The ECG content framework for Indian founders

Most founders treat content as advertising with a smaller budget. That is why it does not work. The founders who build audiences treat content as a product with its own quality bar, its own release schedule and its own metrics — and the brand comes later, almost as a consequence.

This is the deepest guide we have written. If you only have two minutes, read the summary immediately below. If you are actually going to run this, read the whole thing.

The short version

• The ratio: out of every ten pieces of content — five Evergreen, three Controversial, two Growth.
• Evergreen (5) keeps your existing audience warm: relevant yesterday, today and next year.
• Controversial (3) reaches strangers: a defensible strong opinion that polarises and therefore travels.
• Growth (2) serves your core community deeply. These are the people who become your promoters.
• Only two metrics matter: shares and saves. Not likes, not views.
• Match the platform's stated priority — read its announcements and build in the format it is currently pushing.
• Never mix branded, performance and shareable content in one post. It fails at all three.
• The chain: content builds community, community creates culture, culture changes what people buy.

Who came up with this, and why it is credible

The framework comes from Raj Shamani, speaking on Episode 11 of WTF is with Nikhil Kamath (7 October 2023).

His track record matters here, because it is not a theory. Shamani started in business at 16 helping his father's detergent company in Indore — a manufacturer doing roughly ₹40 lakh a year who explicitly did not believe in branding. Shamani built distribution village by village and scaled the business roughly 10x within 18 months, then 10x again.

He then moved to content, and by his account went from 50,000 to 300,000 followers in three months by studying the patterns of the world's top 100 brands, and reached 400 million views a year within two years. His first brand deal paid ₹70,000. Three deals shortly after paid roughly ₹9 lakh — six months of runway in Bombay, obtained by cold-DMing brands on Instagram.

He now builds creator-led consumer brands at House of X. The framework below is what he ran to get there.

Evergreen (5 of 10): the content that keeps you alive

Evergreen content was relevant yesterday, is relevant today and will be relevant next year. Its job is not reach. Its job is to keep your existing audience engaged so the account does not go cold between bigger moments.

For a founder in India, evergreen usually means:

• How something actually works — unit economics, a supply chain, a GST classification that cost you money
• Frameworks and checklists people can apply immediately
• Breakdowns of well-known Indian businesses that will still be relevant in three years
• Answers to questions your customers ask every single week

This is the give-first half of the strategy, and it is doing quiet Cialdini work. Reciprocity does not fire because you gave something away — it fires because you gave something away before being asked for anything. Fifty percent of your output existing purely to be useful is what makes the eventual ask feel earned rather than transactional.

Controversial (3 of 10): the content that finds strangers

This is the part people misread. Controversial does not mean inflammatory, cruel, or picking fights for attention. It means taking a genuine position that a meaningful share of your audience will disagree with — because agreement does not travel and disagreement does.

Shamani's own examples run toward the uncomfortable-but-true: businesses that failed, categories that are declining, things everyone believes that the data does not support. His mechanics for making content shareable:

• Break a belief. Take something your audience assumes is settled and show why it is not. You will get a polarised response, and half of that polarised audience shares it everywhere.
• Make them feel smart — or challenge them directly. Both work.
• Play on a relationship. Build a piece one side of a relationship will send to the other. Every girlfriend sending it to a boyfriend, every founder sending it to a co-founder.

The Indian nuance worth adding: this market has a long memory and a fast cancel culture. A defensible contrarian position — here is the data, here is my reasoning — compounds. A cheap hot take gets you one spike and a credibility problem. Shamani himself is emphatic that undisclosed advertising is where creators lose trust permanently.

Growth (2 of 10): the content that builds promoters

The final two pieces are aimed narrowly at your core community — the people who already believe what you believe. This content does not chase reach at all. It exists to make the people closest to you better at the thing you share.

Shamani's stated purpose is to create more leaders and help people build personal brands. The strategic logic: these are the people who become your promoters, and in a market where word of mouth still outperforms every paid channel, a hundred genuine advocates outperform a hundred thousand passive followers.

The metric that actually matters

Engagement does not matter. Likes do not matter. Views do not matter. Shares and saves are all that matter.

This is the single most actionable line in the episode, and it inverts how most founders judge their content. A share is someone spending their own social capital on you. A save is someone declaring future intent. Both are far stronger signals than a like — and both are what algorithms are actually optimising for.

Practical test before you publish: can you name the specific person someone would send this to, and why? If not, you have made content for yourself.

Respect the platform if you want the platform to respect you

Shamani's second principle is that platforms tell you exactly what they will promote — in their annual reports, earnings calls and product announcements — and almost nobody reads them.

The examples he gave were of his time: Instagram pushing short-form, Twitter optimising for time-on-platform (so threads worked), LinkedIn wanting to feel less corporate (so video and personal posts got distribution). The specific answers change. The method does not:

1. Read the platform's most recent public statements about what it is prioritising.
2. Build in that format for as long as the priority holds.
3. Expect the priority to change, and re-check every quarter.

This is arbitrage, and it is temporary by nature — which is exactly why it works. When a platform pushes a format, it is over-distributing that format relative to demand. Getting in early is underpriced attention, which was Shamani's own term for the thing every growth strategy is really hunting for.

Never mix the three jobs

The third principle, and the most commonly violated: brands try to make one post do branded storytelling, performance conversion and shareability at once. It is a losing strategy, because the three require contradictory structures.

• Branded content communicates values and takes patience.
• Performance content asks for a specific action now.
• Shareable content gives the viewer social currency for passing it on.

Do them in phases. Values sometimes, conversion sometimes, shareable regularly — but not stacked in one asset.

The real reason this works: the point of sale moved

Shamani's underlying argument is bigger than a content ratio, and it is the strategic case for why founders should do this at all. Influence happens at the point of sale — and the point of sale has migrated twice:

1. The kirana era. You went for Colgate, there was none, the shopkeeper handed you Close-Up, and if you liked it you never went back. The shopkeeper was the influencer. Narayanan, on the same episode, gave the mechanism: margins — "it's all incentive driven."
2. The marketplace era. Amazon, Flipkart, Big Bazaar. You arrive with intent to shop and get convinced in the aisle or the search results.
3. The feed era. You are scrolling, you see someone using something, and conversation, convincing and conversion can now all happen in the same place.

Crucially, he notes each layer added to the previous rather than replacing it — kirana did not die when marketplaces arrived. But if influence now begins in the feed and you are not there, you are relying on someone else to introduce you to your own customer.

His formulation of the chain is the cleanest statement of the thesis:

Content builds community. Community brings culture. And culture changes the way you buy.

The three C's: conversation, convincing, conversion

Shamani's model of how a customer actually moves — first developed watching detergent buyers in Indore, and unchanged by the internet:

• Conversation — the customer talks to themselves. Have I seen this? Does it look credible? Is it everywhere?
• Convincing — they talk to others. Friends, a shopkeeper, a review, a community.
• Conversion — they buy.

The insight for founders is about proportion: expect a large amount of conversation, a decent amount of convincing, and a small amount of conversion in any content-led channel. Judging a content strategy purely on last-click conversion measures the smallest part of what it does. Narayanan named this on the same episode — attributability is the standing problem with influencer marketing, and it has not been solved.

What the data says

The episode is nearly three years old, so here is where the numbers stand now:

• Trust: Kantar's Influencer Playbook found 67% of Indian consumers trust influencer recommendations over traditional advertising.
• Market size: EY projected India's influencer marketing industry at around ₹3,375 crore by 2026, with industry estimates suggesting it will breach ₹4,000 crore.
• Where brands are spending: EY reported that roughly 47% of brands prefer micro and nano creators. We have not found a primary study for the engagement-rate bands often quoted alongside this, so we do not repeat them.

Shamani's own selection rule was mid-tier, not smallest: pick people "who are at the tipping point. Not really big, not small." He also cited survey evidence that people are convinced first by friends and family, then by people they follow who are not famous, then by influencers — with celebrities landing sixth or seventh.

Mapping ECG to Cialdini

Each content type is doing a specific piece of persuasion work, which is why the ratio matters:

• Evergreen → reciprocity and authority. Consistent usefulness given freely, which also demonstrates competence.
• Controversial → liking and commitment. A clear position attracts people who share it and repels those who do not — that filtering is a feature.
• Growth → social proof and unity. Serving a core community turns audience into identity, and identity is the strongest driver of advocacy.

Through Hormozi's value equation, content is the mechanism that collapses time delay and effort before a purchase exists. A customer who has learned from you for six months needs no education at the moment of sale and carries far less perceived risk. That is why content-led brands convert at rates paid acquisition cannot match — the value was delivered long before the offer appeared.

For the full persuasion toolkit, see Cialdini for founders, and for offer construction, the Grand Slam Offer, India edition.

A 30-day plan to start

You do not need a studio, an agency or a content calendar tool. You need ten posts and a month.

1. Week 0 — Write down the one thing you want to be known for. Everything else keys off this.
2. Week 0 — Read the latest public announcements from the one platform you will focus on. Note the format it is pushing.
3. Week 1 — Publish two evergreen pieces. Teach something you know that your customer does not.
4. Week 2 — Publish one controversial piece and one evergreen. State a position you can defend with reasoning or data.
5. Week 3 — Publish two evergreen and one growth piece. The growth piece serves the people closest to you.
6. Week 4 — Publish one controversial, one growth, one evergreen. Then review only shares and saves — ignore likes and views entirely.
7. Month 2 — Double down on whatever earned shares. Kill whatever did not, regardless of how many likes it got.

The failure mode to avoid

The most common way founders get this wrong is treating controversial as a shortcut. Three out of ten is deliberate. Run five out of ten controversial and you become a commentator, not a builder — you will get reach, and it will convert into nothing, because nobody trusts a person whose entire output is provocation.

The ratio protects you from yourself. Evergreen earns the right to be provocative. Growth converts the audience into a community. Controversy alone just makes noise, and India has plenty of that already.

Source: [WTF is with Nikhil Kamath, Episode 11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjiZ11lKCrU) — "WTF Goes into Building a Fashion, Beauty, or Home Brand?", published 7 October 2023.

On the episode: [Nikhil Kamath](/en/founders/nikhil-kamath/) with [Ananth Narayanan](/en/founders/ananth-narayanan/) ([Mensa Brands](/en/companies/mensa-brands/), formerly Myntra), [Kishore Biyani](/en/founders/kishore-biyani/) ([Future Group](/en/companies/future-group/), Big Bazaar) and [Raj Shamani](/en/founders/raj-shamani/) ([House of X](/en/companies/house-of-x/)).

Quotes are attributed to the speaker and checked against the recording. Independent figures are sourced and dated separately.