From Fractional CMO to Spray Drones to the Moon with Aruna Inalsingh
Is Aruna Inalsingh successful because she's sophisticated or because she's a little bit scrappy? On this episode of Scrappy But Successful, Jack sits down with the fractional CMO and founding member of TerraNav Spray Drones to find out. Her first answer is that it's all relative, which fits a conversation that ends up on the moon.
What a spray drone is and how a marketer got into them
Aruna explains that most people know drones as either hobby cameras or military hardware. Spray drones are the bigger, payload-carrying kind: a chassis fitted with injection-molded tanks that hold anywhere from 10 to 100 liters of liquid. TerraNav's target market is the farmer, who can use them to get water, pesticides, and nutrients onto their land, with different tanks, shapes, and nozzles depending on the job. The same chassis can also clean windows, solar panels, and windmill blades, or carry air-sensing devices.
Her path there is not a straight line. Aruna studied materials science as an undergrad and began her career around metering gear pumps used in candy coatings, adhesives, and catheters. She then moved into tech and data transfer, education, and publishing before becoming a fractional CMO. As demand for fractional marketing softened, spray drones came her way, and she says it makes sense in hindsight: you manufacture a product, move data, and educate the market on why it matters. She has even earned her small drone pilot license, which helps TerraNav establish itself as an official certified service and sales provider.
Drones, NASA, and moon base
Aruna had just come back from a conference at NASA's Space Center in Houston, where she saw drones designed to help astronauts and future inhabitants of what NASA calls moon base. The engineering challenge is the same as on Earth, balancing battery depletion against payload depletion, but the moon-bound versions look more like kites because of the low gravity. She is upfront that she doesn't know whether any of them have been deployed yet, and she explains why drone operators need line of sight and are licensed as pilots.
Why Aruna puts process ahead of strategy
Asked to rank people, process, strategy, and product, Aruna says that with the companies she has worked with, process comes first. Owners are often the bottleneck in their own business, so she starts by looking at what they are actually doing and where tools like Claude can free up their time. People come next, partly because they get the work done and partly because employees who believe in a company become its best advocates.
She would not spend months on strategy up front. Aruna knows the long-term goal, works on the other pieces, and then circles back to confirm or tweak the strategy. Jack adds that it can be almost irresponsible to build a roadmap before you even have a customer, so the move is to go get one, collect feedback, and adjust. Her advice right now is to pick a specific niche so people come to you for one need, then guard against scope creep once something sticks.
She also describes a new client that wants only strategy as it adapts its marketing to AI search rather than traditional Google search, a shift she compares to the Beta versus VHS days.
TerraNav's next chapter and a very full plate
TerraNav began a little over a year ago in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and has shifted from distributing drones to assembling them and now toward manufacturing them in the US, a plan Aruna says shrank from three years to one. The team is relocating to Northwest Arkansas, which she describes as an emerging drone capital, and is looking for financing. They have been bootstrapped so far and would rather avoid venture capital so they can keep equity available for the people who work for them. Aruna is also working with the US Department of Commerce on possible trade missions, with Pakistan as one destination under discussion.
TerraNav is only one of her ventures. Aruna also recently launched Life's Guardrails, a subscription service (around $100 a month) that helps families plan for aging by connecting the financial, legal, healthcare, insurance, and real estate pieces that usually sit in silos. She is also helping a fashion brand, a beauty company, and a mentoring platform for tech careers, which she says adds up to 13 to 15 hour days. Her hope is that building out teams will eventually free her up to focus on strategy rather than tactics.
So is she scrappy or sophisticated? Jack's verdict is 50-50, depending on the scenario.
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