Engineer turned marketer

It started with storytelling, went through engineering, and came back around.

Long before any of this, I was a child who told stories. Nobody asked me to. Some things were hard to say directly, and a story got around them.

That habit went quiet for years.

I studied IT Engineering, then finished a Master's in Computer Engineering. Along the way, I published two research papers, one with ACM on predicting heart attacks using machine learning and explainable AI, one with IEEE on breast cancer prediction. Systems, data structures, and a great deal of time spent staring at numbers trying to work out what they were saying.

Then in 2019 I started marketing a project of my own, and both halves collided.

Marketing turned out to be storytelling with a measurement problem attached. You say something true about a business in a way people care about, which is the story. Then you prove it worked, which is the engineering. Most marketers do one well and the other badly.

I planned none of it. Seven years in, "accidental" stops working as an excuse.

WHAT I DO

Since 2019, I have worked with over 100 businesses across Nepal on social media, SEO, Meta and Google ads, and content writing.

Some already had strong brands and needed the marketing tidied. Others had nothing at all: no page, no followers, no website. That second group is my favourite because nothing broken needs to be undone first.

I also run Mysticrubs, where I have published about SEO, AI, marketing and technology in Nepal what I learned and research so far. I test things there before I recommend them to anyone paying me.

ON AI

I'm an optimist, and here is the reasoning

I write about this more than anything else, so it belongs on this page.

AI has no borders and no gatekeepers. It does not check where you studied. It responds to creativity, and for the first time in a long while somebody building something in Kathmandu starts on level ground with somebody building something anywhere else.

That is why I keep telling younger people in Nepal to start now. This is not a train you catch late.

Optimism does not require ignoring the problems. Most of what I see going wrong involves people using AI to produce more content faster without ever deciding what their brand sounds like. The output reads as competent and forgettable, and every competitor produces the identical thing from the identical prompt.

AI does the work well. Deciding what work is worth doing remains a human job.

WHAT I VALUE

Honesty, including the unprofitable kind. The most common complaint I hear about other marketers is not bad results. It is promises nobody could have kept.

Evidence over confidence. Argue me out of a position with data, and I will change my mind. Confidence alone will not do it.

Explaining rather than impressing. If you do not understand what you pay for, I failed at my job.

Curiosity as a working method. Learning never stops, which is on my LinkedIn and is not a slogan. This field moves faster than any qualification keeps up with.