Reputation before marketing: Neha K Bisht explains how Zerodha scaled without ads

Marketing tells the world what a company is selling. Reputation decides whether the world believes it. Growth-stage companies routinely build the two in the wrong order, and the cost rarely shows up until it is expensive to fix.

A few years ago, a growth-stage technology company I worked with had done everything right on paper: funding in place, a strong product, a marketing calendar full for two quarters. Then a negative product story broke publicly, with no narrative ready and no one decided on who would speak. Journalists and social media filled the silence with their own version of events, and the campaign that launched two weeks later landed against a backdrop nobody had chosen. Nothing about that campaign was wrong. The problem was that nobody had decided, ahead of time, what the company wanted to be known for. That gap rarely comes from bad marketing. It comes from marketing that ran ahead of a reputation strategy that was never built.

Most founders I meet at the growth stage, meaning companies past the earliest, prove-the-idea phase, typically around a Series A or Series B round, with a working product, paying customers and a mandate to scale fast, have already hired a marketing team before deciding what they want to be known for. Reputation feels like a slower conversation for later, once there is more time.

I think this order is backwards, and I say that as someone whose job depends on marketing budgets existing. Early on, almost nobody outside a company's founders and first customers has an opinion about it worth managing. By the time it is established, it has usually earned some benefit of the doubt. The growth stage sits in between: visible enough for opinions to form fast, not yet trusted enough for them to default in its favour. Marketing at this stage does not fill that gap. It amplifies whatever is already sitting in it.

India's own startup history is full of growth-stage companies that found this out the hard way. BharatPe was one of the country's most visible fintech growth stories in 2021, built around an aggressive public profile centred on its co-founder. In January 2022, a leaked audio clip of that co-founder allegedly abusing a bank employee went viral, with no prepared position for the board to fall back on. What followed was months of headlines, an independent audit and the co-founder's resignation. The marketing machine could not be redirected fast enough. This was never a marketing problem, it was a reputation strategy that had never been built.

GoMechanic offers an even more direct lesson, because the failure there hit what founders care about most: the ability to raise money. In January 2023, mid way through a SoftBank-led Series D round, an audit at the Gurugram based auto services startup found dozens of its service centres had overstated revenue. The co-founder admitted publicly to errors made chasing growth at all costs. The round collapsed and the company laid off seventy percent of its staff within days. The damage was financial, but the mechanism was reputational: investors were no longer willing to take the company's account of itself at face value, at precisely the stage where that account matters most.

The counter-example is just as instructive. Zerodha, India's largest retail stock broker, says it has built its business to over sixteen million users largely without an advertising budget, with close to a third of customers arriving through referrals. Founder, Nithin Kamath has been consistent for years about the company's refusal to push customers to trade more than they should, treating that restraint as the whole point rather than a marketing angle. That reputation, built deliberately and defended consistently, is the growth engine, not something layered on top of marketing after the fact.

None of this is only about avoiding a crisis. Harvard Business Review's research on leadership calls trust one of the most vital forms of capital a leader has today. For a growth-stage company raising its next round, hiring senior leaders and signing enterprise customers all at once, that capital is not optional.

There is also a more practical reason growth-stage companies cannot afford to wait. A 2026 buyer survey by G2 found that 51 percent of B2B software buyers now begin their research inside an AI chatbot more often than a traditional search engine, up from 29 percent barely a year earlier. A company that has never defined its own narrative clearly gets one assembled for it, out of whatever fragments exist online. Waiting no longer just means missing a news cycle. It means losing control of the version of the company that AI tools are already presenting to buyers.

So what does building reputation at this stage actually look like? A handful of concrete decisions, not a rebrand.

Name one voice. Decide, before there is a crisis, who speaks for the company on hard topics, usually the founder or CEO.

Write down the non-negotiables. One page on what the company will say, and refuse to say, when something goes wrong, decided in a calm room rather than improvised under pressure.

Audit the existing narrative. Search the company's own name, read what journalists, review sites and AI tools already say, and correct the gaps deliberately.

Build relationships before you need them. Brief journalists, analysts and investors when there is no news to report, not only during a launch or a crisis.

None of this means growth-stage companies should slow down on marketing. It means the sequence has to be deliberate. Decide first what the company stands for and its non-negotiables in a difficult moment. Only then build the campaigns, the content calendars, the media plans. Marketing without a reputation strategy underneath it is a house built without checking the ground first. It might look fine for a while. It rarely holds when the weather changes.

The founders I have seen handle this well are not necessarily the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They are the ones who took a few weeks early on, usually around their first big funding round, to have an uncomfortable conversation about what they wanted to be known for, and what they were prepared to defend when it got tested. Everything else followed from that.

Neha K Bisht  is founder and CEO, Blue Buzz