Medianews4u.com caught up with Harshit Arora founder, CEO Growster
His story doesn’t begin in a business school classroom or a corporate office. It begins at age 9, when he joined Sherwood College in Nainital as a boarding student, living away from home in an environment where family background, financial status, and social standing meant nothing. What mattered was your ability to stand on your own feet. That experience quietly became the blueprint for everything he would build later.
After school, Harshit studied Journalism at Amity University. Growster is his first and only job. Everything he knows about marketing, production, client management, and leadership, he learned by doing it, without a corporate ladder, a mentor handing him the playbook, or a safety net of any kind.
Building Growster from Zero
In 2019, Harshit started Growster with ₹300 in his bank account. He made 100 cold calls a day to sell website design to small businesses, at the height of the Covid lockdown. No investor. No fallback. He did not ask his family for money, a choice rooted in the self-reliance his boarding school years had drilled into him, and started Growster with this initial seed fund of Rs. 300.
From those cold calls, Growster grew into social media, performance marketing, and full-scale creative production. He refused to say no to new briefs, pivoted when the market shifted, and kept going until the agency earned mandates from Snitch, Virgo, Zouk, and RWDY by Vijay Deverakonda, names most agency founders would treat as landmarks of a career. For Harshit, they were early chapters.
What Young Leadership Actually Looks Like
Harshit is part of a generation of founders who did not inherit businesses or buy into established playbooks. He built in a period when the old rules of management, hierarchy, burnout as a badge, clients always being right, were visibly breaking down, and when a new kind of leader had to figure out something different in real time.
At Growster, that has meant running an agency on two principles that most would consider contradictory: radical empathy and genuine accountability. Clients who are disrespectful to the team are let go. But anyone who doesn’t genuinely care about delivering results for clients doesn’t last either. Both standards are non-negotiable, and Harshit holds them equally.
This isn’t policy; it’s what he learned watching his parents, both business owners who weathered significant highs and lows, navigate the human cost of building something. His generation of leaders grew up watching what the old model produced: anxious, burned-out workforces, high churn, and campaigns that spent budgets without building anything. He is building a different kind of firm.
On the aspirational side, he points to Steve Jobs, specifically, the willingness to be, as he puts it, “delusional about your dreams.” For a founder who started with ₹300, that framing is less motivational poster and more a lived operating principle.
What He’s Building Towards
The next five years, for Harshit, are not about scaling headcount or chasing revenue milestones. He wants Growster to pioneer a new kind of marketing professional: production people who understand growth, and growth people who understand creative. That cross-functional thinking, he believes, is what the next wave of marketing will be built on, and the talent to execute it doesn’t exist yet in any pipeline. He intends to create it.
Success, for him, looks like a body of work: campaigns that genuinely shaped brands, and a team where the people who joined early built careers they are proud of.
Outside Work
He is an avid reader, the kind who finds a book in a 10-minute gap between meetings. His reading ranges widely; he has a soft spot for teen fiction and airport novels, which he credits for helping him switch off. He has recently rediscovered his love for fitness and is training for a marathon.
Q. How has the link between data and creativity changed for brands in the past few years?
Classically, brands spent big money on TVCs, OOH, and events, but there was no real attribution. You could only measure impact qualitatively, through NPS scores or brand lift studies and FGDs, without ever knowing precisely what a rupee spent had actually achieved.
That’s changed with self-serve platforms like Meta and Google. Now you can trace spending down to the last paisa and know exactly what it delivered. That level of visibility has opened up real scrutiny; every advertising dollar has to justify itself.
In many ways, creativity today has become a bridge to solve data problems. If a brand’s CTRs aren’t performing, the creative gets built specifically to fix that. That’s made creativity more disciplined and outcome-driven, but it’s also a double-edged sword.
Marketers can no longer just tell stories or play to emotion; we’re competing with content creators who earn attention naturally through relatability. Brands have had to become relatable, too. Some of that classical storytelling may be fading, but that’s simply how the landscape is evolving.
Q. You manage over Rs. 100 Crores in media spend. How do you balance speed in production with keeping quality high for big brands?
We’ve spent over 100 crores on the assets we’ve generated over the last six years, and speed-versus-quality comes down to systems. We’ve built efficient systems to spot trends, track shifts in content patterns, and stay close to where the consumer is moving.
Our machinery is built to produce high volumes without compromising on quality. Part of Growster’s ethos is to partner with a couple of large brands in every industry and give them a real moat, production quality and format testing that’s unmatched by any other agency or by their own internal teams. That’s what we’re solving for.
Q. How did Rubans and Snitch benefit from Growster’s creative approach?
Both are brands scaling into new categories and industries. They wanted content that resonates with their audience in a way that opens up new markets for their products.
Our videos give them ready content to put advertising dollars behind, along with the learnings we’ve built from working across other brands, helping them get a better strike rate on their ads and, ultimately, drive more revenue.
Q. Brands today want content that scales fast. What systems has Growster built to deliver personalised ads without losing the brand story?
We’ve built systems specifically for this. Put any two Growster-made ads for different brands side by side, and you won’t find similarities; production is kept tight to each brand’s world.
Every person on the team, from the crew member holding a light to the editor to the director, is briefed on the brand language. Our teams essentially become an extension of the brand’s own team; we think, eat, and breathe that brand, so the content comes naturally.
That’s also why we can scale fast; it’s become second nature to us, and it’s built as a system, not dependent on any one person. Even as we grow to a 200-person team, we want to retain the same culture, where every person understands exactly what we’re building for a brand on any given day, no second-guessing on direction or creative choices. That comes from the time we invest in brand immersion.
Q. With Meta and Google changing rules often, what risks do brands face if they don’t adapt their creative strategy quickly?
A new trend surfaces almost every week now. The real risk is not moving fast enough; if a brand’s internal decision-making is slow or bloated, by the time they adapt, competitors have already started eating into their market share.
Brands need to iterate daily, social listening, tracking the industry, and figuring out what can be adapted for their own audience. Consumers today are loyal to their own sensibilities, not to brands. So brands need to create content that matches customer sensibility; that’s how loyalty gets earned by extension.
Q. Why does creativity matter more than targeting now?
Since Meta’s Andromeda update, the rulebook has been clear: creative matters more, targetting matters less. Make the right creative, and the platform will find the right audience for it. Targetting, as a lever, has lost most of its weight; it’s now about producing the right creative and doing it at scale.
Q. Indian brands are moving to a digital-first world. What practical steps should they take to stay relevant and win attention?
The first step is accepting that consumers today are loyal to their own sensibilities, not to brands, so content has to be built around what the audience actually cares about, not just what the brand wants to say.
That means daily social listening and staying close to what’s shifting in the industry, because platform trends move on a weekly cycle now, and slow, bloated decision-making is the fastest way to lose market share to a faster-moving competitor.
Second, brands need to move to a creative-first approach rather than leading with targeting or media spend. Platforms like Meta have made it clear that the right creative finds its own audience, so the investment has to go into producing strong, high-volume creative, not just buying reach.
Third, this has to be backed by systems, not one-off campaigns. Brand language needs to be tightly defined and briefed consistently, so that content can be produced at speed and scale without losing what makes the brand recognisable. Speed without a system just produces volume; speed with a system produces volume that still converts.
And finally, brands shouldn’t try to out-produce content creators at their own game. Creator-style content works for top-of-funnel visibility, but what actually drives sales is content made with a marketer’s understanding of the brand and the consumer. Digital-first doesn’t mean chasing every trend; it means building the discipline to adapt quickly while staying unmistakably true to the brand.
Q. Can brand building and performance marketing really work together?
This is central to how we work. In performance marketing, the constant risk is that revenue becomes the only KPI, and when you’re chasing revenue, it’s easy to lose the brand’s actual story and ethos. That’s the perennial tension between marketing and business teams.
We bridge that gap by first immersing ourselves in the brand’s story, understanding what the brand will and won’t say, and why it sells what it sells. Only then do we build the creative, so that business and marketing are married together into something that actually scales.
Q. Authentic storytelling is a big theme. How does Growster help clients find stories that feel real and still drive sales?
We start with immersion, not with the brief. Before we write a single script, we spend real time understanding a brand natively, what it will and won’t say, why it sells what it sells, and what its actual ethos is, beyond the marketing language. That gets briefed down to every single person on the team, from the crew member holding a light to the editor to the director, so the brand’s voice isn’t something we refer back to a document for; it’s something the whole team already thinks in.
That’s what keeps the storytelling authentic. The honest tension in this industry is that when revenue becomes the only KPI, it’s very easy to quietly lose the brand’s actual story in favour of whatever converts fastest. We try to close that gap by treating brand and business as one problem, not two. We only start building creative once we understand the brand story natively, so the content is marrying business and marketing together rather than sacrificing one for the other.
The other part of it is scale with consistency. Because our teams essentially become an extension of the brand’s own team, the authenticity doesn’t dilute as we produce more content or move faster; it becomes second nature, which is what lets a story stay real even when it’s being produced at volume and built to sell.
Q. Growing fast often means pressure on teams. How is Growster managing scale while keeping creativity fresh for clients?
Creativity doesn’t happen under pressure; it needs time, and that’s true of anything creative.
So we’ve structured our team into multiple factions, each dedicated to a particular client. That lets us stay fresh and creative while still delivering at scale.
Q. With over Rs 100 Crores in media spend, clients will expect guaranteed ROI. How does Growster handle the situation when a big creative-led campaign doesn’t deliver the numbers brands paid for?
There’s no such thing as easy money or guaranteed ROI. When a campaign underperforms, we go back and try to understand what went wrong and build a new hypothesis.
We price ourselves in a way that keeps us approachable, so brands come back for another shot rather than walking away after one miss. We’re not trying to build a one-invoice billing relationship; we’re building an extension of a brand’s marketing and content team, one they return to repeatedly.
Any good marketer knows results are a hypothesis game. If the first hypothesis doesn’t work, we sit down together, understand why, and solve it in the next batch. It’s usually just a matter of time before it starts working, and when brand teams and agencies work together rather than in silos, there’s very little chance of a campaign truly failing.
Q. As budgets move to creators and AI tools, how does Growster prove to clients that spend isn’t just going to “content production” with no clear business impact?
I’d actually push back on the premise a little; budgets have started moving back from creators and AI tools. The creator bubble has burst, and market rates are coming down, or are set to in the coming months.
AI has taken over a lot of what brands used to outsource- copywriting, idea generation, deck-making- so we don’t compete there anymore. What we tell clients is simple: AI-made content has a low barrier to entry, which means every brand can do it, which means it won’t make your brand stand out. Creator content is great for top-of-funnel awareness, but it doesn’t convert the way content made by marketers for consumers does.
Growster sits in the sweet spot between cost and creativity; we’re priced competitively with creators, not at a premium, while delivering a meaningfully higher strike rate at scale. It’s content built by marketers, built on a brand book, and built to convert, and we have the data and client retention (clients typically stay with us 2–2.5 years, which is close to our own company’s lifespan) to back that up. The business impact on revenue is clear and doesn’t need much justification.
Q. With so many new growth marketing agencies in Delhi/NCR, what stops a client from leaving Growster once you’ve built their playbook and they take it in-house?
Honestly, nothing formally stops a client from leaving. Our moat is an invisible one: our efficiency in producing at scale. Many brands have tried to replicate it in-house and have not been able to match our efficiency or precision.
At the end of the day, our moat is that we genuinely care about the brands we work with, about the content, about the revenue outcomes, and we’ve built systems around that. That’s where our success comes from.
Q. You talk about a creative-first approach for 2026. What will brands that ignore this lose in the market?
Brands that don’t shift to a creative-first approach in 2026 will struggle to drive sales or scale, at least on the advertising side. There’s really no way to build a brand today without putting creative first, unless you’re something like a mass, retail-first legacy brand (a Keshe King hair oil, for instance). Any new-age brand simply won’t survive without a content-first approach.
Q. How is AI changing the way Growster makes and tests ads today?
AI plays a meaningful but bounded role for us. It’s excellent at pattern recognition, so we use it heavily to audit ad accounts and pit creative performances against each other, and to stress-test our hypotheses and surface weaknesses before we commit budget. We also use it internally to build tools that would otherwise be too expensive, and to make our own workflows more efficient.
But scripting and ideation stay human. We don’t lean on AI much beyond image generation in our videos. What we’re protecting is the sanctity of human-made content, the kind that stops the scroll. AI content, in our experience, tends to trigger people to scroll past; it can be entertaining, but we’re not in the business of entertainment. We’re in the business of selling a product, and for that, we rely on human instinct.
