The paid versus content argument in Indian startups usually gets settled by whoever is more senior in the room. It is a maths question and the maths is not complicated.
The two cost curves
Paid CAC is roughly flat per unit and rises as you scale, because you exhaust the cheapest audience first and bid against more competitors for the rest. Spend nothing, get nothing. Spend ten times more and you get somewhat less than ten times the customers.
Content CAC starts absurdly high and falls toward zero. Your first post costs whatever it cost and brings no customers, so CAC is infinite. By month eighteen the same post is still working and the marginal cost of another customer from it is nothing.
Everything about the decision comes from those two shapes. Paid is a tap. Content is an asset with a long build.
Working the crossover
Take your monthly content spend, including salaries, and divide by customers attributed to organic. Do the same for paid. Plot both monthly. Content CAC falls, paid stays roughly flat or drifts up. Where the lines cross is the point where content became the cheaper channel.
For Indian B2B SaaS with a serious content operation this typically lands somewhere between month twelve and month twenty-four. If you are eight months in and content CAC still looks terrible, that is expected rather than evidence of failure. If you are at month thirty and it has not crossed, something is wrong with the content, not the theory.
Which one your stage needs
Pre-product-market-fit, paid wins, because you need fast feedback and you are still changing what you sell. Building content for a positioning you will abandon is waste.
Post-fit with runway, run both. Paid funds the present, content builds the position that eventually lowers blended CAC.
Post-fit with tight runway and a long sales cycle, content is the harder but usually correct call, because paid CAC on a six-month cycle burns cash before it returns any.
The mistake both camps make
Paid people treat content as free and forget salaries are the largest line. Content people compare month-one paid CAC against month-thirty content CAC, which is not a comparison. Use the same time window on both sides or the argument is theatre.