About Ayush Das
I am Ayush. I am based in Bangalore right now, and relocating to Dubai. My career started almost seven years ago as a content writer, across travel media, ed-tech and e-commerce, two of those as internships. Today I am a Manager, Content Marketing at Headout, where I have spent the last five years.
The first job was broader than its title suggested, which turned out to set the pattern for everything after it. I was writing Amazon A+ content and marketing copy, running social, and sketching product wireframes in Balsamiq whenever the marketing needed a product to point at. Nobody asked me to do the last part. It was just obvious that the copy could not fix a thing the product had not decided yet.
At Headout I started on content and moved outward. I owned organic growth for Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, first as a market lead and then as a manager, which meant briefs and calendars and writer pods, and also crawl budgets, internal linking, and arguments about which of the two was actually the bottleneck. Usually it was neither. Usually it was that the system underneath could not publish fast enough to test anything.
So I went and worked on the system. Content models, a migration off one content platform onto another, AI-assisted pipelines, and a set of internal tools that let a small team publish and measure at a scale no one person could hold in their head. That is the work I am proudest of, and it is the least visible work I have ever done. Nobody sees a content model. They see that the pages went up.
I still care about the sentence. I have just come to care more about the machine that ships thousands of them, and about whether anyone can tell afterwards which of the thousand actually worked.
My career journey.
Newest first. Roles, remit and scope: what each step actually put me in charge of. The outcome numbers are in the section below this one.
Manager, Content Marketing, on the platform
Moved onto the content platform itself at the end of 2025, off market ownership. Working across content modelling, CMS infrastructure, AI pipelines and the internal tooling the publishing teams run on.
Manager, Content Marketing
Promoted to Manager in April. The remit widened to sixteen countries and a pod of seven writers. Split the job between the editorial system and the technical one, on the view that a content operation is a product and ought to be run like one.
Lead, Content Marketing
Ran CSEE as one organic growth engine, sixteen countries rather than sixteen separate markets, owning the brief-to-publish loop end to end. Ran SEO audits across the domain estate and worked with the engineering team on the CMS migration: data migration, sanity checks and product QA.
Senior Content Writer & Marketing Associate
Formed the CSEE market pod and helped grow the writing team from three people to more than fifty over about two years, hiring and mentoring writers and pod leads. Built AI-assisted content templates through prompt engineering, which is what made landing pages scale across markets without scaling the headcount with them.
Content Writer, Headout
Joined Headout on content, writing and commissioning evergreen pages against a growing catalogue. Picked up the SEO side quickly, because the question of what to write next kept turning out to be a search question.
Content Writer, ZB Ventures
E-commerce. Ran social strategy and content calendars for several brands, and produced the posts, stories and reels that filled them. Wrote structured product and packaging content, optimised Amazon USA listings, and sketched the wireframes when the marketing needed a product to point at.
Internships and freelance
Content Writer and Social Media Intern at ED Times, and freelance writing for Moxtain, Travel Lens and Flurosis Communication. Travel media, entertainment and ed-tech. The stretch that taught me to write quickly, to a brief, about things I had to go and learn first.
Building systems.
Driving measurable impact.
Building systems. Driving measurable impact.A publishing pipeline that holds at 10,000 pages a month
Rebuilt the publishing pipeline around Payload automation, Content AI and automated localisation. Monthly output moved from a few hundred pages to a sustained 10,000+, and held there for five consecutive months rather than spiking once.
The content platform, rebuilt underneath it
Led the migration off Prismic onto Payload, and the content modelling that made the new system worth migrating to. The estate it runs across is 750+ domains and 25,000+ URLs, localised into a floor of seven languages and up to fourteen for the markets that earn it.
Organic growth across Central, Southern and Eastern Europe
Managed the content marketing team for CSEE: seven writers across sixteen countries, run as one organic engine rather than sixteen separate markets. The team grew organic contribution 29% year on year, and took 24+ high-value product pages to the first page of Google.
Search visibility at estate scale
Audited the estate end to end, and worked the findings back through the content and the templates rather than filing them. Active subdomains nearly doubled, and campaign landing pages went from 10,482 to 19,500.
What it moved for the business
Website GBV rose 31% over the period, with localisation contributing 19.3%. These are company figures that the work above contributed to, not a personal result, and gross booking value rather than revenue.
Some of the work.
Three pieces that show the range: a ranking recovery, a page taken to the first page from nowhere, and the tools underneath.
Everything I actually work in.
- Payload
- Prismic
- WordPress
- Google Keyword Planner
- Ahrefs
- Frase
- Surfer SEO
- Figma
- Canva
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Lightroom
- Slack
- Trello
- Zendesk
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog
- Profound
- Looker Studio
- Omni
- Mixpanel
- GA4
- Google Sheets
- MS Excel
- VectorShift
- n8n
- Google Apps Script
- Claude Code
- Codex
- Antigravity
- Replit
- Lovable
- Balsamiq
- Claude Design
Education
- Master of Arts, English
- Bachelor of Arts, English (Honours)
People who worked with me.
Ayush thinks through the small details, edge cases, and potential points of failure that most people would overlook, and builds the system in a way that guides you towards doing things correctly. You don't really have the option of taking shortcuts or working with half-baked information because the CMS is planned and built with extremely well thought out guardrails in place. That level of thought and attention to detail has saved the team countless hours of troubleshooting and prevented a lot of problems down the line. Ayush also has a strong instinct for marketing and organic growth. His understanding of SEO is exceptional, and he has a great sense of what audiences are looking for, where market trends are heading, and how to turn that into useful content ideas. He also has a very data-driven approach to decision-making and is rarely satisfied with making a call based purely on assumptions. What makes Ayush an especially great manager is that he doesn't just tell you what to do, but teaches you how to think. He shares context, trusts people with responsibility, and is always the most reliable person in the team, someone you can go to when you need thoughtful advice or want to solve a problem in a way that it never shows up again!
Nicknamed as the multi-hat wearer in our team, his expertise in Google Sheets, on page and off page SEO, technical aspects of content marketing is truly impressive. More than just being knowledgeable, he has a natural ability to explain complex topics in a way that makes them easy to grasp. Whether it's troubleshooting an issue, optimizing a process, or sharing new insights, he's always willing to help. Whenever I have gone to him for help, he doesn't just give me the answer but also takes the effort to make me understand the why and the how behind it. His problem-solving mindset makes him an incredible asset to any team. I'm grateful for everything I've learned from him!
What sets him apart is his technical vision—he built CMS architectures and internal programs with in-built AI generation features that automated complex workflows and made our content operations exponentially faster and easier. Paired with his sharp organic search insights using tools like GSC, his growth strategies were key to driving our expansion across Europe. He brings out the best in his team while delivering hard business results. Every chance to work with him is an opportunity to learn and grow!
Ayush is one of the talented, dedicated colleagues I got a chance to work with. His content creation and researching skills are always a cut above. If we think there are only 10 ways to do things, then Ayush surprises us with 90 other ways and even more. He has an appetite for learning and growing. I am sure he will be the best team player and contributor in any organization.
He creates an environment where doubts are welcomed, and learning is a two-way street. I still remember his words on my first day at Headout- he described our dynamic as a transactional relationship where he was there to share knowledge, and I was there to absorb it, leaving no room for miscommunication. His approachable nature coupled with the amount of experience he brings to the table, further makes him an asset for any team he works at.
Still reading? Let us talk.
If you are trying to make content compound rather than accumulate, that is the problem I like most. Email is quickest, and my calendar is open.