Agency vs In-House vs Startup – Which Pays More for Digital Marketing in India?

In-house roles at established companies pay the most on paper at entry and mid-level – ₹5-12 LPA to start versus ₹2.5-5 LPA at agencies. Startups offer the fastest salary growth if you can demonstrate impact, with performance-linked compensation that can take you well past ₹10 LPA in 3-4 years. However, Kraftshala alumni have built genuinely high-paying careers starting from all three, which is the clearest evidence that the “best” choice depends on what you’re optimising for, not which option is objectively superior.

Here’s how the three setups actually compare:

Why agencies are a real career path, not just a stepping stone

Agencies get unfairly framed as a place you start and then leave. The truth is more interesting: agencies are where some of the most senior marketing leaders in India built their range, and plenty of people build full careers there.

Tarun Tanwar got placed at GroupM through Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad. He’s now Associate Director at the agency. That trajectory only happens because agency work, done well, builds something specific – the ability to manage multiple brands, categories, and client expectations simultaneously, and to turn that range into genuine strategic judgment. Two years of agency work exposes you to more campaign variety than most in-house marketers see in five.

What in-house roles are built for

In-house roles at established brands pay more from day one because they’re hiring for depth, not breadth. You work on one brand, one audience, one set of products – which means you go deeper into that brand’s customer, category, and growth levers than anyone managing it as one of ten accounts ever could.

Kraftshala alumni building in-house careers at brands like Nykaa, Tata Cliq, Acko, Mamaearth, Sleepy Owl, and Zouk are doing exactly this – becoming the person inside the company who understands the brand and its customer better than anyone else. That depth compounds into genuine ownership over time: budget, strategy, and increasingly, the business outcome itself.

Why startups create career velocity

Startups reward demonstrated impact faster than either agencies or in-house teams, because the team is small enough that your work is directly visible. Two Kraftshala alumni show what that velocity actually looks like in practice.

Chakresh Tiwari was placed at The Sleep Company through Marketing Launchpad. From there, he moved to Astrotalk, then Kuku FM, and is now a performance marketer at Emergent Labs. Each move added a different kind of scale and category experience – D2C, content subscription, audio platforms – compounding into a track record that kept opening better roles.

Vinayak Shivodia took a different route to the same outcome. He joined Curryit – the Shark Tank-funded D2C brand – as an intern through Marketing Launchpad in 2023. He’s now their Marketing Manager. No job-hopping required – just consistent ownership inside one growing company, with the title and scope expanding as the impact did.

Both paths work. What they share is that neither waited years for permission to take on more.

Which environment to choose

The honest framework isn’t “which pays more” – it’s “what am I trying to build right now.” If you want range and the ability to work across categories fast, an agency builds that. If you want to go deep on one brand and compound your expertise over years, in-house is built for that. If you want your impact to translate into opportunity quickly, startups reward that directly – as both Chakresh’s and Vinayak’s paths show.

What’s true across all three: the people who advance fastest are the ones who take ownership before it’s formally handed to them. That pattern, more than the company type, is what determined the outcome for every alumnus mentioned here.