About · Ashwat Mahendran
A marketer who learned to build.
I’m Ashwat. I help businesses find their story, get it into the world, and build the systems that keep it moving. I work across marketing, content and code — with AI in the toolkit and a person making the calls.
Equal parts story, systems, and following a thought a little too far.
Chennai / somewhere on the internet.
What I do
I help SaaS companies build content engines that actually move revenue. Not blog factories. Not vanity traffic. A system where every essay, page, and asset is doing a specific job in the buying cycle, and where the team has the playbooks to keep shipping after I leave.
On the side, I run Eostrix as a personal lab and studio, ship open-source work, run a self-hosted homelab on Raspberry Pi, and vibecode an analytics SaaS using LLMs as my co-engineer.
Where I’ve worked
- Unifize (2023 – Present) — turned knowledge into a content engine, and content into a revenue engine. Drove GTM for new products through a content-first approach.
- Eostrix (2021 – Present) — my lab and the business where I place my boldest bets. Where I learned risk management, leadership, and what it takes to be a founder.
- Dukaan (2021 – 2023) — founding marketer at the rocketship where I learned to fuse storytelling with scale.
- Ankur Warikoo (2020 – 2022) — helped grow his personal brand from 100K to 1.2M on Instagram in 14 months. Gained a mentor for life.
- QuarkMe (2019 – 2021) — led creative direction for large brands and executed offline marketing campaigns across India.
- Become (2016 – 2019) — the origin story. Learned the fundamentals of design thinking working with some of the boldest brands in India.
What I’m working on right now
- Developing a playbook on Content-Led-Growth for global B2B SaaS. My bread and butter; and what I spend >40 hours of my week working on. About a decade ago, when I got into content creation as a career, content was neither as democratized nor as impactful. With its evolution, I've also learnt to apply it in building and selling software products to other businesses. Things are wildly different when selling to businesses of all sizes and I'm documenting the variables and potential strategy for placing bets around them so it leads to commercial success.
- Building a homelab with Raspberry Pi. One fine day, I woke up to the realization that I'm paying cloud platforms monthly subscription fee to hold on to my own memories I collected over the years in the form of photos and videos. I also have plenty of storage that is non-utilized just because it was not available over a network. This led me to build a NAS which later became a personal cloud, firewall, automation engine, personal server, etc. This hobby is getting very expensive and I intend to spend the rest of my adulthood building servers for my own homelab.
- Vibe-coding an analytics SaaS. During my earlier startup attempts, I had failed again and again because I suck at coding. I can't remember all the syntaxes and how to 'write' code from scratch. To the great advantage of all people like me, LLMs came to the rescue and it's opened a new world where thinking and articulating can lead to instant gratification. I'm having the time of my life playing around with an idea of mine from years ago that seems simple on the surface, but nobody's done it yet.
- Automating everything with n8n and AI. I can vividly remember the day I hit puberty, and the day I discovered n8n; because both of those things kept me busy late into the night for weeks at a stretch. Jokes apart, n8n combined with LLMs are an incredible way to automate most aspects of your life, so that you never have to say "oopsie, I forgot". The way I've set up my personal automations is for me to cut through all the noise inside my digital footprint and highlight the signals I need to be aware of and act on.
- Understanding and practicing holistic wellness. Among all the chaos, I find my peace only when I'm operating at the prime of my physical, mental, emotional, financial, and spiritual well-being. Along the way, I've realized that these things are not separate, but work in tandem with each other so that the human potential can be maximized. But sadly, there's so much myth and misconceptions around this subject that I spent years cutting through through personal experimentation.
What I write about
Essays on content strategy, SaaS marketing, building in public, automation with LLMs, homelab and self-hosting, and the gap between prototype and production. Read the journal, walk through the work archive, or check the FAQ for quick answers.
The fastest way to reach me is the contact page. I read every message.