy may simply win. Speed sometimes beats credibility — and a category with a closing window doesn’t care about my diagnosis.
The test: if a competitor got every rupee of your awareness budget tomorrow, would they beat you? If yes, spend. If no, your problem was never awareness.
If you do one thing
- Before buying reach, establish which of the four problems you actually have.
- In a new category, make one neighbourhood believe before telling a country.
- Legitimacy is bought with proof and borrowed trust, not impressions.
- If awareness genuinely is the constraint, move fast — but prove it first.
The proof: CoinSwitch and legitimacy · Zepto’s neighbourhood-first launch.