I'm Swapnil Ughade. I run MagicWorks, the AI-first digital marketing agency I founded in Pune in 2009, and Ideovate, the company behind simplidistance.com. I've written two books on how classical marketing meets the AI-powered era of search.
Some backstory. I was born in Amravati in 1984 and moved to Pune for education, which is where I still live and work. MagicWorks was founded in 2009, in a single-room office, at a time when most Indian mid-market businesses were still deciding whether digital marketing was a serious channel or a novelty. The decision to build a marketing agency in that market meant spending as much time educating clients as executing for them. That constraint felt like a limitation at the time. It turned out to be the training that mattered most. It forced me to think in first principles rather than in playbook, which is a habit that has held through every technology shift since.
By 2012, MagicWorks was incorporated as a private limited company. Through the years that followed, the agency grew as digital marketing became a serious channel for Indian mid-market businesses, and clients came from the UK, Norway, the UAE, and the US alongside the home market. Today MagicWorks runs as five service pillars: Digital Marketing, Web Development, AI Consultation, Marketplace & Platform Consultation, and Brand, Research & Publishing. Three sibling brands sit inside the MagicWorks Group: MagicWorks Host, MagicFlow AI, and Magic Pipeline. In June 2026, the new site at magicworksitsolutions.com went live and Next.js became the default stack for all new web builds.
What did not change through any of that growth was the founder-led model on the two advisory pillars: AI Consultation (Pillar 03) and Marketplace & Platform Consultation (Pillar 04). Both are founder-led by design. That work does not senior-associate well. It requires two decades of operator scars to run properly, which is why I am still in every engagement personally, from the first call to the last review.
There is a through-line across everything I build. I call it the operating thesis, and it is short: two into one. Human strategy into machine acceleration. Traditional search into AI-powered search. Execution into advisory. Services into products.
Both of my ventures in the education discovery space stand on their own. simplidistance.com is a distance and online MBA discovery portal. collegencourses.com is a regular MBA and design institute discovery portal. Founder to operator to investor to author: these are not four separate careers. They are one practice viewed from four angles.
The two books published in 2026 are the natural output of that practice. Two Algorithms, One Strategy is about SEO meeting AI-powered search, drawn from the SEO practice at MagicWorks, illustrated by Vinay Khamkar with a foreword by Mohan Chute. The AI-Powered Google Ads System is drawn from over ₹70 crore in managed ad spend and co-written with Mohan Chute.
This site is where the writing continues after the books, and where the ventures, speaking, and current work sit together in one place. I still live in Pune. I still take the founder call myself when the engagement is right. If you are building a portal or a platform, or if you run a mid-market business that has to make the AI-search transition intact, that call is probably worth having.