Notes for owners · Digital marketing
How to advertise to startup employees
There is no tech park to buy. A forty person company sits above a bakery, so the audience is the neighbourhood, the delivery app and the coworking floor.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
There is nothing to book. A company of forty people sits on the first floor above a bakery in HSR Layout, or takes twelve desks in a coworking floor, and neither has a media owner, a food court panel or a security desk you can negotiate with. That is the whole difference between this audience and the one inside a large technology campus, where the building itself sells advertising. Here the audience is a neighbourhood and a phone, and everything you buy is either on that phone or in a shop the person walks past on the way home.
Why this is not a tech park buy
In a large campus you can buy the lift lobby, the cafeteria and the gate, and the seat count tells you roughly who you reached. None of that exists in a startup cluster. The offices are small, scattered across dozens of buildings, mostly on ordinary commercial floors with a landlord who has never sold advertising.
So drop the idea of getting inside. If your audience genuinely sits in a big park, that is a different plan with different inventory. Here, plan for the street and the screen.
The neighbourhood is the audience
In Bengaluru this crowd concentrates in Koramangala, HSR Layout, Indiranagar, Jayanagar and the Bellandur stretch, with smaller pockets almost everywhere. Most live within six or seven kilometres of the desk, in a rented flat, a co-living block or a paying guest room, often with a flatmate who works at a similar company.
Draw a circle round the office streets and the residential lanes beside them, and let the geography do the work the targeting cannot. Hinjawadi and Baner in Pune, Madhapur and Kondapur in Hyderabad, Gurugram's sectors along the expressway: the shape repeats.
What you can actually book here
| Where | What it reaches | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery and quick commerce app placement | The order being placed, right now | You pay for a listing position and the app keeps the customer |
| Search and Maps for "near me" | Small volume, highest intent of anything on this list | Needs correct hours, photographs and a working booking link |
| Instagram and YouTube by radius | Everyone inside the circle, families and students included | Cheap and wide, so the creative has to do the filtering |
| Coworking community channel or members' event | People physically on that floor this week | Only worth it if you get the channel, not a poster |
| Co-living and apartment lift panels | The same people at home, in the evening | Booked through the building's managing committee |
| A tie-up with the gym, cafe or salon they already use | Trust borrowed from a place they chose | Needs something real to offer, not a flyer |
| City subreddits and neighbourhood groups | Genuine influence at no media cost | You cannot advertise there, only be worth mentioning |
Three calendars, not one
Salaries land between the last working day and the fifth. The ten days after are when subscriptions start, memberships get bought and postponed appointments get booked. The last week of the month is when a discount earns its keep.
Appraisals and switches cluster between April and June. That is when people move flats, upgrade phones, and finally book the dental work or the eye surgery they have been putting off for two years.
Then the news cycle particular to this crowd. A funding announcement in the neighbourhood loosens spending for a quarter. A round of layoffs tightens it within a week, and a campaign about premium anything lands badly in that month.
For example, imagine a dental clinic in HSR Layout. Its own appointment book shows evening slots filling between the first and the twelfth and Saturday mornings filling all month. The figures are illustrative; the pattern is what should decide when it spends.
What gets ignored
Cold calls. An unknown number is not answered by this group at all.
Email to a work address for a personal purchase, which reads as spam and occasionally gets reported as a security issue.
Newspaper inserts, in a rented flat that does not take a paper.
An offer with no price on it. This audience compares on an app before walking in, and a hidden number is assumed to be a high one.
Anything that has to be booked by phone. If it cannot be done on a link or over WhatsApp in under a minute, it gets postponed and forgotten.
The churn is not your problem
People here change jobs every eighteen months or so, and a proportion leave the city entirely. That looks like a reason not to invest in the audience, and for anything sold once at a high price it genuinely is.
For everything bought repeatedly it is the opposite. The seat gets filled within weeks by somebody at the same life stage, on the same street, with the same habits. So build for the place rather than for the person, and the audience renews itself without you spending again.
What to do next
Get your last three months of customers, plot their postcodes, and see how tight the circle is. Most businesses serving this crowd find that a large majority came from inside three kilometres, which settles the media question without any further discussion.
Two small things cost nothing and decide more than the media plan: that your Google Business Profile shows the right hours and a booking link that works, and that a WhatsApp message sent after ten at night is answered the same evening. The free audit measures both, because with this audience a fast reply beats a bigger budget.