At Brilliant Read Media, it is our constant endeavour to identify and share some of the unique and compelling stories from the startup ecosystem. As part of this, we invited Kaveri Tikmani for an interview with Brilliant Read Media. To say further, Kaveri is an Entrepreneur and Founder at Write Side Up Solutions & Eleven. Let’s learn more about her background, inspiring journey so far and her advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Kaveri:
You’ve spent 13 years in marketing—what pivotal experiences shaped your philosophy of “marketing that works for YOU”?
One thing I’ve observed consistently across clients is that we live in a world where everything is visible. You can see exactly what your competitor posted, what ad they’re running, how many likes they got. And that visibility, as useful as it is, creates a very dangerous reflex in business owners: comparison without context.
I’ve had clients come to me and say, that brand ran one post and it blew up, why isn’t mine doing that? Or, that competitor launched one ad and they’re everywhere now, what are we doing wrong?
What they’re not seeing is the two years of consistent presence that preceded that one post. The brand equity that was quietly compounding in the background. That ‘overnight success’ was built on months, sometimes years, of showing up, hammering the same message to the same audience, over and over, until it stuck.
Marketing compounds. Just like investing. The brands that are ‘viral’ aren’t the ones who react the fastest to what everyone else is doing, they’re the ones who stay the longest in their own lane.
So my philosophy, and what I tell every client now, is this: do what you’ve seen work for you. Zero in on that. Double down on it. Because the moment you start operating from someone else’s strategy, you’ve stopped having one of your own. And marketing without a strategy isn’t marketing at all, it’s just noise.
What inspired you to specifically focus on D2C brands, coaches, and service-based businesses?
Honestly, it comes down to one thing: I only want to work in spaces where I’m genuinely invested, either as someone who finds the work fascinating, or as someone who is the actual target audience.
With D2C brands, it’s the energy. The kind of products coming to market right now, the founders building them, there’s a level of innovation happening that I find genuinely exciting. I don’t want to just consult from the outside. I want to be in the room. I want to be part of the build.
With coaches, it’s more personal. When I started out, I was in a very specific place, just trying to figure out how to market myself, struggling with the same things I now see coaches struggle with every single day. I understand that mindset intimately.
The self-doubt around selling yourself. The discomfort with visibility. The pressure to look more established than you feel. I’ve lived those pain points, which means I can actually help someone move through them without handing them a content calendar.
And with service-based businesses, I’m selective. I don’t work with every service business. I work with the ones where I am the target audience. Physiotherapy, fitness, wellness, a book club, services revolving around kids, these are worlds I live in.
I’m not guessing what the customer feels or thinks. I know, because I am that customer. And when you market from that place of genuine understanding, the work is different. It shows.
Many people struggle with marketing overwhelm—how do you help clients simplify and gain clarity in their strategy?
Marketing overwhelm is real and I think it’s misunderstood by most people in this industry. The common assumption is that founders are overwhelmed because they don’t know what to do.
In my experience, that’s rarely the problem. The overwhelm comes from something much harder to fix: you’re giving effort, time, creativity, and vulnerability constantly and all of it publicly. And the return doesn’t come back on your timeline. It compounds invisibly, while you’re just… showing up. Day after day. With no guarantee.
And while you’re doing that, everyone has an opinion. A comment. A metric that tells you it’s not working. The effort you put out from a genuinely positive, energetic place doesn’t always land that way and founders absorb that personally. Because it is personal. It’s their business. Their idea. Their face on it sometimes.
So the overwhelm isn’t really about the workload. It’s about doing hard, public, emotionally exposed work with a delayed return, while also trying to run a business.
What I try to do is two things. First, I show them what’s on the other side. Not as a motivational exercise but as a strategic reality check. Here’s what the compounding looks like. Here’s what you’re actually building. Second, I break it down until the weight of it disappears. Small enough steps that marketing stops feeling like a separate, draining thing and starts feeling like a natural part of how they operate.
Most of my strategy sessions are less about deciding what goes up and more about mindset. Because a founder who understands why they’re doing what they’re doing, and believes it will work executes completely differently to one who’s just following a content calendar and hoping for the best.
What are the biggest mistakes you see D2C brands or coaches making on Instagram today?
I want to start by saying that marketing has genuinely gotten better. The number of founders who are confident on camera now, who are showing up consistently and authentically, is exciting to see.
But the mistake I see most often, across D2C brands and coaches alike, is overexplaining. You’re running a page. You have a target audience. That audience has pain points they’re actively living with.
Your job is to speak directly to those pain points and then, almost seamlessly, show how your product or service fits into the solution. That’s it. That’s the formula. It works every single time.
The moment you start adding layers, more context, more features, more explanation, you lose people. Because content that’s hard to consume doesn’t get consumed. And content that doesn’t get consumed, doesn’t build trust.
When you get this right, something interesting happens. The person watching or reading thinks: this person gets me. They understand exactly what I’m dealing with. And that thought, that moment of recognition, is where trust begins. Once someone trusts you, they don’t shop around when they need what you offer. They come back to you. Every time.
So the standard I try to hold my clients to is this: can someone understand your content in one second and immediately feel that you are the person solving their problem? If the answer is no, simplify. Keep simplifying until the answer is yes.
This is a mistake I catch myself making too. The temptation to overexplain is real, especially when you’re deeply invested in what you’re building. But the best marketing always looks effortless because it’s doing exactly one job, and doing it well.
You talk about “marketing with confidence”—what does that practically look like for a beginner vs. an established business?
Confidence in marketing looks very different depending on where you are and I think it’s important to acknowledge that, because the advice can’t be the same for both.
For an established business, confidence comes from evidence. You have numbers. You have testimonials. You have a track record. Your marketing confidence is essentially borrowed from your results and that’s a legitimate place to operate from.
For a beginner, there are no numbers yet. And that’s where it gets hard and where most people either show up apologetically or don’t show up at all.
But here’s what I tell every founder who’s just starting out: your audience cannot be more sure of you than you are of yourself. If you get in front of a camera or write a caption, or send an email and there’s even a trace of ‘I’m not sure this is good enough’ in how you carry yourself, people feel it. They may not be able to name it, but they feel it. And they don’t buy from it.
So the question isn’t: do I have the numbers to back this up? The question is: do I believe in what I’m building?
If the answer is yes, that belief has to come through publicly. Not arrogantly. Not with manufactured hype. Just with the quiet, steady conviction of someone who knows their product solves a real problem.
Confidence at the beginning isn’t about pretending you’re bigger than you are. It’s about being completely sure of the thing you’re selling and letting that sureness do the work. That’s what makes someone stop scrolling. That’s what makes someone trust a brand they’ve never heard of.
If someone had to focus on just 3 things to grow on Instagram, what would you recommend and why?
First: show your face. Founders need to be on screen. Not because it looks good, but because people trust people. They don’t trust logos. They don’t trust brand pages. They trust a human being who looks them in the eye and says: I built this, I believe in it, here’s why it matters. That human presence is the single fastest way to build the kind of trust that converts.
Second: be honest, not polished. There’s this pressure, especially on Instagram, to make everything look perfect. Perfect lighting, perfect edit, perfect caption. And what ends up happening is the content looks great and feels like nothing. Drop the facelift. Speak like a person. Share the real thing. Honesty on camera is far more magnetic than production value, and audiences in 2026 are very good at telling the difference.
Third: make them stop and think, then give them the answer. Your content has one job: to make someone pause mid-scroll and think ‘wait, that’s exactly what I’m dealing with.’ The moment you create that recognition, you have their attention. And then you give them the solution right there, in the same piece of content. Don’t hold it back for a link in bio or a paid offer. Give it freely. That generosity is what builds the kind of following that actually buys from you.
None of these require a big budget or a content team. They require clarity, consistency, and the confidence to show up as yourself. That’s it.
How do you balance authentic storytelling with conversion-driven marketing?
I think authenticity is one of the most overused and misunderstood words in marketing today. When people say ‘just be authentic,’ what they sometimes mean is: show up however you feel, bring your whole unfiltered self, and the audience will respond.
But that’s not a marketing strategy, that’s a diary. If you’re having a bad day, your audience doesn’t need to absorb that. Your content is a professional output. It deserves your best, not your current mood.
What I believe in instead is intentional storytelling. You are always putting your best foot forward but the story you tell is real. The problem you’re solving is real. The transformation you’re promising is real. That combination of high standards plus genuine substance is what actually builds trust.
Now, does storytelling drive conversion? Absolutely. But not because it’s ‘authentic.’ Because it’s resonant.
Think about why influencer marketing works. It’s not the follower count. It’s the fact that when someone you’ve followed for two years recommends a product, you believe them because you feel like you know them and somewhere in your heart, you want their glass skin or their taste in fashion.
You’ve watched them long enough to know what they actually stand for. And the smart influencers, the ones with real commercial value, only associate with brands that fit the world they’ve built. The moment they don’t, the audience feels it immediately.
That’s the balance. Your audience is sharp. They know when they’re being sold to. They’ve had enough of being pushed at. So the conversion doesn’t come from the pitch, it comes from the relationship that preceded the pitch. Tell the story well, build the trust consistently, and when the moment to sell arrives, you barely have to try.
Storytelling earns the right to convert. In that order, always.
Can you share a case study or transformation where your approach significantly changed a brand’s results?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of brands across very different stages, so there are many transformation stories I could share but let me tell you the ones that mean the most to me, because they’re not just about numbers.
One that stands out is a coach who was building her own niche from scratch. She had the expertise. She had the substance. But when it came to showing up on screen, there was real hesitation.
A visible discomfort with being seen. We worked on it together over time: the topics she spoke about, how she understood her audience’s behaviour, what perception she wanted to create and how to build it consistently. Today when I see her posting, she’s a completely different presence.
Confident, clear, owning her space. Some of her posts bring in hundreds of new followers in a single day. That shift came from a mindset change and I’m so proud to be a part of that journey for her.
And then there are the business wins, which are significant too. Clients who’ve seen real sales growth. A home-based startup that is now a recognised name in their industry. A brand whose ad performance was strong enough that they opened their first physical store. These are outcomes that change the trajectory of someone’s business and their life.
But honestly? The win I’m proudest of, across all of it, is when a client reaches the point where they know how to talk about what they do. Where the discomfort with marketing themselves is gone. They can brief better. They can show up better. They can drive the message home themselves, with or without me in the room.
That’s the hardest thing to teach. And when it happens, that’s the transformation I care about most.
What inner blocks or fears do you see holding people back from showing up consistently online—and how can they overcome them?
I think the block is generational. Millennials grew up in a world where showing up online was what influencers did. And there’s this deeply embedded association: if I do it, I’m performing. I’m seeking attention. I’m publicly embarrassing myself. Gen Z didn’t inherit that association, they grew up with it as normal. For millennials, it still feels like crossing a line.
But one needs to know that their gains are on the other side of that discomfort. The moment you start showing up, you start building something. But nothing will convert overnight, let it cook.
And yes, building in public means people can see you figuring it out. They can see the posts that don’t land, the videos that feel awkward, the ideas that don’t connect. You have to make peace with that. The only way through it is to be more committed to your vision than you are to other people’s opinions.
I genuinely don’t look at how someone reacts to what I put out. If I believe in it, I keep going. That’s not bravado, it’s just the only approach that works.
On the numbers, don’t do everything for them, and don’t let them shrink you either. The numbers don’t lie but they also don’t arrive on day one. So you monitor, you shift, you notice what’s working and you build more of that. You notice where your sales are coming from and you double down there. That’s the practice.
And if you ever feel like your following is too small to matter then close your eyes and imagine standing on a stage in a packed auditorium. A thousand people have shown up to hear you speak. That’s what a thousand followers is. That’s not a small number. That’s not something to be embarrassed about. That’s an audience.
Don’t play it small. The numbers you’re dismissing right now are the foundation of everything that comes next.
What does “marketing that works for YOU” mean in terms of alignment, energy, and sustainability?
A founder sees a competitor doing talking head videos and suddenly everyone’s doing talking head videos. Someone sees a brand blowing up on memes and now everyone’s doing memes. And some of them get results, but most of them don’t because they’re operating from imitation, not alignment.
Marketing that works for you starts with a very honest question: what can I actually sustain? Because the best strategy in the world is useless if you can’t show up for it consistently.
If you hate being on camera, building an entire content strategy around Reels is going to drain you in six weeks. If you’re a natural writer, maybe long-form LinkedIn content is where your energy compounds. The format has to fit the person, not the trend.
And then there’s the energy piece which people don’t talk about enough in marketing conversations. When you’re marketing from a place of genuine belief, it shows. When you’re marketing because you feel like you should, or because someone told you this is what’s working right now, that shows too. Audiences are perceptive. They can feel the difference between someone who means it and someone who’s going through the motions.
Sustainability is the part that separates the brands that last from the ones that burn bright for three months and disappear. Marketing is a long game. It compounds. But only if you keep playing. And you’ll only keep playing if the way you’re showing up doesn’t feel like it’s costing you everything.
So when I work with someone, one of the first things I try to understand is not just what their audience needs but what the founder can genuinely give. What lights them up.
What they could talk about on their worst day and still mean it. Because that intersection between what your audience needs and what you can give sustainably and with conviction, that’s where marketing stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like momentum.
That’s marketing that works for you. Not for the algorithm. Not for your competitor. For you.
For someone starting today, what would be your first 30-day roadmap to build a strong and confident marketing presence?
30 days is enough to build a foundation. It’s not enough to see results. And I think being honest about that upfront is actually the first step because if you go in expecting traction in 30 days, you’ll quit on day 31.
So here’s what you can do.
Start with complete clarity. Sit down and answer three questions honestly:
> Who am I talking to?
> What is the one problem I solve for them?
> And what do I want to be known for
Not in a broad, vague way, but specifically. Not ‘I help businesses grow.’ What do you actually do, for whom, and what changes for them after working with you? Get that down. Write it in one sentence. That sentence becomes the spine of everything you put out.
Then, start setting up your presence. Your bio, your profile, the way your page looks when someone lands on it for the first time. That first impression either makes someone stay or leave.
Make sure it’s immediately clear who you are and who you’re for. And then start consuming, not to copy, but to calibrate. Look at what’s working in your space. Notice what makes you stop scrolling. Start developing your own taste for what good looks like.
When you start, don’t start with 5 posts a week. Start with two. One piece of content that addresses a pain point your audience is living with right now. One piece that shows who you are as a person, not just what you do. Do those two things well. Don’t worry about production quality. Worry about whether it’s honest and whether it’s clear.
While doing all of the above, pay a lot of attention. Not to likes, to signals. Did anyone save it? Did anyone DM you? Did anyone share it? Those are the things that tell you something worked. Take note of what felt easy to make and what felt forced. Take note of what got a response and what didn’t. You’re not optimising yet, you’re just listening. Building the habit of noticing.
And through all thirty days, show your face at least 3 times. I know that’s the hard one. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be you, saying something you genuinely believe, to the person you’re genuinely trying to help.
Thirty days from now you won’t have a big following. But you’ll have something more valuable – a point of view, a presence, and the proof to yourself that you can do it. That’s the real foundation. Everything else gets built on top of that.
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