Last night, I slept for 10 hours. And it felt amazing! 😴

Went to bed at 7 PM. Woke up at 5 AM.

No magnesium. No melatonin. No supplements. Just good old sleep.

I must admit, I'm a poor sleeper. Most nights, I barely manage 5–6 hours.

For a long time, I used sleep trackers. t thing I would do was check my sleep score.

And quite often, that number would leave me disappointed.

Sometimes, even when I felt fine!

Yesterday, I didn't need a score to tell me I had slept well.

And that got me thinking.

The business of sleep is BIG. ₹30,000 crore+ in India alone!

Some brands keep us awake.
Some help us sleep.
Some measure our sleep.

And some are writing bestselling books about it.

☕ Keeping us awake: Red Bull, Monster Energy, Starbucks, Sleepy Owl Coffee
🛏️ Helping us sleep: Duroflex, Wakefit, The Sleep Company & a growing category of sleep supplements.
⌚ Measuring our sleep: Apple Watch, Fitbit, WHOOP, Ultrahuman

📚 Teaching us about sleep: Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep) and Arianna Huffington (The Sleep Revolution).

And then there's Netflix.

In 2017, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings famously said that its biggest competitor was sleep.

And Netflix was winning!

What's fascinating is that we spend money to stay awake, then spend money to fall asleep, and now spend even more money to measure how well we slept!

We explored India's evolving sleep economy, the brands shaping it and the opportunities emerging around something as basic as a good night's sleep.

BTW so many brands also use Sleep in the brand name, and it keeps me thinking

Is sleep a just a keyword 🤔

So, which sleep club do you belong to? React with an emoji! 👇

❤️ Sleep Better Club: Buying products to help you sleep better.
👍 Stay Awake Club: Running on coffee and energy drinks.
👏 Sleep Tracker Club: Measuring every hour, every score, every night.
😴 Natural Sleep Club: No products, no tracking. Just sleep.

React with your club, or tell me in the comments!

Your brand can show up in an AI answer and still get zero visits.

We found people clicked a link in only 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one.

So AI visibility is now about authority, not traffic.

And Meltwater’s study of 9.5 million citations found han @Reddit across 16 B2B categories (0.53% vs 0.44%).

What gets cited:
→ Long-form articles with headings and lists. They earned 6.5x more citations than standard posts.

→ Individual profiles, not just company pages. 75% of citations came from people.

→ Original knowledge in a human voice.

At DAiOM, about 5–6% of our site traffic now comes from AI sources. We got it by posting analysis on LinkedIn consistently.

Start by checking GA4 for chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai referrals.

Full playbook here: daiom.in/the-ai-search-…

You don't have to be interesting to have interesting conversations.

You just have to be interested.

Even the delivery bag is a billboard now.

In Rajasthan, @zomato 's bags read “Can we padharo at your doorstep?”, “Any orders, hukum?” and “Call me bag-sa.”

I sat through their Head of Marketing’s session at the @CleverTap summit. Four things stayed with me:

→ Instinct over n print ad started as Twitter banter.

→ Copy comes from the whole team brainstorming together, not one writer.

→ AI is for scale, not taste. People still sign off the final work.

→ Their CFO’s advice: focus on retention. A Mumbai user’s 3,580 orders in a year became a post, a notification and a billboard.

Full breakdown in the blog: daiom.in/the-secret-sau…

Can poor data privacy wipe $350 million off your company’s valuation? 🤔

It happened to @Yahoo . When Verizon acquired it, the deal value dropped by $350 million after major data breach disclosures.

With India’s DPDP framework nearing another implementation milestone, every eds to take this seriously.

At @_TechSparks last week, I attended Shivaarti Bajaj’s session on AI, IP and DPDP. My biggest learnings:

1. Build privacy in from day one

2. Consent isn’t blanket permission. Data collected for one purpose can’t automatically be used for another

3. Opting out should be as easy as opting in

4. Your CRM, CDP and AI vendors may process the data, but the responsibility stays with you

5. Poor data governance can cut valuations during acquisitions

6. Penalties under the DPDP Act go up to ₹250 crore

7. India’s definition of a child (under 18) matters for digital businesses

8. Training AI on customer data without permission can put the whole model at risk

9. If you don’t know where your data lives, you can’t protect it

10. Privacy is a competitive advantage

One line from Shivaarti stayed with me: “You cannot contract out a responsibility.”

Maybe the next edge isn’t how much first-party data we collect, but how responsibly we use it.

Thank you, @ShivaartiBajaj, @SharmaShradha and @YourStoryCo for the conversation. A deep-dive episode on Dilse Omni Talks is coming soon.

Are we genuinely prepared for DPDP, or still treating it as a legal team’s problem?

Someone is searching “your brand + store near me” right now.

What do they find?

For most omnichannel brands, it’s one of these:
→ A store locator buried in the footer
→ Outdated addresses and no mobile-friendly experience
→ No individual store pages for Google to show
ap. Brands spend on ads to bring people online, then lose the customer who was ready to walk into a store.

Store footfall is the #1 challenge we see omnichannel brands face. A lot of it starts with how their stores show up in search.

That’s why we built Omni Store Locator, a Shopify app. Every store gets its own SEO-optimised page, along with city and state pages, reviews, directions, and call and WhatsApp buttons.

What we’ve seen so far:

✓ ~22% better search position and ~18% higher CTR across brands that are live now
✓ 36%+ rise in “brand near me” searches within the first 2 months
✓ Live with 5+ brands, helping people discover 350+ stores

Setup takes under 10 minutes, and there’s a free plan.

Swipe through to see how it works. To try it, search "Omni Store Locator" on the Shopify App Store.

Is your store locator working as hard as your ads?

India’s tech success cannot be defined by Bengaluru.

That was one of the strongest thoughts I took away from @YourStoryCo founder @SharmaShradha at @_TechSparks .

Spend enough time in Bengaluru and it is easy to believe everyone is talking about AI, agents, startups and deep one version of India.

Shradha had just returned from Patna, and she asked a question that stayed with me:

“How long can we live in a bubble?”

Across India, there are millions of people with ambition and aspiration.

What many of them lack is not talent.

It is access, context and exposure.

That is also why her work through The Bharat Project matters.

The mission is not just to talk about entrepreneurship beyond metros.

It is to help create and enable the next generation of entrepreneurs from Bharat.

Because talent is not concentrated in Bengaluru.

Opportunity still is.

One line from her talk captured this beautifully:

“You cannot be a superstar if a majority of the people are not along with you.”

That changes how we should think about India’s technology story.

It cannot only be about:

• how many unicorns we create
• how much capital we raise
• how advanced our AI models become

It also has to be about:

How many more people get the ability to build?

And perhaps her most powerful reminder was this:

“The biggest joy… is to think beyond oneself… and the people who are not in this room.”

That, to me, is the real challenge for India’s next tech order.

Not just building from India for the world.

But enabling many more people across Bharat to become builders themselves.

Software is a handloom business. Powerful machine looms are coming. - @svembu

I had the opportunity to hear him firsthand at @YourStoryCo @techsparks on how he sees AI reshaping software, jobs, and India’s technology future.

Then came his strong post on @Zoho current reality: cture costs, salary hikes being paused, hiring staying flat, and a clear effort to avoid mass layoffs.

No wonder his talk felt so relevant.

3 things stayed with me:

1. Software may be moving from handloom to power loom

Handlooms didn’t disappear because people stopped needing cloth.

Machines simply enabled far more output with fewer people.

AI could do something similar to software.

We may produce much more software, much faster, while needing fewer people for routine coding.

The disruption may be less about software demand and more about how software gets produced.

2. AI is reducing one cost while increasing another

AI is making coding faster.

But software infrastructure is getting more expensive.

GPUs. Memory. Servers. Data centres. Inference.

So the economics may shift from:

People-intensive software → compute-intensive software.

And companies may feel that pressure through hiring freezes, lower increments, smaller teams, and tighter spending even before layoffs happen.

Zoho is already feeling some of that pinch.

3. India’s bigger question is technology ownership

This was probably the deepest part of his talk for me.

His point was simple:

“The profits go where the ownership of technology is.”

If India becomes great at using AI but remains dependent on others for GPUs, operating systems, hardware, memory, and foundational technologies, we may still be sitting too high in the stack.

His message: build foundation upwards.

Not just AI applications, but also hardware, manufacturing, materials science, agriculture technology, medical equipment, and core infrastructure.

Bonus: one piece of advice for founders

At the end, @SharmaShradha asked what advice he would give the next generation of entrepreneurs.

His answer:

Start from first principles. Ask basic questions. Even dumb questions.

To me, that comes down to curiosity.

Always great listening to technology leaders who are not just talking about the future, but actually building from India for the world.

AI may change the tools.
But curiosity, ownership, and first-principles thinking may matter even more.

Context > Content.

3 years of teaching Digital Marketing & Analytics at @ISBedu@ISBeduone thing is clear:

AI is making content abundant. Context is becoming more valuable.

This time, we focused on:

1. More Marketing AI
2. More hands-on building
3. More brand stories, fewer slides
end-to-end brand website and marketing solution.

And the biggest learning?

When one person teaches, two people learn.

If marketers are the Avengers, Tesseract may be their Infinity Stone.

Because in Agentic Marketing, the real power is not just the agent.

It is the customer context and decisioning underneath it.

That was my biggest takeaway from the CleverAI Summit by @CleverTap .

Everyone But an AI agent does not solve your Agentic Marketing problem if the customer data foundation underneath it is weak.

One line from the session captured it well:

“Everyone has custom agents now. There’s nothing new about it.”

The real question is: what intelligence sits underneath those agents?

For years, Tesseract DB has been CleverTap’s data engine, bringing together customer history and live behavioural signals.

Now comes the next evolution: the Tesseract Decisioning Engine, using that context to decide what should happen next for each customer.

A few lines from the sessions stayed with me:

1. “Life doesn’t wait for your next campaign.”

Customer intent changes faster than campaign calendars.

2. “Live intelligence is not about interrupting customers faster.”

Sometimes the right action is an offer. Sometimes another product. And sometimes nothing at all.

3. “Autonomy has to be earned.”

Start with a defined problem, outcome and guardrails. Then progressively increase autonomy.

4. “Our ambition has to be to create growth. It can’t be just to take credit for it.”

Their first-purchase demo showed a 25% uplift versus the control group.

The shift from attribution to incrementality is an important one.

5. “The goal is not to take marketing out of the marketer.”

The marketer remains the Avenger.

AI agents provide the leverage.

And Tesseract provides the context and decisioning power underneath them.

What also made the summit useful was seeing Agentic AI in action and hearing real brand stories of how AI is moving from experiments into everyday marketing workflows.

I had the opportunity to do a podcast with Anand Jain earlier this year. What struck me now was how quickly the platform has evolved since that conversation.

Credit to @helloanand Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas and the CleverTap leadership team for making what feels like an orbital shift.

Not simply adding AI features to CRM.

But moving from:

CRM → Context → Decisioning → Agentic Marketing

Having used CleverTap at Lenskart and across a few other companies and clients, I have always liked its balance of usability and progressive capabilities.

Now that Tesseract foundation is becoming much more interesting.

Because even Avengers need an Infinity Stone.

Shopify's real genius wasn't making e-commerce easy.

It was making it easy for everyone.

Sonakshi Nathani, Founder of Bik.ai, broke this down beautifully on Dilse Omni.

A solo founder with no tech team could launch a store without hiring developers or it, and Shopify took that same simplicity and made it flexible enough for large enterprises.

Today, Reebok and Duroflex run on the same platform a first-time founder uses.

That's rare.

Most products pick a side. Built for startups, or built for enterprise.

Shopify refused to choose.

The lesson for any business:

→ Find the one problem every customer shares
→ Solve it simply
→ Then let the product grow with them

For Shopify, that problem was clear: make commerce easier to build.

Everything else followed.

What's one tool that changed how you run your business?

Watch the full podcast: dilseomni.com/ep10

Unilever had everything.

The money. The scale. A brand every Indian already knew.

And still, Fogg caught them by surprise.

@SumitJasoria of NEWME brought this up on Dilse Omni, and it's one of my favourite FMCG lessons.

Fogg didn't win by outspending Axe.

It won by mer better and moving faster.

That's the part most brands miss.

When you're the challenger, you'll never have more money than the leader.

But you can have:

→ A sharper read on what the customer actually wants
→ The speed to act on it before anyone else does
→ The willingness to break the category's rules
Big budgets buy reach.
Consumer insight buys relevance.
And relevance is what makes a challenger the new leader.

Which brand do you think completely changed its category?

Watch the full podcast: dilseomni.com/ep14

Copy shamelessly, but implement seamlessly

Had a great time listening to @amangupta0303 and @helloanand , founders of boAt and @CleverTap , at the CleverAI session today.

They spoke about entrepreneurship, customers and building in India.

5 things stayed with me:

1. Ideas ion.
Don’t get stuck searching for the perfect idea. Execute better.

2. Don’t chase investor trends.
Fintech, D2C, AI, quick commerce. Trends change. Founder conviction shouldn’t.

3. India still has huge whitespace.
From AI and deep tech to consumer brands, there is still so much left to build.

4. The Indian consumer keeps changing.
As Aman put it, “the most flirtatious customer.” Loyalty has to be earned again and again.

5. Most importantly, own the customer relationship.
Marketplaces can help with acquisition, but brands need to own the customer relationship, data and experience to drive long-term retention.

My biggest takeaway:

India doesn’t have an idea problem.

It has an execution opportunity.

#CleverAI #Clevertap #BrandETBrandEquity

Most founders think investors are judging their numbers.

At pre-seed, there usually aren't any.

That's what stayed with me after 2.5 hours with Aditya Singh, pre-seed investor and co-founder of @All_IN_CAPITAL , on Dilse Omni.

He backs people before the revenue, sometimes ich means the pitch deck isn't what's being judged. You are.

He looks for three things:

→ How clearly you think
→ How deeply you know your market
→ Whether you can make others believe in what you're building

Honestly, that's not just an investor's checklist.

Customers, hires and partners judge you on exactly the same things.

The line I keep coming back to: a "no" from an investor often just means "not yet."

Most founders hear rejection. Aditya hears timing.

His networking rules work the same way:

→ Reach out
→ Be useful
→ Follow up without chasing
→ Get comfortable hearing no

None of it is complicated. Most people just stop after step one.

Then came the stories.

A ₹10 protein bar founder who built his own factory because the numbers wouldn't work any other way.

A mother-son thekua brand, profitable since day one.

And Aditya taking a sales job at Amazon when everyone around him called it a step down.

Different paths, same pattern.

Each of them did the unglamorous thing that made everything else possible.

His closing thought is one I'm keeping for myself:

Keep increasing the surface area for opportunities to find you.

Founders, be honest. When did you last reach out to someone without wanting anything back?

Watch the full podcast: dilseomni.com/ep25

I didn't start a podcast because I had all the answers.

I started because I had more questions.

Podcasting now has a huge global audience. eMarketer estimates 619 million people worldwide will listen to or watch a podcast monthly in 2026. By 2027, that could reach 652 million.
sn't mean you've earned its attention.

Building Dilse Omni Talks has taught me five things:

1. Great conversations start with great preparation. Study the guest and the subject before you hit record.

2. Better questions create better conversations. The right question can take you somewhere you didn't expect.

3. Not everyone says yes. Keep asking. Finding the right guest takes persistence.

4. There is no single success metric. Subscribers and views matter, but I also look at watch time, comments and shares. They tell me whether a conversation held someone's attention and gave them something to take away.

5. The audience is the hero. The conversation should give the person listening something useful to carry with them.

Podcasting is a marathon. The more you do, the more you learn.

The journey is just beginning.

AI is moving through a fascinating evolution.

First, humans did the work themselves. Then we started using prompts to get AI to write code. Next came loops that could write prompts, test outputs against an objective, and iterate.

Now the next layer is emerging: context and generate those loops themselves.

In other words:

Humans → Prompts → Loops → Graphs

Each step moves the work to a higher level of abstraction, reducing how much humans need to directly orchestrate the process.

The bigger question is where this abstraction ladder eventually leads.

If AI keeps moving one layer higher, what happens when humans no longer need to define every step?

The era of broadcast marketing is Over.

Every message now carries a higher cost, and that's forcing brands to make their interactions smarter and more personalised.

I sat down with @beerud, Co-Founder and CEO of @gupshup , to understand how AI agents are replacing clicks with versations.

Gupshup already powers 120+ billion messages a year for 50,000+ customers across 130+ countries. But Beerud believes the bigger opportunity is still ahead, as businesses move from broadcast messaging toward intelligent, personalised conversations powered by AI agents.

We got into:

→ Why the conversation could become more important than the click

→ How AI agents could become the new interface between brands and consumers

→ Why proprietary context and customer data could become the real AI advantage

→ The build vs. buy decision for AI

→ Why simple AI wrappers may struggle as foundation models keep improving

Beerud's own journey adds another layer to this. He co-founded Elance in 1998, one of the early pioneers of the gig economy, which later became Upwork.

Where do you think AI agents will change customer engagement first: marketing, sales, or support?

Watch the full episode here: dilseomni.com/beerud

Before you become a podcaster, become a podcast guest.

One of the milestone conversations on Dil Se Omni Talks was with @sbikh

Even today, I cannot believe he agreed to come on our podcast.

Towards the end, I asked him:

“Sanjeev, you are such a successful businessman. Why n my podcast?”

His answer stayed with me.

“We also wanted to start a podcast, but we couldn’t commit the dedication and effort that you and your team put into it. So I told my team, rather than becoming a podcaster, I will become a podcast guest and appear on 2–3 podcasts every year.”

What a simple and powerful insight.

Launching a podcast is easy. Sustaining one requires research, preparation, production, editing and consistent distribution.

But you don’t always need to build your own platform to share your ideas.

As a founder or leader, you can commit to appearing on two or three relevant podcasts every year. Let the podcaster focus on creating the platform while you bring your experiences, ideas and stories.

If you are looking to build your personal brand, or create organic distribution for your business, consider becoming a podcast guest first.

Before starting your own podcast, learn to tell your story on someone else’s.