19 years in marketing, 7 startups founded — still building, still learning

Hi everyone, I’m Achyuthan from India. 👋

I’ve spent close to 19 years working across digital marketing, growth, strategy and business, and somewhere along the way I ended up becoming a founder too.

I’ve now founded 7 startups.

And definitely not 7 success stories. 😄

Some worked, some didn’t, some taught me expensive lessons, and a few completely changed the way I think about building businesses.

One thing I’ve realised after all these years is that building the product is often only half the job.

Distribution, positioning, getting the first users, earning trust and figuring out why somebody should care — those are usually the harder parts.

That’s probably why I still enjoy marketing so much.

These days I’m particularly interested in:

• startup distribution and growth

• SEO and AI-driven discovery

• founder-led marketing

• building products people naturally want to share

• marketplaces, directories and discovery platforms

• figuring out how small products can compete for attention without massive budgets

I’m currently building a few things of my own as well, including RankRizers, ToolaGator and FirstRank.

But the main reason I’m becoming more active on Product Hunt is actually to meet more builders, learn what everyone is working on, exchange ideas and hopefully contribute from some of the mistakes and lessons I’ve collected over the years.

I’d especially love to connect with indie hackers, SaaS founders, AI founders, marketers, SEO folks and people building weird little internet products that probably shouldn’t work — but somehow do. 😄

Would love to know:

What are you building right now, and what’s the hardest part for you — building the product or getting people to discover it?