One year, four countries, ₹20 crore in managed media: Opus Momentum closes its first year on numbers most agencies wait three years for

New Delhi [India], May 23: Most digital marketing agencies do not look like much at the end of their first year. They are five people, a handful of clients within a hundred-kilometre radius of the founder’s apartment, an Instagram page that hasn’t been updated in six weeks, and a balance sheet held together with retainer agreements that nobody wants to renegotiate.

Opus Momentum, the Bhopal-headquartered agency founded by digital marketing veteran Saurabh Tripathi in December 2024, looks different.

At the end of its first full calendar year of operations, the agency has thirty-five clients on its books, twenty crore rupees in managed advertising spend across Meta, Google, LinkedIn and DV360, a client retention rate of ninety-six percent, and a live roster that runs across four countries. India, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

For an agency that was technically a registered LLP and a handful of LinkedIn announcements a year ago, that is an unusual scoreboard.

It is also, Tripathi says, a scoreboard he plans to deliberately slow down.

“There is a temptation in this business to chase the client count,” he says. “Every founder I know wants to say they have a hundred clients. I do not. I would rather have fifty clients we can actually move forward.”

The numbers, on their own, tell part of the story. The composition of the roster tells the rest.

Opus Momentum’s clients include education and consulting brands, healthcare ventures, D2C and lifestyle businesses, an Ivy League admissions counselling practice, a fintech startup, an interiors and fireplace business in Melbourne, a travel experience company, and a non-profit running rural mobile medical units in central India. Of the thirty-five names on the agency’s first-year roster, a meaningful fraction are international. Tripathi will not name them all on record but is comfortable confirming the geography: paying clients in three Australian states, one in Canada, two in the US, and the rest spread across India.

The international footprint is the part that surprises Indian agency observers. Tier-two Indian agencies do not typically win their first US client in their first year. Opus Momentum, according to Tripathi, won its first US engagement in its second quarter through a direct LinkedIn outreach response. The Australian clients followed through referral.

“Clients in the US, Canada and Australia did not ask me where I was based,” Tripathi says. “They asked me what I had done before, who I had worked with, and how I would run their account. The question of which Indian city the agency operates from did not come up until after the contract was signed.”

The retention number is the one Tripathi cites as the real measure.

Ninety-six percent retention at the end of year one means, in practical terms, that of every twenty-five clients the agency has signed, twenty-four are still active. The industry benchmark for retention in the first year of an agency relationship is, by most published estimates, between fifty and seventy percent. Opus Momentum is operating roughly thirty percentage points above that.

“Retention is the only number in this business that cannot be faked,” Tripathi says. “You cannot buy retention with ad spend. You cannot inflate it with influencer placements. Either the client stays because the work is doing something for them, or they leave.”

The agency’s positioning, which Tripathi describes as “strategy-led execution,” is built around that retention thesis. Opus Momentum operates seven service lines: search engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation, performance marketing, social media marketing, website design and development, branding and design, and marketing strategy consulting. The intent, Tripathi says, is not to be a full-service shop in the conventional sense. It is to be a small number of services done seriously, with the option for a client to use one or several depending on their actual marketing problem.

What is conspicuously absent from the agency’s first-year story is paid acquisition. Opus Momentum, according to Tripathi, has not spent a rupee on inbound marketing for itself. Every client on the year-one roster has come through some combination of LinkedIn, founder network, and referral. The agency’s own website went through three iterations during the year, and a properly built case studies section is still on the to-do list for the next quarter.

“We have been busy with client work,” Tripathi says, when asked about this. “Our own marketing has been the last priority. We are now starting to fix that.”

Year two, the founder says, will be about depth rather than breadth. Opus Momentum is investing in generative engine optimisation as a standalone service line on the bet that AI-driven search will eat into Google’s share over the next twenty-four months. The agency is also building a more structured client onboarding process, hiring a senior strategist, and being more selective about which engagements it accepts.

“I do not need a hundred clients,” Tripathi repeats. “I need the right fifty.”

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