Four different jobs go by this one title. What each costs in 2026, the questions worth asking on the first call, and how to tell within twenty minutes whether the person across from you has ever shipped at volume.
By Aditya Vora · Updated August 2026 · Pune, India
Most people hiring in India ask for "a content strategist" when what they need is one of four fairly different jobs. Picking the wrong category is the reason a lot of these engagements quietly fall apart around month three, and it costs more than picking a merely decent person in the right one.
Works on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. Owns the opening seconds, the retention curve, format design, and how a clip gets assembled. Hire this person if you're already producing video and the results won't settle down. Good videos happen, you can't say why, and the channel doesn't compound.
Works on packaging, titles, thumbnails, and holding attention across eight to twenty minutes. A different craft from short-form, and the failure points sit in different places: the first minute and the middle, rather than the first three seconds. Hire this person if you're building a subscription channel rather than a reach channel.
Works on keyword clusters, blog architecture, and increasingly on visibility inside AI answers. Most people in India who list themselves as "content strategist" are actually this. Good for a company blog or a B2B pipeline. Not the person who'll fix a Reel.
Works on positioning, narrative and LinkedIn presence for founders and executives. Useful work, but a different discipline from anything happening inside a video timeline.
Ask to see a retention graph they changed, before and after, along with the specific decision that caused the change. View counts prove nothing on their own.
Ask what they stopped making, and why. Anyone can add formats. The answer tells you whether they read data or read vibes.
Ask whether the median video improved or just the best one. A single viral video is variance. A lifted median means there's a system underneath.
Ask what they personally did on the last channel they worked on. If the answer stays entirely conceptual, they've never sat inside the work, and short-form gets decided inside the work.
Ask who else was on that team and what those people owned. It separates someone who operated inside a content engine from someone who advised one from outside. Both can be useful. They're not the same hire.
Ask what they'll hand over that outlives the engagement. The answer you want is a format spec, an SOP, a checklist. Something your team can run without them.
Ask what kind of channel they're bad for. Anyone who has genuinely specialised names it immediately. Generalists go quiet.
| Basic content help | From ₹10,000 a month. This is execution, not strategy. Price it that way |
|---|---|
| Mid-level strategist | From ₹40,000 a month on retainer, typically a couple of years of real work behind them |
| Experienced strategist | From ₹70,000 a month. You're buying pattern recognition, not hours. This is where my own rates start |
| One-off content audit | ₹25,000 to ₹75,000 depending on how much you've published and how deep the retention analysis goes |
| Full retainer with production | ₹2,00,000 and up, once scripting, direction, posting and reporting are all inside the scope |
These are working ranges for independent operators, not agency rate cards. Agencies usually land two to three times higher, because you're also paying for account management.
The highest-yield method is to reverse-engineer channels you admire. Find three Indian channels whose short-form genuinely works, then find out who makes it. Credits are usually in the description, a pinned comment, or the creator's team page.
Podcast appearances are the next best filter. People who can talk in detail about retention and formats on a creator-economy show are, by definition, people who can explain their own system.
You can also just ask the creator. Most Indian creators will tell you who fixed their content if you ask politely and specifically.
Marketplaces come last. Upwork, Twine and the agency directories are full of this title and thin on people who've shipped at scale. Use them to fill execution roles, not the strategy seat.
I'm the first kind. I've spent six years at Brand Warikoo, Ankur Warikoo's 11.6M-subscriber channel, and I'm still on that team. My part there is the craft layer: how a clip gets assembled so people stay to the end. Scripting and the data work sat with other people, and the numbers from that channel belong to the team rather than to me.
Across everything, more than 5 billion views. On Warikoo's finance Shorts, 1,313 videos at 85.1% average retention. I run Voracious Studios and work with creators and founder-led brands from Pune.
I'm a bad fit for channels that want volume without a point of view, and for anyone whose real problem is paid distribution. I take one to three new retainers a quarter, starting at ₹70,000 a month. If the diagnosis above sounds like your channel, email adityavora16@gmail.com.