India's creator economy is still mid-build
The numbers say boom. The plumbing says we are nowhere near the cap. Three forces, three years, one operator point of view.
Pick up any quarterly report and India's creator economy looks like it has already arrived. Sixty-thousand-crore by 2027. Two hundred million social commerce buyers. The PowerPoint is loud.
The plumbing is not. The contracting infrastructure is held together with WhatsApp and goodwill. Brand-safety audits are an exception, not a default. Half the rate cards we see in the wild are missing GSTIN.
Three forces still missing
First, real attribution. Most of the agencies we displace are still selling reach. Reconciliation against a CRM is a quarterly exception, not a monthly default.
Second, named accountability. The creator economy at scale is run by twenty-three-year-olds with a Notion board. The senior IC who can carry a tentpole brief end-to-end is the rarest hire in Indian agency-land.
Third, MSAs that hold up. Most existing creator MSAs are template-stripped versions of US influencer agreements that ignore CCPA, ASCI, FTC, and the IT Act. They will not survive a real dispute.
What gets built next
The agencies that survive the next three years are the ones that fix all three at once. Not by pitching it. By writing it into the contract and shipping it on the first brief.
We started vexo because we wanted to be one of those firms. The market gets to decide whether it wants more of them.
— Shrijeet runs vexo. Reach him at [email protected].