Mangaluru raised me. Bengaluru sharpened me. Businesses paid for both.

I grew up in Mangaluru and studied Business Management at St. Aloysius, majoring in marketing. The coastal belt is full of family-run businesses — jewellers, clinics, builders, colleges, exporters — and almost all of them were being told they needed to "be online" by people who could not explain what that meant. That gap is more or less the reason I ended up doing this for a living.

My first real marketing role was field sales. Territory targets, cold calls, forty-odd conversations a day, and no way to hide behind a dashboard. It taught me something no course does: a lead is not a form fill. It is a person with a budget, a deadline and a reason to say no. I still design campaigns around that person rather than around the traffic graph.

From there I moved into SaaS marketing and lead generation — running Google, Facebook and Instagram campaigns, building landing pages, A/B testing them until sign-ups moved, and wiring up email automation in Zoho and HubSpot. This is where marketing stopped being campaigns for me and started being systems: what happens after the click, who follows up, and whether any of it is measured.

Then came two years of enterprise technical SEO, working on hosting platforms serving a global customer base. Schema and structured data, Core Web Vitals, Cloudflare CDN and caching, mobile-first indexing, JavaScript SEO problems, log file analysis, Google Tag Manager. This is the part most marketers never touch — and it is the part that quietly caps everything else. A beautiful site that Google struggles to crawl is a brochure nobody asked for.

Today I work in Bengaluru, running end-to-end digital marketing and SEO — brand research and market R&D through to strategy, execution, analytics and growth — across organic search, Google Ads, Meta and LinkedIn, and collaborating with product, design and development teams on launches and website initiatives.

Digital with Thejas is where I bring that whole stack to founders and small businesses directly — the technical depth of enterprise SEO, the discipline of paid media measured on cost per lead, and the AI and automation systems I now build on top of both. No account managers, no layers. Just the person who does the work.