The best recommendation I get goes something like this: "Please listen to that a*shole so that you can make your business better."
I'll take it.
Seven years of building things and the one thing I keep getting hired for isn't strategy decks or brand audits — it's clarity. The kind that's uncomfortable to hear and impossible to ignore. I will tell you what's actually wrong with your positioning, why your market doesn't understand what you sell, and exactly what needs to change.
That directness comes from doing it myself, not just advising others. I've started 13 companies — tea shops, specialty coffee, wedding invites. Nine failed and three exited. I led brand strategy at HCL GUVI, India's largest vernacular ed-tech platform with over 3 million learners, where my team set a Guinness World Record. I used to write The Stupidpreneur Newsletter to 23,000+ founders daily. I've delivered 100+ talks on branding and entrepreneurship and for that reason LinkedIn named me a Top Voice in Branding and gave me the blue badge and not the phony yellow one.
None of that is why people keep coming back. They come back because I don't waste their money on campaigns that feel good and do nothing.
Now I'm building Say About Us — and it comes from the same place everything that kept showing up and nobody was fixing honestly.
My biggest branding lesson is that the first purchase means your marketing worked. The second means they trust you. The referral is when a brand starts. That third stage, where customers sell for you — only happens when you've earned enough trust to make someone stake their own reputation on recommending you. Every company I advised had the same gap. They had good products with real results, but a stranger landing on their page couldn't tell.
Social proof is how that starts. Not a wall of five-star ratings nobody believes. Real testimonials, collected properly, shown where they matter.
Say About Us is the tool I wish existed when I was on the other side — doing the work, doing it right, and still having to prove it from scratch every single time. We hate the Success Tax and we don't handcuff you either.
If you want someone to tell you your brand is great, I'm not the guy. If you want someone to tell you what's actually broken and how to fix it — I'm exactly the a*shole you're looking for.