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From the Founders

Why we built Oye Creators, who is building it, and the company behind it.

Why Oye exists

Somewhere in Amravati there is a woman with six thousand followers who can fill a shop on a Saturday afternoon. No brand has ever paid her. For most of the last decade, the industry decided she was too small to matter.

She is not too small. She is the point.

We have spent fifteen years building a version of the internet where a few hundred people speak and a billion listen, and we have called that influence. It was never the truth. The truth is that the most persuasive voice in India has always been the nearest one — the neighbour, the shopkeeper, the teacher, the farmer with a demonstration plot. What we lacked was never trust. It was a way to reach the people who hold it.

That gap was never really about talent. It was about operations. Finding one famous person in Mumbai is easy; finding four hundred trusted people across four hundred towns, briefing them in twenty languages, tracking what they did and paying every one of them on time is hard. So the industry did the easy thing for a decade, and an enormous number of people who had genuinely earned an audience were left standing outside a room they belonged in.

The cost of that exclusion is not only theirs. A single-outlet restaurant cannot buy a billboard. A shopkeeper in Kolhapur cannot afford a television campaign. For the overwhelming majority of Indian businesses, marketing has been something other people do — a service priced for someone else. Both ends of that equation were shut out at once: the small business that needed customers, and the small creator who could have brought them.

So we built the thing that was missing. Not a directory of famous people, but a system: state what should happen, in which pin code, in which language, in which week — and the platform activates the creators who already hold that audience, briefs them, tracks the work and pays them.

What we are actually trying to do

If this works, the result is bigger than a marketplace.

It is income arriving in towns where there was very little. It is a nineteen-year-old in Nagpur discovering that her phone is a livelihood and not a distraction. It is Bhojpuri, Marathi, Assamese and Tamil becoming commercially valuable rather than merely spoken. It is the single most concentrated asset of the last decade — influence — being handed back, in small pieces, to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who actually earned it.

And on the other side of the same transaction, it is a family business in a tier-3 town being able to advertise at all. Campaigns on our platform start at ₹3,000. That number matters more than it looks: it is the difference between marketing being a privilege and marketing being a tool.

We are a business, and that is the point

We are not a charity, and I think that is what makes this durable. Good intentions do not pay a creator on the fifteenth of the month; systems do. So we built the unglamorous parts first — contracts, invoices, TDS, weekly reporting, payouts that actually arrive. Dignity, in practice, usually looks like plumbing.

We are early, and we will get things wrong. But the direction is not in doubt. The next decade of Indian marketing will not be written by a few hundred famous people in three cities. It will be written in four hundred towns, in twenty languages, by people whose neighbours believe them.

We would like to be the reason they got paid for it.

— Praddyumna Bapat, Founder & CEO

What we believe

Founder

Praddyumna Bapat, Founder of Oye Creators

Praddyumna Bapat

Founder & CEO, Oye Creators · TTL Media Private Limited, Pune

Some people build companies. A few set out to change who gets to be heard.

Praddyumna Bapat is the Founder and CEO of Oye Creators, driven by the belief that the future of marketing will be shaped by people, their credibility, and the communities they connect with.

He founded the company on a conviction the industry had spent a decade ignoring: that the most persuasive voice in India is not the most famous one — it is the nearest one. The woman with six thousand followers in Amravati who is believed because her audience can walk into the shop she mentioned. The farmer in Yavatmal whose demonstration plot is proof no advertisement could buy. India does not lack influence. It lacks a way to reach the people who actually hold it.

He came to the problem as an operator, not an observer. With over 14 years of experience across advertising, brand strategy and business development — including a period as Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder of a B2B SaaS company that he helped scale from zero to roughly $76 million in annual recurring revenue — he learned that revenue is never an accident; that it is engineered, measured and rebuilt every quarter. It is a rare discipline to bring into creator marketing, a category that had grown enormous while still running largely on instinct, screenshots and hope.

That is the standard he set for the platform. A brand should be able to say what it wants to happen — footfall in a pin code, orders in a language, trial in a town — and watch it happen, tracked week by week, with every creator paid on time and every rupee accounted for. Not impressions. Outcomes. The same rigour a CRO would demand of any other channel, finally applied to the one closest to real people.

The early evidence came quickly. Within sixty days Oye Creators had onboarded more than a thousand creators and delivered campaigns for restaurants, resorts, banking, jewellery and retail brands — proof that the hyperlocal, any-category model was not a thesis but a working machine. That model is still the one the platform runs on today, now across a network of 1.5 million creators in twenty-eight states and more than twenty languages.

His ambition is to make creator marketing an accessible, dependable part of everyday business growth — where local voices have value, emerging talent finds opportunity, and businesses of every size can participate. Through Oye Creators, he is working towards a more structured creator economy, bringing together technology, human insight, and operational discipline. He believes the industry’s next chapter will depend on how effectively it connects creative freedom with accountability, and scale with meaningful local relevance.

His approach to leadership reflects that same belief in possibility. As technology reshapes industries and roles, he sees continuous learning, ownership, and the courage to change direction as essential qualities for both people and businesses.

What he is building toward is larger than a marketplace. It is the idea that a shopkeeper in Nagpur and a national brand should have access to the same distribution; that a creator with four thousand followers deserves a contract, an invoice and a payout as reliable as any agency’s; and that the next decade of Indian marketing will be written not in three metros, but in four hundred towns, in the languages people actually dream in.

Praddyumna’s vision is to build an ecosystem where influence becomes opportunity — and where creators, brands, and teams can grow together.

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Founding team

The people who built the platform, the creator network and the brand relationships from day one — in the founder’s own words.

Ashi Bansal, Business Head at Oye Creators

Ashi Bansal

Business Head

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Ashi Bansal has been part of the Oye Creators journey from the very day the idea was conceived — not from the day it became a company, but from the day it was still only a conviction shared between a few people. Immensely talented, with business acumen sharp enough to cut through any room, she has been one of our greatest strengths and a constant source of steadiness.

It is rare to find someone with the courage to go against the tide and choose a radically different path in life. It is rarer still to find someone who does it with such certainty. Ashi brought that courage, along with the entrepreneurial instincts shaped by a business family, and turned both into the commercial backbone of Oye Creators.

A true all-rounder in the fullest sense of the word, she has worn every hat this company has needed — operations, client servicing, advising on product development, managing HR and business operations, and stepping into production when production is what the moment demanded. Wherever there was a gap, she closed it. Wherever ownership was needed, she took it. That instinct, more than any title, is what has made her indispensable to this journey.

Ashi, thank you for believing in the idea from day one, and for putting so much of yourself into bringing it to life.

Shital Bhujbal, Accounts & Finance at Oye Creators

Shital Bhujbal

Accounts & Finance

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Shital knows accounting the way we know our closest friends — with familiarity, understanding, and an unerring instinct for the moment something needs attention.

She has been a critical part of Oye Creators since its inception. Before the company even had its “birth certificate”, she was preparing documentation and putting accounting processes in place — building the scaffolding of a business before there was a business to hold it up. From managing funds and cash flow to maintaining the books, she has built the financial discipline that a growing company cannot survive without and rarely appreciates until it is missing.

An immensely talented accounting professional, Shital carries many responsibilities at once, and carries each of them with care and precision. She understands something many finance teams never quite internalise: that accurate financial data is not paperwork. It is the honest picture of a company’s health, and the foundation of every good decision made on top of it.

Most companies remember their accounting team once a year, when the audit comes calling. We have made a habit of bothering Shital every single day — for clarity, for guidance, for her professional judgement — and not once has she been anything other than dependable.

Shital, thank you for being there from the very beginning, and for bringing order, accountability and reassurance to the Oye Creators journey.

Shoaib Sayyad, Product Manager at Oye Creators

Shoaib Sayyad

Product Manager

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Shoaib joined Oye Creators as our third team member, bringing with him ambition and an uncommonly early belief in what we were setting out to build.

He recognised, well before most, how rapidly automation and AI were rewriting the way we work. Rather than wait to see which roles would survive it, he took a piece of advice to heart and made a decision few would have the nerve to make — leaving digital marketing behind to move into product management entirely.

That transition was anything but easy. With Oye Creators still at the idea stage, he carried digital operations on one shoulder and product development on the other, learning from scratch, working through unfamiliar problems, and refusing to let either fall while the vision took shape.

What began as a single static website built by one developer has become five web applications, each designed and customised for a different kind of user and the realities of their working day. Along the way Shoaib grew into a manager of multiple developers and testing teams, fluent in the hardest translation in software — turning what a business needs into something that actually works.

Shoaib, thank you for believing in the idea, for embracing the uncertainty, and for growing alongside Oye Creators. You have every reason to be proud of what you have helped build — and we are proud to have you on this journey.

Anup Kamble, Designer at Oye Creators

Anup Kamble

Designer

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Anup Kamble is a young and genuinely dynamic professional whose passion for art has always been impossible to miss. He arrived with the talent and the hunger to create; what he needed was a direction that would connect that creativity to strategy.

His eye for detail, and his ability to turn an idea into something visually striking, quickly became his defining strengths as a designer. Building on artistic skill that was hard-earned rather than handed to him, he embraced learning from the ground up — understanding customer behaviour, the intent sitting behind a brief, and how design is meant to communicate long before it is meant to impress.

What I value most about Anup is his willingness to remain a student of design. That curiosity, and the commitment to learning that comes with it, keeps shaping him into a stronger professional every year. His ability to think visually, to articulate an idea through design, and to turn a simple thought into something genuinely memorable has been a considerable strength for me and for the team.

Anup, thank you for bringing your creativity, your dedication and your desire to learn to Oye Creators. It has been a pleasure to watch your talent find its direction and grow.

The company behind Oye: TTL Media

Oye Creators is a product of TTL Media Private Limited, a Pune-based company incorporated on 22 March 2024 and registered with the Registrar of Companies, Pune (CIN U73100PN2024PTC229413). TTL Media owns the platform, employs the team, holds the contracts with brands and creators, and is the legal entity named in every policy on this site.

TTL stands for Through The Line — and the name is the thesis. For decades advertising was split in two. Above the line meant mass media: television, radio, print, hoardings. Enormous reach, no targeting, and almost nothing you could measure at the level of a single person. Below the line meant everything direct: activations, sampling, in-store, events. Precisely targeted and genuinely measurable, but small, slow and expensive to scale.

Brands were forced to choose. Reach or relevance. Awareness or action. A campaign that everybody saw and nobody responded to, or one that converted beautifully in four localities and nowhere else.

Through the line is the refusal to choose. It sits exactly on the cusp of the two and serves both: the scale of media with the precision of activation, in a single motion. That idea is what the company was founded on — and Oye Creators is what it looks like when you build it. A creator’s post carries the reach of a media buy and the targeting, trust and measurability of a doorstep activation at the same time. Ten thousand nano creators across four hundred towns is a mass-reach campaign and a hyperlocal one simultaneously, tracked per pin code, per language, per week.

We named the company after the idea before we had built the product that proves it. Read the full story of ATL, BTL and TTL →

Directors: Pradeep Padmakar Bapat · Mahesh Narayan Sarawate · Nitin Nagnath Gangishetty

Registered office

Office No. 205, Second Floor, CTS No. 1703B, Final Plot No. 100, Bhambhurda, Narveer Tanaji Wadi, Shivajinagar, Pune, Maharashtra 411005

Corporate office

Office No. 1, 6th Floor, CTS No. 177(p), S. No. 43/2, near Nal Stop Metro Station, Pandurang Colony, Erandwane, Pune, Maharashtra 411052

Mumbai sales headquarters

7th Floor, Dynasty Business Park, 701–713, A-Wing, Andheri–Kurla Road, near Chakala (J B Nagar) Metro Station, J B Nagar, Andheri East, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400059