Saptarshi Ray profile photo 1 on Tal

Saptarshi Ray

Marketer | Collective Artists Network | ISB | INSEAD

Bengaluru

7+ years of work experience

Collective Artists Network
Feb 20269 mosPresent

Bengaluru

Brands & Licensing | Collective Artists Network After leading an 8-member team at Big Bang Social, I moved into a very different job. Smaller team: me. Higher stakes: celebrities, their money, their reputation and consumer brands that had to actually sell. I moved into building celebrity-led consumer businesses from scratch and very quickly discovered how wide the phrase from scratch can be. I worked across product development, sourcing, vendor shortlisting, sampling, inventory buying and planning, pricing, margins, unit economics, warehousing, customs, freight, fulfilment, payment gateways, WMS, website development and GTM. Basically, if there was a box somewhere between idea and a product reaching a customer's doorstep, I probably had to open it. For one active lifestyle brand, I built supply networks across Guangzhou, Shantou and Zhejiang in China, Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, Ludhiana in Punjab, and Dharavi, Bhiwandi and Ghatkopar in Mumbai. That meant learning things I had never been trained to do: understanding fabrics and construction, comparing samples, negotiating MOQs and lead times, planning inventory, working backwards from margins, and figuring out how decisions made months before launch would eventually show up in the customer experience. This role was uncomfortable in the best possible way. I went from leading specialists to having to become competent across an absurdly wide spectrum of things myself. And it reinforced something I’ve come to believe strongly: You don’t always need to know how to solve the problem when it arrives. You do need to be the kind of person who will figure it out.
Collective Artists Network
Apr 202511 mosFeb 2026

This might be the team I’m proudest of building. 8 people across performance, content, design, creator support, product marketing, community and brand. People far better than me at their individual crafts, which is probably exactly how a team should be built. Together, we grew daily installs by 177% for the BBS app, which helped creators participate in various collaboration opportunities with brands, brought blended CAC down to ₹8 and sustained it for seven months, while getting D0–D7 retention to 19.8%. We built an affiliate programme that onboarded 10,000+ creators and generated ₹5 Cr+ in tracked GMV in its first quarter. We also did some wonderfully mad things along the way. Like helping execute a hyperlocal influencer campaign for HUL across 5,000+ unique pincodes in India. Or growing our own Instagram community from zero to 25,000 organically. Or constantly finding new ways to turn creators from an audience we marketed to into the distribution engine itself. This role taught me that growth is rarely one big idea. It’s a hundred small systems across product, content, distribution, community and people, working well together. And increasingly, my favourite part of the job became building the team capable of figuring those systems out without me.
Rigi
Jun 20222 yrs 2 mosJul 2024

Bengaluru

Rigi was where my job description started becoming increasingly difficult to explain. I began on the creative side, leading a national campaign with MS Dhoni, Tanmay Bhat, Kusha Kapila, Gaurav Taneja and Sharan Hegde across 10+ cities. At the same time, I built an 8-member creative marketing team from scratch across copy, content and editing. Then an internal hackathon changed my role completely. I pitched an idea for a platform where creators could connect their Instagram accounts, participate in brand challenges, post content against a brief, and get paid based on how many views they generated. More views = more money. For brands, the proposition was equally simple. They knew their cost per view before spending a rupee, could activate hundreds of creators for horizontal visibility, and take a campaign live within three working days of finalising the brief. The idea won support, and I moved on to building the product from scratch. We eventually took it to 700,000 signups in two weeks at ₹1.2 CPA, built a 25,000-member nano creator community, and redesigned the activation funnel to improve DAU conversion from under 15% to 32%. This was probably the role where I stopped thinking of product, growth, creative and marketing as separate disciplines. There was a problem to solve. I just wanted to build whatever solved it.
Namaste Business
Apr 20202 yrs 3 mosJun 2022

Bengaluru

Joined Namaste Business as the first marketing hire, which is a fancy way of saying I got to build the marketing function from scratch. So I learnt everything I could get my hands on: storytelling, copywriting, video editing, performance marketing, SEO, ASO and, eventually, how to build a team. I made plenty of mistakes. Luckily, I worked for a CEO, Dhilbar, whose response was almost always the same: It’s okay. We’ll get it right next time. Watching him manage me taught me one of my earliest lessons in leadership. Skills can be taught. Processes can be fixed. Mistakes can be corrected. But if someone genuinely has skin in the game, give them room. They’ll usually figure things out in ways that surprise you. And sometimes, themselves.
McCann Worldgroup
Apr 20191 yr 1 moApr 2020

Bangalore

Had the best time working here. This was the role where I really got to punch above my weight. I was doing the usual account management work, but increasingly found myself pulled towards the parts I enjoyed most: consumer research, new product development and crafting the creative proposition behind a campaign. Along the way, I launched Aashirvaad Vermicelli, worked on ITC’s ready-to-cook chapatis, won two Effie Silvers for a campaign called Tarun’s Tiffin, and handled the pre and post-IPO campaigns for Ujjivan Small Finance Bank. This was probably where advertising stopped being just a job and I started understanding the business behind the communication. I eventually had to move on for a very practical reason: family commitments meant I needed to find opportunities that paid better. This is where I also learnt that sometimes career decisions are less about chasing the next big thing and more about doing what life requires of you.
J. Walter Thompson Worldwide
May 20181 yrApr 2019

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Joining advertising was pure serendipity. I interviewed at JWT with absolutely no idea how an ad agency worked. The one thing I did know was how to handle extremely high-maintenance clients, which, as it turns out, is fairly useful in client servicing. Three months in, my Branch Head walked up to me and said, You were born for this role. At the time, it felt like the greatest compliment I’d ever received. Nine months later, after delivering my first TVC, releasing more print ads than I can remember and working on a bunch of BTL campaigns, I realised I was probably born to be good at this role. And maybe more. So when McCann offered me the opportunity to work on ITC Aashirvaad, I took it. Looking back, though, I’m incredibly grateful to JWT and my manager there. They introduced me to a world that eventually became an obsession. Probably why I still can’t bring myself to buy YouTube Premium. I genuinely enjoy watching the ads. Weird? I know.

Saptarshi’s AI Stack

claude code
claude code
claude
claude
codex
codex
elevenlabs
elevenlabs
meta
meta
openai
openai

Education

Indian School of Business

Master of Business Administration - MBA

Indian School of Business

20241 yr2025
Mumbai university

Bachelor of Science, Hospitality Administration/Management

Mumbai university

Join Saptarshi and 10k+ other professionals on

Tal Boss

Tal is the app where bosses meet engineers & builders directly, without middlemen

Download Tal Boss

Saptarshi Ray on Tal

Headline

Marketer | Collective Artists Network | ISB | INSEAD

About

I build growth engines that compound. Over 10+ years across consumer internet, creator economy, and D2C commerce, I've scaled acquisition through strategy, channel architecture, and high-performance teams, while keeping unit economics honest. 700,000 signups in two weeks at ₹1.2 CPA. CAC brought down to ₹8 while scaling daily installs 177%. 10,000+ creators converted into a revenue-generating affiliate channel. A brand built from zero - GTM strategy, acquisition architecture, margin design, and commercial roadmap owned end-to-end. My edge is sitting at the intersection of growth strategy and operator execution. I've run media budgets, managed P&Ls, built supplier networks, and led cross-functional teams that deliver measurable outcomes. I don't just brief agencies. I build the systems they operate within.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

claude

codex

elevenlabs

meta

openai

Work experience

Commercial Growth & Celebrity D2C Brand Building at Collective Artists Network, Feb 2026 - Present · 9 mos, Bengaluru, Brands & Licensing | Collective Artists Network After leading an 8-member team at Big Bang Social, I moved into a very different job. Smaller team: me. Higher stakes: celebrities, their money, their reputation and consumer brands that had to actually sell. I moved into building celebrity-led consumer businesses from scratch and very quickly discovered how wide the phrase from scratch can be. I worked across product development, sourcing, vendor shortlisting, sampling, inventory buying and planning, pricing, margins, unit economics, warehousing, customs, freight, fulfilment, payment gateways, WMS, website development and GTM. Basically, if there was a box somewhere between idea and a product reaching a customer's doorstep, I probably had to open it. For one active lifestyle brand, I built supply networks across Guangzhou, Shantou and Zhejiang in China, Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, Ludhiana in Punjab, and Dharavi, Bhiwandi and Ghatkopar in Mumbai. That meant learning things I had never been trained to do: understanding fabrics and construction, comparing samples, negotiating MOQs and lead times, planning inventory, working backwards from margins, and figuring out how decisions made months before launch would eventually show up in the customer experience. This role was uncomfortable in the best possible way. I went from leading specialists to having to become competent across an absurdly wide spectrum of things myself. And it reinforced something I’ve come to believe strongly: You don’t always need to know how to solve the problem when it arrives. You do need to be the kind of person who will figure it out.

Head of Marketing - Big Bang Social at Collective Artists Network, Apr 2025 - Feb 2026 · 11 mos, This might be the team I’m proudest of building. 8 people across performance, content, design, creator support, product marketing, community and brand. People far better than me at their individual crafts, which is probably exactly how a team should be built. Together, we grew daily installs by 177% for the BBS app, which helped creators participate in various collaboration opportunities with brands, brought blended CAC down to ₹8 and sustained it for seven months, while getting D0–D7 retention to 19.8%. We built an affiliate programme that onboarded 10,000+ creators and generated ₹5 Cr+ in tracked GMV in its first quarter. We also did some wonderfully mad things along the way. Like helping execute a hyperlocal influencer campaign for HUL across 5,000+ unique pincodes in India. Or growing our own Instagram community from zero to 25,000 organically. Or constantly finding new ways to turn creators from an audience we marketed to into the distribution engine itself. This role taught me that growth is rarely one big idea. It’s a hundred small systems across product, content, distribution, community and people, working well together. And increasingly, my favourite part of the job became building the team capable of figuring those systems out without me.

Growth & Product Marketing Lead at Rigi, Jun 2022 - Jul 2024 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Bengaluru, Rigi was where my job description started becoming increasingly difficult to explain. I began on the creative side, leading a national campaign with MS Dhoni, Tanmay Bhat, Kusha Kapila, Gaurav Taneja and Sharan Hegde across 10+ cities. At the same time, I built an 8-member creative marketing team from scratch across copy, content and editing. Then an internal hackathon changed my role completely. I pitched an idea for a platform where creators could connect their Instagram accounts, participate in brand challenges, post content against a brief, and get paid based on how many views they generated. More views = more money. For brands, the proposition was equally simple. They knew their cost per view before spending a rupee, could activate hundreds of creators for horizontal visibility, and take a campaign live within three working days of finalising the brief. The idea won support, and I moved on to building the product from scratch. We eventually took it to 700,000 signups in two weeks at ₹1.2 CPA, built a 25,000-member nano creator community, and redesigned the activation funnel to improve DAU conversion from under 15% to 32%. This was probably the role where I stopped thinking of product, growth, creative and marketing as separate disciplines. There was a problem to solve. I just wanted to build whatever solved it.

Head of Creative Marketing at Namaste Business, Apr 2020 - Jun 2022 · 2 yrs 3 mos, Bengaluru, Joined Namaste Business as the first marketing hire, which is a fancy way of saying I got to build the marketing function from scratch. So I learnt everything I could get my hands on: storytelling, copywriting, video editing, performance marketing, SEO, ASO and, eventually, how to build a team. I made plenty of mistakes. Luckily, I worked for a CEO, Dhilbar, whose response was almost always the same: It’s okay. We’ll get it right next time. Watching him manage me taught me one of my earliest lessons in leadership. Skills can be taught. Processes can be fixed. Mistakes can be corrected. But if someone genuinely has skin in the game, give them room. They’ll usually figure things out in ways that surprise you. And sometimes, themselves.

Senior Project Manager at McCann Worldgroup, Apr 2019 - Apr 2020 · 1 yr 1 mo, Bangalore, Had the best time working here. This was the role where I really got to punch above my weight. I was doing the usual account management work, but increasingly found myself pulled towards the parts I enjoyed most: consumer research, new product development and crafting the creative proposition behind a campaign. Along the way, I launched Aashirvaad Vermicelli, worked on ITC’s ready-to-cook chapatis, won two Effie Silvers for a campaign called Tarun’s Tiffin, and handled the pre and post-IPO campaigns for Ujjivan Small Finance Bank. This was probably where advertising stopped being just a job and I started understanding the business behind the communication. I eventually had to move on for a very practical reason: family commitments meant I needed to find opportunities that paid better. This is where I also learnt that sometimes career decisions are less about chasing the next big thing and more about doing what life requires of you.

Account Executive at J. Walter Thompson Worldwide, May 2018 - Apr 2019 · 1 yr, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Joining advertising was pure serendipity. I interviewed at JWT with absolutely no idea how an ad agency worked. The one thing I did know was how to handle extremely high-maintenance clients, which, as it turns out, is fairly useful in client servicing. Three months in, my Branch Head walked up to me and said, You were born for this role. At the time, it felt like the greatest compliment I’d ever received. Nine months later, after delivering my first TVC, releasing more print ads than I can remember and working on a bunch of BTL campaigns, I realised I was probably born to be good at this role. And maybe more. So when McCann offered me the opportunity to work on ITC Aashirvaad, I took it. Looking back, though, I’m incredibly grateful to JWT and my manager there. They introduced me to a world that eventually became an obsession. Probably why I still can’t bring myself to buy YouTube Premium. I genuinely enjoy watching the ads. Weird? I know.

Education

Master of Business Administration - MBA, Indian School of Business

Bachelor of Science, Hospitality Administration/Management, Mumbai university

Public links

theycallmerishi.com: https://theycallmerishi.com/