A Gen Zer shares 4 rules he followed to turn $35 into a 6-figure marketing agency from his dorm room
· Business Insider
Courtesy of Stavya
- Babson student Stavya Nilawar grew a $35 creator marketing agency into six-figure revenue.
- Nilawar's agency connects AI brands with YouTube creators for sponsored segments and dedicated videos.
- He shares four lessons that helped him grow it from his dorm room.
When Stavya Nilawar isn't in class at Babson College, he's growing his creator marketing agency.
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His weekdays follow a disciplined routine: class from 8 to 11:15 a.m., lunch, then a five-hour work block. After dinner, he works for another hour or two.
Nilawar's company connects brands with YouTube creators for sponsored segments and dedicated videos. He's worked with brands including AI companies CodeRabbit and Wispr Flow, as well as on campaigns involving Jack Link's x MrBeast. He earns a cut of the project fee, typically 20%.
He said he spent about $35 to get started — for a website domain and two email inboxes. First, he built a network of creators by manually searching TikTok: "I would literally doomscroll on TikTok and just go on people's accounts and look at their emails."
Once he had a roster of 10 to 15 creators, he began pitching brands.
Today, his monthly expenses rarely exceed $1,500, while monthly revenue topped $100,000 for the first time in October. Business Insider reviewed monthly business-account statements to verify his revenue.
"The main expenses are virtual assistants," Nilawar said. They cost him about $1,000 a month and help manage his agency's outreach, which can involve sending 200 to 300 emails a day, including follow-ups.
Nilawar, who started the business during a gap semester before college, said these four rules helped him turn roughly $35 into a six-figure business.
1. Choose a niche based on opportunity — not just passion
Nilawar doesn't buy into the standard advice to follow your passion when choosing a business niche. For him, the business model came first: He knew he wanted to run an agency that connects brands with creators. Then he had to decide which type of brands to serve.
He chose to work with AI companies.
"I was not passionate about AI at all, to be honest," he said. But he saw an opportunity: AI companies were growing quickly, and many had budgets for creator partnerships.
In his view, that's the better order of operations for aspiring founders: Choose a business model you enjoy, then find a niche with clear demand and customers willing to pay.
2. Find people who are already where you want to be
When Nilawar began exploring influencer marketing, an industry contact helped explain how brands work with creators and how agencies make money. He also learned that 20% was a typical agency cut on a deal.
Since then, he's deliberately sought advice from people further along in the industry, including his current mentor, who runs a similar agency that generates about $10 million a year.
Nilawar named his agency after his family name.Courtesy of Stavya Nilawar
"I would reach out to agency owners who were in the position that I wanted to be in," he said. "I literally asked them what they're doing now in their day-to-day business and how they got to the next level."
Nilawar's advice: Find someone who has built the type of business you want to build, and ask if they'd be willing to share what they've learned.
3. Build a repeatable outreach system
In the early days, Nilawar did everything manually: sourcing creators, sending emails, following up with potential clients, and managing campaigns.
"Emails are the main way that we get clients," he said. "If you don't have a system for that, you're not going to do very well in the beginning."
For Nilawar, reaching the first $10,000 in revenue required volume. He tested different email copy and calls to action, then sent outreach to brands within his chosen niche. Today, he uses virtual assistants and software to scale that work, but outreach is only part of the system. In a crowded agency market, Nilawar said his edge is responsiveness.
What sets him apart from his competitors is "our relationships and our speed," he said. His team aims to respond to clients within two to five minutes.
4. Treat mistakes as lessons, not reasons to quit
Early on, Nilawar landed a big campaign involving three creators. Two went smoothly, but the third repeatedly missed deadlines, and when the creator eventually delivered the content, Nilawar said the brand was unhappy with its quality.
The brand wanted to cancel that portion of the deal, leaving Nilawar caught between the brand and the creator's manager. He thought he might have to pay the brand $25,000.
"I didn't have $25K," said Nilawar, who was 18 at the time. "I thought I was screwed."
The parties ultimately worked out a solution, and the experience taught him that agency work involves more than landing the deal: He also has to manage expectations, maintain communication, and resolve conflicts when a partnership goes sideways.
Rather than viewing that scare as proof he wasn't ready to run a business, Nilawar sees it as a lesson he got early — when the stakes were still manageable.
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