Saurabh Tripathi is the founder and CEO of Opus Momentum, a Bhopal-headquartered digital marketing and branding agency that completed its first year of operations in December. The agency has taken on thirty-five clients across India, the United States, Canada and Australia, managed roughly twenty crore rupees in advertising spend, and held its client retention rate at ninety-six percent. We sat down with Tripathi to talk about how the agency came together, what he thinks is structurally wrong with the Indian marketing services industry, and where he wants to take Opus Momentum next.
Let’s start at the beginning. You spent a decade in digital marketing before starting Opus Momentum. Why start an agency now, and not five years ago?
I had thought about it for years. The reason I did not start earlier is that I did not have a clear point of view yet. I had skills. I did not have a thesis. The last two years of my corporate and consulting work, I started noticing the same pattern across every client I touched. Good marketing teams were producing bad work because the strategy layer was missing or shallow. The work looked busy and changed nothing. By late 2024, I had a clear enough argument about why this was happening that I felt I could build an agency around the fix. That is when I started Opus Momentum.
You stayed in Bhopal. Most founders in your category would have moved to Mumbai or Bangalore. Why?
There was no business reason to move. Bhopal is where my family is, where my cost base is sustainable, and where the talent I want to work with already exists. The myth that you need to be in a metro to win serious clients is a hangover from when the industry was offline and relationships were physical. None of my paying clients today are in Bhopal. The agency’s incorporation address has been a non-issue in every client conversation I have had.
The agency has clients in four countries in its first year. How did that happen?
The same way most international agency work happens. LinkedIn, referrals, and a body of public work that overseas clients could find when they searched for the kind of work they needed done. My first US client found me on LinkedIn. The Australian clients came through referral from an Indian client. The Canadian engagement came through a former colleague. There is no growth hack. The only thing that made it possible is that I had spent ten years building a professional profile that was searchable and credible.
Ninety-six percent client retention in year one is unusually high. What is the story behind that number?
It is the result of habits that are individually unglamorous. We do a strategic viability filter at the start of every engagement, so we are not signing clients we cannot move. We do a monthly review call with every client, which catches frustration before it becomes a churn risk. We lead our updates with bad news, not good. And we keep the strategy and execution functions separate so neither degrades. None of this is novel. Most agencies stop doing these things when they get busy. We have not yet.
What is the most broken thing about the Indian agency industry right now?
The reporting. Almost every performance marketing report I have seen from another agency, before clients move to us, is technically accurate and substantively misleading. Platforms double-count conversions across Meta and Google. Reports show inflated returns. Agencies do not deduplicate, because deduplicating produces a smaller, less impressive number. Founders sign off on monthly reports thinking their ads are returning ten X when the deduplicated number is closer to three X. The gap between what is reported and what is real is now financially material for any SME spending above five lakhs a month on ads.
You have been vocal about Generative Engine Optimisation. Is this real, or is it agency hype?
It is real, and the agencies treating it as hype will look slow in eighteen months. The behaviour shift is already happening. A meaningful share of high-intent commercial searches now end inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews without the user clicking through to a website. Brands that do not appear in those AI-generated answers are invisible to a growing segment of users. The work to fix this is technical, but it is not exotic. Structured content, source diversification, prompt auditing, ongoing measurement. We treat it as a standalone discipline because we think it is going to be one within two years.
What has been the hardest lesson of year one?
That you cannot rescue a bad-fit client through good execution. We took on a small number of engagements in the first six months where the fit was wrong on the strategy side and we believed we could compensate by working harder. We could not. The work was good, the client was unhappy, and the relationships ended badly. We have tightened our intake process significantly since. Saying no to a client who is wrong for the agency is, in retrospect, the single most valuable habit we have built.
What does Opus Momentum look like in year three?
A team of about forty to fifty people, with senior strategists across four service lines, working with somewhere between forty and sixty clients at any given time. Half international, half Indian. A documented methodology that we can train people on. A reputation, hopefully, for being the agency that other agencies’ clients call when the work has not been moving for them.
Last question. What are you reading or thinking about outside of work?
Mostly science fiction and Formula 1. Both are good preparation for an industry where the rules change without warning and the people who win are the ones who paid attention before everyone else did.