Darpan Keswani

The brief. Build the company’s first owned event: three days, Bangkok, a room of telco executives, investors, bankers and press. Prove the business was real to people who had only seen it in a deck.

What I owned. All of it. Ideation, the agenda and panel line-up, vendor sourcing and costing, hotel and venue, the registration flow and RSVP forms, invitations, pre-event newsletters, branding and on-site collateral, the media calendar, KOL and press invitations, and the comms running during the event itself. One task list, 100-plus rows, mostly mine.

Getting the right room. Attendance was the hard part. The guest list was built by role, not by headcount: operators we were live with, investors we wanted in the next round, and journalists who covered telecom and fintech in the region. Every invite went out with a reason that person should be there, and the RSVP flow was tuned so the people we wanted most got the least friction.

The press work. Coverage was not left to a press release. I set up one-to-one interviews with reporters around the event, gave each outlet a different exclusive angle so nothing cannibalised, and used the CEO as the hook. The part people underestimate: I worked backwards from what each journalist’s editor would approve, shaping the pitch so the story fit a beat they were already running. That is why it ran as features rather than a wire pick-up.

What came out of it. 100+ executives across three days. Features in e27, Benzinga, Forbes and CryptoDaily plus local coverage. A 71-piece content plan from the recordings and photos that fed social for weeks afterwards. And the investor conversations that began in that room were part of the funding round the company closed next.

What I took from it. A big offline event is a distribution channel, not a cost centre, if you design the room and the press cycle together. The playbook is now reusable: the task list, the guest-list logic and the outlet-by-outlet angle sheet are the template for the next one.

The setup. Two audiences, two jobs. Organic was for reach and credibility: weekly X Spaces and co-marketing announcements with every new partner, so each partner’s audience met ours. Paid was for leads: companies in gaming, finance and consumer apps who wanted distribution into telco user bases and could plug into the platform.

The paid campaign. Five angles, one per segment and pain point, each with ten creatives. Total spend: $500. The metric was never followers; it was cost per lead into a Google Form for partnerships, with cost per follower tracked only for the organic side. Losing creatives were cut within days, winners got the budget.

Why the split matters. Mixing the two is how teams end up spending ad money on vanity numbers. Organic (co-marketing, Spaces) owned followers and engagement. Paid owned sign-ups. Each side had its own cost metric and its own definition of done.

Result. 15K to 60K followers in three to six months, mostly from co-marketing and Spaces. From the paid side, a lead flow that converted into 80 live partners over the next year, on a budget most teams spend on a single boosted post.

What I took from it. Segment first, then pick the metric. A $500 budget forces you to decide what you are actually buying.

Who it was for. Three audiences at once: telco and CVM decision-makers evaluating us, investors tracking the company, and the apps, games and brands who might partner with us. The content had to work for a buyer, a backer and a partner without feeling like three different pages.

Founder-led first. The CEO’s profile was the engine. I ran it as a channel: a posting cadence, a point of view per week, and the company page amplifying rather than competing. His following doubled from 20K to 40K, and the page grew in its slipstream.

The content system. Small team, so every idea was squeezed four ways: a text post, a carousel, a short video or GIF, and a founder version. We tried everything early (polls, carousels, long text, GIF series, data posts) and kept what performed. The survivors became a recurring brand series with a fixed format, which made production faster and gave followers something to recognise.

Volume with rules. 465 posts in twelve months. That only works with locked style rules, a batch workflow (write five, schedule five) and a weekly look at what moved. Posts that did not earn their slot were replaced, not debated.

Result. Company page 1,700 to 8,000 followers, all organic. CEO 20K to 40K. Inbound from the right people: operator teams, investors and partners referencing specific posts in first conversations.

What I took from it. On LinkedIn, consistency compounds faster than cleverness. A fixed format you can ship weekly beats a brilliant post you ship once.

The buyer. Fintechs and venture firms handling digital assets. A small, careful audience that researches before it talks to sales, so the funnel had to earn trust before it asked for a meeting.

What I inherited. A CRM nobody had wired up, a rebranded site with nothing to download, and an agency that knew the right keywords but had no content to rank with. The pieces were there; the system was not.

Content and SEO. The agency had the keyword map; I wrote the content. We started where we could win, low-difficulty long-tail terms, and used those pages to build domain authority over six months. By the end we ranked in the top three for the head term, custody wallet, which is where the serious buyers were searching.

Gated collateral and landing pages. Every piece of substantial content got a landing page with an email gate: guides, comparisons, product explainers. That turned organic traffic into named leads inside the CRM rather than anonymous visits.

Events. This is where the Web3 meetup series started. Monthly events in Bangkok put the product in front of exactly the people we wanted, with a follow-up sequence that moved attendees into the pipeline. Events and SEO ended up as the two biggest lead sources.

Sales enablement from zero. The company had no brand deck, no product deck, no one-pagers, no case studies, no pricing or competitor comparisons. I built the set, so a lead that marketing generated had something to be sold with.

Result. 800 qualified leads in six months. Product signups up 20% month over month. Top three for the main keyword. Newsletter doubled to 7,400; X from 900 to 5,000.

What I took from it. In B2B, the lead count is the output of five systems working together. Fix the CRM and the collateral first; the traffic is worthless without somewhere to land.

The engine. Two channels did most of the work: Meetup.com as the discovery portal, where people searching for tech events in each city found us, and a newsletter that kept them between events. Everything else, social included, pointed back to those two.

Expanding city by city. Each new city followed the same pattern. First, a local community who already had the room and the trust, so we co-hosted rather than cold-launched. Then speakers whose own networks brought the crowd. Then a sponsor to cover the venue. Bangkok proved the format, Chiang Mai tested it, Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore followed.

Sponsors as proof. Sponsorship was the growth signal. Early events ran on goodwill and borrowed venues. As the audience became reliable, the sponsors did too, up to names like the Ethereum Foundation and AWS. The pitch to each was the same: a specific room of builders and operators in a specific city, with the attendance history to back it.

What it fed back. The community became a channel for my day jobs: it is where the custody meetups came from, where press and partner introductions happened, and where I built the network that made a 100-executive summit possible later.

Result. 1,800+ members. 44 events. Four cities. Repeat sponsors. Zero paid acquisition.

What I took from it. Communities grow through connections, not promotion. Find the person who already has the room, and the room comes with them.