Niranjan Ramamurthy

I studied Electrical and Electronics Engineering in Chennai, at Sathyabama, from 1999 to 2003, though I spent more time exploring the city than studying. It turned out to matter later, in a roundabout way: standing inside a five-lakh-square-foot tyre plant in the same city, twenty years on, felt like a strange kind of full circle, even though the degree has almost nothing to do with the work.

The tyre connection runs a bit deeper than the degree, actually. My dad managed an agency that did tyre retreading, so I grew up around the smell of rubber and the mechanics of grip. I'm the sort of person who checks nitrogen levels before a road trip out of habit. When the chance came up to document a plant-scale digital twin for JK Tyre, in Gwalior and later Chennai, I said yes before thinking too hard about the sixteen days it would take.

Search marketing came first and never quite left: Linksys from 2003, then Overture/Yahoo from 2004, back when "search engine marketing" barely had a settled name yet. It started as a small Yahoo pilot, twelve of us, each handed a URL and told to build a hundred-keyword campaign with unique titles and descriptions, under strict guidelines. That pilot grew to two hundred people, and growing with it made me an auditor and a trainer. From there to Yahoo's own captive center: six months on machine-learning categorization of search queries, then proper SEM work by industry, then the transition to Bing Ads, managing premier clients. I was the only one on my team handling entertainment accounts. I trained new hires, ran tips-and-tricks sessions across multiple teams, and came second in a foosball tournament.

Adostrophe started in 2017, first as a Google Ads freelance operation, around the same time I was selling 360° cameras, back when almost nobody in India had heard of one. The Matterport work grew out of that, and eventually became the main thing. Somewhere in there, Google made me a Trusted Photographer; the two Local Guide profiles I maintain (one personal, one purely client work) have between them crossed 57 million photo views.

The search side never went away, and neither did the building. Adostrophe still runs Google Ads accounts, manages Ad Grants for nonprofits, and builds websites — this one included, hand-written and deployed rather than dropped into a template.

Alongside the scanning, I'm building Finostrophe: an offline-first money tracker that never touches a bank account, backed by Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, NVIDIA Inception, and AWS Activate. Whatever else is in progress sits in Labs, described only as far as it actually exists.

Ten years in, give or take a few, of scanning rooms other people mostly just walk through.