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How One Viral Video Saved Our Startup | Bhanu Harish Gurram (Finshots)
92 Plays4 years ago
"A viral video changed everything for us."
This single event took Bhanu Harish Gurram and his co-founders from the brink of running out of money to securing their first funding check from Zerodha. It's a powerful reminder for every founder that a breakthrough can come from the most unexpected places when you are consistently creating value.
Bhanu Harish Gurram is the co-founder of Finshots, Finception, and Ditto Insurance. An alumnus of IIT Roorkee and IIM Ahmedabad, Bhanu turned down a pre-placement offer from Amazon to build his vision. Today, his daily financial newsletter, Finshots, reaches over 500,000 subscribers, and his insurance advisory platform, Ditto, has advised over 300,000 users and sold more than 30,000 policies.
Key Insights from the Conversation:
- Problem-First Approach: The ventures evolved sequentially, each tackling a more refined version of the initial problem: making finance simple and accessible for the average Indian.
- The Content-to-Commerce Flywheel: Finshots builds a massive, trusting audience with free, high-quality content, which then serves as a low-cost acquisition funnel for Ditto Insurance, their primary monetization engine.
- Monetize Trust, Not Content: The team made a deliberate choice not to put their content behind a paywall, instead choosing to monetize the trust they built by offering ethical, advisory-led services.
- The Power of a Strategic Partner: The early and consistent backing from Zerodha provided not just capital but immense credibility and philosophical alignment, proving crucial to their success.
- Building an "Anti-Pattern" Brand: The ventures were consciously designed to counteract the negative practices of their respective industries—jargon, mis-selling, and spam—thereby creating a powerful brand differentiator built on transparency.
Chapters:
(00:00) - From Local College Dreams to IIT
(02:26) - Life at Nestlé & The Decision for an MBA
(07:39) - Rejecting an Amazon Offer to Start Up
(12:18) - The First Venture: The Rise and Pivot of Finception
(24:17) - "We Were Running Out of Money"
(31:31) - How a Viral Video Led to Zerodha Funding
(38:11) - Launching & Scaling Finshots to 500k+ Readers
(42:49) - The Long-Term Vision: Creating Ditto Insurance
(50:52) - The "Why": Personal Stories That Built the Mission
(58:07) - The Challenges of Hiring and Scaling a Team
Hashtags:
#Finshots #DittoInsurance #BhanuHarishGurram #FounderThesis #StartupIndia #Fintech #Insurtech #IIMAhmedabad #Zerodha #Entrepreneurship #ContentStrategy #ContentMarketing #Bootstrapping #VentureCapital #IndianStartups #FinancialLiteracy #StartupJourney #AkshayDatt
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi,
Early Ambitions and Educational Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Banu. I'm one of the co-founders of Finshorts. So there were like two good engineering colleges in a place where I grew up, Gintguntur. I mean, they think come in top hundred colleges in the country, maybe. So my whole focus was somehow I should get into those two colleges because I have heard my school seniors and a lot of people kind of getting good jobs, going abroad and stuff.
00:00:21
Speaker
Once I was in 10th class, we had a science teacher who came from a different school. And then he prompted me saying, I think you should go try for IIT. I mean, you should not just settle on for the local engineering colleges. Maybe you should go and try it out. So that's when I was introduced to something called IIT that exists. OK. So you got into IIT Roorkee, I believe, right? Yes, yes. OK. So what was that experience like for you, those four years at IIT Roorkee?
00:00:50
Speaker
I would say pretty crazy experience mainly because I never stayed away from my parents or at least I was completely stayed only in Andhra. Now, Roorkee is a complete opposite of what you have back at home.
00:01:06
Speaker
Let it be the weather, the food habits, the language. I can barely speak Hindi. I rarely tried any North Indian cuisines or anything. The temperatures there were very harsh. The temperatures would get to 5 degrees as well. I grew up in an entirely tropical atmosphere.
00:01:26
Speaker
So the first couple of years are pretty harsh, but after that you kind of get used to it because once you are there, you can't obviously go back and you don't want to leave the IIT as well. So
Career Beginnings and MBA Pursuit
00:01:37
Speaker
you slowly kind of got accustomed to that lifestyle. So IIT Roorkee, then at the end of your fourth year, what did you end up deciding to do next?
00:01:47
Speaker
I wanted to kind of, you know, go for an MBA. I don't know why I did that, but yeah, but I couldn't kind of, you know, score well in the cat. And I ended up kind of, you know, taking a job. And at the same time, I wanted to, you know, I was focused on, you know, getting a better job as well, because that would kind of, you know, help me kind of get out of the regular middle class life, right? That was like the first window for me, the first opportunity for me.
00:02:12
Speaker
Right. So yeah, I ended up working with Nestle India. I joined there as an engineering executive. I mean, I was responsible for taking care of the automation and maintenance of the noodles manufacturing plant. So then what next, you know, during those almost three years that you spent at Nestle, like what did you decide you want to do with your life? What did you learn in that experience?
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, I mean, for the first two years at least, I was continuing, I didn't have any major plans as such. I mean, mainly because I'm earning good money and I'm able to send back, you know, money to my parents, kind of, you know, things are working out. So I kind of, and the other thing is I was in Goa back then. So I was posted in one of Nestle's Goa's plans. So yeah, I mean, like, okay, what can an engineering student expect?
00:02:59
Speaker
I mean, you're earning money, you have your freedom and you're in Goa. So kind of, you know, I found good friends as well. They're good co-workers, good friends. So kind of chilled out for, let's say, one to two years. But then again, when we look back, you know, what is it kind of the Nestle experience or, you know, what is my future going to look like?
00:03:19
Speaker
So I was looking for some kind of exit options and so MBA kind of, you know, felt like a good option because it would open up a lot of new opportunities as well. Right. I mean, once I get into the B school, I can kind of decide where I want to head. Right. Yeah. So in third year of my work, I decided to kind of go ahead and, you know, give cat.
00:03:37
Speaker
So by this time, did you start developing a habit of reading business news or financial news or the seeds of what you eventually started? Did that happen at this time or did it happen once you cleared the cat and joined IMM Zabad?
00:03:53
Speaker
Well, to be honest, I never liked reading stuff, especially business or finance stuff. But again, during the CAT interview preparation days, I would force myself into reading all this stuff because CAT interviews, they may ask you like what's happening with the current economy or what is this policy about, how is this going to have an impact and stuff.
00:04:14
Speaker
Right. So I kind of forced myself into reading this stuff, but I mean, it's just like, you know, you have like no other option there, right? I mean, either you read and you kind of clear the interview or you kind of screw up the interview. So I just kind of forced myself into it, but yeah. Okay.
IIM Experience and Career Decisions
00:04:29
Speaker
So how was the interview like for you?
00:04:32
Speaker
Oh, well, I think I am the best interview was the craziest one. So I mean, when you prepare for these interviews, right, you can kind of lead the interview in a way, right? For example, how you end or you can kind of direct it to some extent in which direction you want the interviewers to proceed. But in I am the best interview, like, they didn't leave me any chance to do anything on my own.
00:04:55
Speaker
At one point, they asked me a probability question. So it's a pretty simple question. They gave me a book and said, if you have to pick a random page in this 200 page book, what is the chance that the last digit will be a zero? And I kind of freaked out there mainly because it's such a simple question. So the first thing that went into my head is, OK, is the panel thinking I'm that dumb that asking me such a simple question?
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, but I answered it. And the next question that followed is again, kind of, you know, put me in the same bucket again. They asked me to draw a graph of Y is equal to X squared. Right. So that is something which, you know, any 10th class kid can do. Right. Yeah. But they asked me about politics. They asked me about, you know, Nestle experience. I mean, it's like bunch of stuff all over the place. Like you wouldn't expect what the follow-up question or what the next question is going to be. Okay. How many items did you get into? Like from where all did you get final offers?
00:05:50
Speaker
I think I got all of them apart from, I think, Lucknow. Yeah. So you decided to go to IMM, what were those two years like for you? Those two years, I think, were the best of the entire student life, I would say my entire student life, mainly because the curriculum there is kind of pretty rigorous, as in they'll just every day you're going to be pushed to the wall, right? You'll have like very little recourse or you'll have very little
00:06:20
Speaker
Time to kind of know go back go back and forth right I mean at least in your undergrad you have like lots of free time to go around you know to explore stuff But in IMS it's just like you know the professor is going to give you You know an assignment or a sort and you have to submit it by midnight
00:06:36
Speaker
And the same thing is going to happen with four other courses you are having at the same time, right? And on top of it, the competition here is again, kind of, you know, cutthroat competition, right? People who are making a decision to come to B schools are typically, you know, I already have a work X, you know, I mean, you are at a much better position to make a decision whether you want to do an MBA or not, right? Compared to undergrad, you are just, you're just going with the flow, but for MBAs, it doesn't typically happen. Only people who have that resolve or who have decided that MBA is for them is going
00:07:06
Speaker
to be there and on top of it you have you know the best of the best students from all the engineering colleges and other you know commerce colleges coming there so the competition was again is pretty you know intense but again you get like you know a very good exposure to a lot of stuff because most of the learning happens you know with your peer-to-peer learning right there's very little you can actually study of the textbooks
00:07:30
Speaker
Okay. And where did you do your internship? I interned with Amazon. And you got a PPO from them also, right? Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So, so why didn't you join Amazon eventually? Like when you finished up with IMM Dabad?
00:07:45
Speaker
No, I think even before I got the offer for them, so you have your internships in April and May, typically every year and the typically companies kind of declare or they kind of disclose this PPOs anywhere from June to December, depending upon their internal requirements and stuff. And I think my Amazon PPO kind of came in November or so.
00:08:09
Speaker
And, uh, but by September, I think, yeah, we kind of decided that, you know, we wanted to do something else.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, so Shreith and I have been pretty close friends right from the first day of the college. And we did a lot of group projects. In these schools, you have a lot of case competitions as well. You have your Tata's, Birla's, and all these companies coming and conducting a lot of case competitions as well. So we participated in a lot of them.
00:08:42
Speaker
So that kind of gave us like a first-hand experience of how the life in corporate is going to be, at least as in in terms of what problems are we going to solve once we join the corporate. And at the same time, our internships also kind of provided a very good window into what is the scope of work that we will be getting into.
00:09:00
Speaker
And we didn't like any of that. So Shreith and I were kind of exploring what can we do. But we were never clear on where we will go. And I think at the same time, Pawan was my domain. So we lived in the same hostel there. So he was exploring a bunch of stuff. He didn't want to get into the corporate again.
00:09:24
Speaker
And he did some project with Professor Ankur Sinha there on why DMAT penetration in the country is low. And he figured there are some problems why a lot of people in India don't participate in the stock markets per se. Now, if you look at US and China, the percentage of population that participates in stock markets is in double digits.
00:09:47
Speaker
And in India, it's like hardly one to 2%. Right. So he thought, you know, I'm going to, I know, let me try and build something which will help people come and, you know, basically learn more about stock investing or, you know, basically people who will get into it.
Entrepreneurial Venture and Challenges
00:10:03
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So I was to discuss with him. I mean, since he's in the dorm and I kind of, you know, like criticizing or discussing more about products, like any product that I use, I kind of just try to, you know,
00:10:13
Speaker
Be the devil's advocate there and do so with power and I used to do that a lot I mean anything that he's doing I would kind of in a comment. I would kind of push him back stuff like that and So straight again was kind of completely convinced that he's not going to get into any corporate jobs
00:10:28
Speaker
And I was at a place where I was kind of, you know, shortlisting companies. Okay. Like these are the only two, three companies, maybe where, you know, I can find some work that I like. But so I think, yeah, by September, so power has pitched this idea to straight.
00:10:45
Speaker
So, this is what I'm going to do and I'm looking for a CTO. So, he wanted to build a gamification of sorts in stock markets where you come and you have like a practice sessions let's say, like mock trading or sessions like this and from there the platform will kind of help you learn and then before you kind of deploy your own capital, you can play or you can practice with virtual money.
00:11:10
Speaker
And then slowly you move and migrate towards, you know, you deploying your own capital there. Right. And he wanted a CTO and straight. He's a computer science engineer, but he never liked computer science. Right. But he still agreed saying, okay, I'll be a CTO and we can, you know, let's go and do something. I mean, he's just kind of so much not into this stuff. He's just kind of looking for an escape.
00:11:32
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And so one straight jumped onto the ship, you know, he kind of, again, convinced me also, you know, to get to get, get onto the act. Right. And so straight and have, I have like a very good, uh, you know, working rapport. We kind of compliment each other skills. Right. I'm more on the, what I would call quantitative stuff. Right. More of a math gal, I can say, and straight. He's of the more of a creative side of, you know, uh, like, you know, left brain, right brain sorts. Right.
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah. So I thought, you know, I mean, in case of straight is again doing right. So yeah, if I can kind of go ahead and experiment with this, let's see what happens from there. So how did that idea of encouraging people to invest in stock markets, like basically encouraging layman to invest in the stock market? How did that become a fin shots?
00:12:21
Speaker
Oh, so, uh, like I said, right. I mean, we had like very little idea back then, and we were just kind of, you know, it's just an escape for us. Right. So we, uh, so I am has this, uh, incubation center, right? CII where they incubate startups, both from, you know, I am from, you know, elsewhere from across the country as well. Right. Right. And when we pitch the idea, so, uh, we have this, uh, uh, fellowship program called I am Mavericks fellowship where.
00:12:47
Speaker
Any graduating students, if they want to perceive alternate career options, let's say like entrepreneurship or some, you know, let's say like in social NGOs or some social initiatives, let's say the college is going to support you for the next two years. Right. As in every month, the college will provide you with a minimal stipend. So we use it to get 40,000 from the college every month.
00:13:08
Speaker
So, it's like you take care of your basic expenses so that you need not be worrying about your livelihood and you can focus on whatever new venture that you want to experiment with. And for this entire thing, there is a professor panel to whom you have to pitch your idea in case if they see these people are qualified enough or this idea has a merit to be pursued or to be supported, the college is going to support you.
00:13:33
Speaker
So, when we pitch the idea, we pitch the same thing. We're going to create a tech solution that will help people to do all this stuff. I think this was in December. And we were selected for this fellowship program and we started working as well. We'll do a little bit of market research here and there and we'll figure it out. And once we get out of the college, we're going to be fully complete working on this thing.
00:14:00
Speaker
And what happened was we wanted to be a stockbroker, right? Just like how Zeroda is a stockbroker. So our plan is that, you know, we'll train people and once they learn, they can kind of come and trade on our platform itself. And that's where we're going to kind of earn money from. So we went to national stock exchange, NSC, in Ahmedabad. We want to be a broker and we want to get a license.
00:14:25
Speaker
And they kind of, you know, we're happy, very happy to help us out with all the stuff. But one of the things they said kind of, you know, blew our mind. Uh, you need, I think, three to five crores of capital to start off with, if you want to be a broker. So that was like completely out of the question for us. I mean, all three of us are getting from, you know, uh, middle-class families. Like we had no backups or anything else with us. Right. So that's when we decided, okay, I mean, we'll try something different. Maybe if not, you know, the brokerage firm.
00:14:55
Speaker
So by when did this meeting with NSE happen when you realize that this will not work out?
00:15:00
Speaker
I think this was in, not sure, but maybe in January, January or February. So still before the placements only. Yeah, but you have already signed out of the placement. So if you want to get into this fellowship, right, so you have to kind of play or indicate to the campus that you're not participating in the, you know, the campus placements. Yeah. I mean, like I said, since we didn't want to go there, right, we thought, you know, we'll figure out something, if not this, but, you know, we still wanted to continue with what we started off with.
00:15:30
Speaker
So then like, you know, what did it morph into or what were the pivot you made?
00:15:36
Speaker
So,
Evolving Business Focus and Investor Interest
00:15:36
Speaker
the first pivot, I think when we started out, we had broadly two problems. One is the information overload. There's so much of information on these stocks and other things that it was pretty difficult for people to make sense of. And once we graduated, now we had full time in our hands to go and do market research. So, for the next three months, I think April, May and June,
00:16:01
Speaker
We met close to 200 to 250 people in and around Ahmedabad, Gujarat and stuff. I mean we met from a person who is running a small pawn shop to HNI who is managing like 600-700 crores of money. So we kind of understood how these people are investing, what is it that they are doing.
00:16:21
Speaker
I think Gujarat contributes to close to 70% of the entire investors in the country. So you meet everybody, anybody there, the person is going to give you a funda about where to invest, where not to invest, which company is hot right now and everything.
00:16:40
Speaker
So, we met one of the research firms there, like stock research firms, and they said that there is an IPO that is coming up. It's an SMEs, small medium enterprises. And he's like, we don't have a lot of time at hand to analyze this company fully. So, how about you guys do something on this? And then we can see how good your research is or what is it that you guys want to simplify and stuff.
00:17:04
Speaker
So we worked on it for a week and we kind of published a small report about what is this company about and should you invest or should you not invest, basically what is happening with this company. And so our whole objective was that we first impressed this one research firm and from there we can, so they said like, in case if you like what you guys are publishing, we will push it across to all of our clients and you can see from where you can go from there.
00:17:31
Speaker
So we published one report for them. They liked it and you know, they kind of asked us to see if we can do more. And so what happened was I think they added us to most investors on this. So at least the full-time investors are typically parts of some WhatsApp or some other WhatsApp groups.
00:17:47
Speaker
And they added us to this WhatsApp group, I believe. And yeah, so from there we started kind of, you know, covering these IPOs, SME IPOs, because there is nobody out there, you know, kind of covering them. The mainstream IPOs, your money control, economic times, you know, a bunch of other stuff are typically do. What were the kind of companies that you were covering and how did you get enough information to make a report on them?
00:18:12
Speaker
I mean, so we primarily read on the information available on the internet. So when all this, when these companies go for an IPO, right? So they file a very big document with regulators detailing about what the company is, what business prospects and stuff, right? So more or less, we would analyze stuff from there. Okay. So you started doing company research or IPO research, then how did that morph to the next stage?
00:18:39
Speaker
So, we did this I think almost for like 4-5 months and then we realized that there's not a big market for this, right? And we kept meeting a lot of people along the way to get better understanding and stuff.
00:18:54
Speaker
And one of the gentlemen that we met, he told us that, you know, there's no point in, you know, even thinking about doing anything on the SME IPOs, mainly because it's like the dark pool of the entire stock market space, which is, you know, primarily used for people to launder money and, you know, do a bunch of stuff. I mean, essentially, you may think this company is doing great and stuff, but it's like, you know, the promoters and the investors, the kind of everybody is in the game together. Right.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's more or less like, you know, sort of a system built into what I would say is to fool the retail investors, per se, right? Yeah, so he kind of showed us the dark side of the SME IPOs. Right. I mean, we were so naive back then that, you know, if you publish a good report, and you highlight all the things, right, people will be able to make a better decision of it.
00:19:42
Speaker
but that was clearly not happening anywhere. So we kind of decided why not shift to covering mainstream stocks because they have much bigger audience. The audience for SMA market is pretty small and again it's kind of niche and not a lot of stuff happening over there.
00:20:00
Speaker
How did you think the monetization would happen in covering stocks, whether it is SME IPOs or mainstream stocks? What did you think the monetization was going to be? Because all these things are freely available on the internet.
00:20:15
Speaker
I don't think we kind of bothered about, you know, the monetization back that mainly because, right. I mean, when we started out, everybody out there would kind of tell us like, who are you guys in this space? Right. I mean, even for example, the people at CII or, you know, when we pitch this idea that, you know, what we're going to do is we're going to take this complex reports and put it in a simple language for people to understand, right. People kind of laugh at us.
00:20:41
Speaker
thinking that what we are doing is, you know, pretty stupid, right? Even when we, you know, when we'd meet these, you know, gentlemen in the market, right? Yeah. So far, I think there the focus was initially to at least show them that, you know, we are capable of doing something there, right? I mean, obviously, we didn't have any experience, right? I mean, we didn't take a lot of finance courses in the campus, neither we invested in the markets before, right? Yeah. So we would spend a lot of time
00:21:07
Speaker
just trying to read as many books as we can on, you know, stocks on investing on, you know, understanding business models and stuff, right? Yeah. So we have fairly focused on just to prove that this idea will work, right? If you simplify the content for people, it's going to help them make better decisions in the market.
00:21:25
Speaker
So then you shifted to mainstream stocks and that was again through like circulating PDFs on WhatsApp groups. No, no, no. I think by then we kind of launched a very minimal website where we would post our content. It's like a small blog website and we would circulate these articles on WhatsApp. So one of the things that we did back then was we leveraged WhatsApp as a tool to reach out to the fellow readers. Right. Hmm.
00:21:52
Speaker
So it's like, you know, you want updates from us, you subscribe on this WhatsApp and, you know, whenever we publish a new article, you're going to get a message directly on WhatsApp. So it kind of helped us because a lot of people would simply forward, you know, our content to their friends or they'll forward it to other groups. Right.
00:22:09
Speaker
But this was still largely investment advice. Like yes, yes, yes. Talk and say bias. No, no, no, no, no. We never did that. So one of the learnings that we had, uh, you know, when we were researching and when we were studying a lot about stocks is that you can, I mean, it's pretty difficult for you to guess which stocks are, you know, should you buy, should you not buy? Right. So there are even a lot of experiments which were conducted in us.
00:22:33
Speaker
which kind of highlight that monkeys are better at picking stocks than your experts on Wall Street. I think I can't recall the professor who conducted this experiment. So he simply, you know, put monkeys and, you know, he asked the monkeys to throw darts on the wall. So whichever, you know, stock it hits, right, he's going to buy it. And on the other hand, he had all this Wall Street, you know, big Ivy School analysts coming in and, you know, doing the stock picking. I think it's the monkeys outperformed it.
00:23:01
Speaker
Right. I mean, it's not because it's not because they're incapable or anything. It's just that there are so many factors that play into this. Right. I mean, your small research or your mathematical model is not going to make a cut over there. So what was your value at? Like for someone reading that it was like what to help them understand if I should invest in this stuff or not.
00:23:20
Speaker
Our focus was that, so on a lot of stocks, I may feel it's an investable stock and for you this may not be an investable stock mainly because your risk appetite and my risk appetite are different. Now, when most people publish the stock reports, they'll simply give like one rating on this. Now, it can be like one fit solution for everybody. So what our belief is that you provide the user with all the information that is required to analyze a stock.
00:23:50
Speaker
And you make it so simple for him, right? He understands everything about this company by the end of this article. And he will be in a better position to make a decision for himself. Yeah. So we would never give a buy sell or a hold call or any of those calls, right? We would simply present, you know, the entire picture about this company, right? What this company does. Okay. Why they are doing this, what is working out, what is not working out. And we leave it at that. Okay. Then what was the next pivot?
00:24:17
Speaker
Oh, no, I wouldn't call it like a big pivot, per se. But we kind of started covering more macroeconomic things as well. Right. And its stock research already had the branding of Finshorts? It was under the name Finsception. And yeah, for us, the bigger problem there was we were kind of running out of money. Right. So, I mean, what did you need money for? Because this was all just intellectual labor, right?
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, at the same time, I mean, for us to kind of analyze about these companies and publish reports every week, right? For example, if you pick one stock and you want to write about it, you may or may not find really interesting stuff about it. It's like, you know, you research four or five different stocks, and you'll find one of it to be interesting enough for you to talk about.
00:25:05
Speaker
Right. So we need, we kind of needed like more brains to work upon. And, uh, we, we kind of had like, you know, a couple of things, four, five interns with us easily, and we used to pay them 5,000 a month. Right. And so all of this coming from the 40,000 we would get from the college.
00:25:23
Speaker
We didn't have a lot of savings as well because neither of us, none of us are planning for getting into entrepreneurship or anything. So we had like four or five interns working with us all the time and we would pay them like five, six K from the 40,000 we would get from the college. And on top of it, our education loans, repayment is going to start in a couple of months. So all three of us graduated with 20 lakhs each education loans.
00:25:52
Speaker
yeah and the AMI for that will typically I think come to what like 30k a month right so for the first year you have that moratorium period and that will kind of you know soon end in you know your March or April right and so we went to the banks we asked them you know can you extend this for us by you know another six months maybe right right now we're not in a position to go ahead and make this 30,000 monthly payments and at the same time we were not able to
00:26:19
Speaker
expand our content reach as well, mainly because we couldn't hire a lot of people, right? So what kind of numbers were you doing then, like around this period of Feb? Oh, I think by February we had 3,000 subscribers, maybe. Okay. So you, on the Finception website, you had like an email list for which you had 3,000 subscribers. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So the daily email.
00:26:44
Speaker
No, no, no, that was like a weekly, not even weekly, I would say once in 10 days, right? Yeah, because it's like, you know, the interns, me and Pawan would do all the research, right? And then give it to Sreyith and the entire magic of inception or why it worked is the language in which it is presented because there are people out there who can provide better research than us. I mean, people who are veterans in this industry, right?
00:27:10
Speaker
But the real differentiator came from the way Shreith wrote the content there. The way you present a complex business model or you talk about complex financial metrics in a layman's language. If you have to explain return on capital employed or what is your inventory turnover days.
00:27:28
Speaker
Right. So you have to kind of, you know, put it in language. So straight was doing that. And yeah, the research, the writing and all of it, it easily took us like, you know, a week to set 10 days. Right. And we couldn't expand because we didn't have any money. And, uh, so straight and I even started, uh, teaching it, you know, uh, time for, you know, the cat students and we would kind of, you know, get like 10,000 a month and it's just like a part-time teaching. So the telegraph with again, this 10,000, we would hire in a couple more interns with us.
00:27:57
Speaker
Okay. So then what, like you're almost like with your back to the wall now. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, uh, I'll locates my brother kind of, you know, moved back to India. I think, uh, he joined us in, uh, I would say it's October, November. So he was working with, uh, so he's from IIT Delhi and he was working with, uh, Samsung South Korea, right? You hear those one crore packages on the internet, right? So he's one of those kids.
00:28:24
Speaker
So he left his high paying job and everything there and he wanted to try something on his own. So we said, why not come sit with us, we'll see if you can do anything here or if you want to do something on your own. And he has a lot of interest in finance and he used to invest as well in stocks, he used to do trading, much of other stuff.
00:28:45
Speaker
So he joined us, he was working with us. And so when we were running out of money, we kind of, you know, did like, you know, couple things, right? Just to keep the, you know, of inception thing floating for a few more months, right? Maybe we can figure out something from there, right?
00:29:01
Speaker
So we pitched to, I think, almost 25 to 30 VCs. That would be my sole job back then. We had 2000 subscribers. We kind of even had a small celebration and we thought now VCs are going to come after us. But I mean, we were so stupid, right? I mean, we didn't think that, okay, our business, I mean, at least the fact of inception business is not something any VC would want to find.
00:29:23
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And because we are from, I am kind of, and everybody would be at least courteous enough to talk to us. Right. And yeah, after first call, nobody would get back to us again. Okay. So you were pitching to VCs. What was the pitch? Like, you know, where was the money going to come from?
00:29:40
Speaker
Oh, the money, uh, so our plan was, uh, we're going to have basically make this content like a paid subscription. Right. For example, if you're a full-time investor, we are going to promise you that every week, let's say, right. You're going to get, you know, every week or twice a week, once we scale up, you're going to get good stuff that will help you make better decisions in the stock markets. So something like, uh, the Ken for, uh, yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
00:30:05
Speaker
So, and we met one HNI in Ahmedabad. So, he runs his own proprietary trading as well as stock investment investing. So, he read our reports and he liked them. So, he asked us if we can work for him and basically he will give us some company names and we have to provide a detailed research report on that.
00:30:28
Speaker
basis which he can take a call on what to do with those companies should he invest or should he not invest. I mean he is a big time investor right. So we started working for him again you know we would charge him like about 10-15k per report per se right yeah and at the same time locus kind of caught up and said okay how about we develop some trading algorithms
00:30:49
Speaker
So, he is like a math and fin guy. So, he kind of has his hand experimenting with various trading algorithms. So, we went ahead and pitched this to many HNI's there in Ahmedabad where it's like a proprietary trading algorithm. We are going to give the entire algorithm and you deploy your capital.
00:31:11
Speaker
And we can take, you know, like a profit sharing or basically we can figure out some of the other way. Right. Yeah. We almost signed up, you know, a couple of investors as well for this. Right. Yeah. But I mean, we didn't kind of, at the same time, we had a chance to meet Nitin Kamath from Zerodha.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, so I think this was in April, I believe. Yeah. So Jet Airways was almost about to shut down. Right. And we were kind of just trying to do, you know, anything different or something that will kind of, you know, give us a big break, right? Because we're not going anywhere. I mean,
00:31:47
Speaker
We're growing at like, you know, 500 subscribers a month, but we're not, you know, kind of moving too much. Right. So I think one of our interns, the design interns, she gave an idea that, you know, why not we make a small video on Jet Airways?
00:32:02
Speaker
Right. So we made one a bar chart race, right? So how jet airway started and it was at one point like the leading airlines in India and how it kind of, you know, is on the brink of bankruptcy now. Right. And that video went viral, right? Overnight, we became so famous on Twitter, LinkedIn, like the video is all over the internet.
00:32:23
Speaker
We got I think close to 2-3 million views on it together on all the platforms and one gentleman at Zeroda watched this video and he pushed it to and he went to our website to see what these guys are doing and he read our stuff, he liked it and he forwarded this to Karthik Rangappa the gentleman who built the entire Zeroda varsity modules and stuff
00:32:48
Speaker
and he liked it and he kind of you know sent it to Nitin. Nitin also liked the content so they wanted to see if we can do something together right yeah and we got a chance to meet Nitin in May and yeah so when we came we didn't have even have a pitch deck
00:33:04
Speaker
I mean, we brought one, but we didn't even show it to him. I think it was the best meetings that we had in the last one, one and a half years. So it hardly lasted for 40 minutes, I believe. And it's more about what you guys want to do and what
00:33:21
Speaker
you know, Nitin is planning to do, right? So, in one of his interviews, I think Nitin said that, you know, Zeroda is a big fish in a small pond, right? Now, until and unless you grow the pond, you're not going to get big, right? It's like the investing base in India is so small, even if you are a leading market player, you're not going to be that big.
00:33:41
Speaker
So, they were planning to, I mean, they had a lot of plans to kind of, you know, increase the base, the number of people who are in the capital markets ecosystem. And with that same initiative, they launched this Zoroda varsity. And even in fact, we learned a lot of stuff from the same website, Zoroda varsity.
00:33:57
Speaker
And we told our plan is again the same. We want to simplify stuff and we want to make content more accessible to people. We want to grow the ecosystem. It's just that both Zerota and us had a very similar goal that we wanted to increase or we want to bring more people into this ecosystem.
00:34:18
Speaker
And Nitin said, like, cool, then I know I'll support you guys. Tell me what you want. Right. So for us, one thing is that, you know, we just needed some capital so that, you know, we can maybe hire in a couple more writers. Right. And push out more stuff and then see. Right. And we ended up raising money from Nitin. Right. I mean, yeah, we met and the next day kind of exchange couple of emails. And that's it. We raised our seed round from zero.
00:34:41
Speaker
Okay, so is that the only investment you've raised so far? Yeah, yes, yes. So, you know, then what was the game plan then? Like, when did fin shorts as a brand get launched? Was this after you raised the funding? Ah, yes, yes, yes. So along with inception, right, I mean, our initial hypothesis was, you know, not entirely correct.
00:35:03
Speaker
As
Growth and Expansion of Finshots
00:35:03
Speaker
in we thought that a new people will basically come into the markets and not trade because our investors are not even trade because we are helping them with this. But what we realized is that most of the people who are reading our stuff are people who are already in the stock markets.
00:35:19
Speaker
So, they are just bored of reading this dense report from other research firms out there and they found you know of inception content is simple and easy to read right. So, it is like we are not bringing in more people into the ecosystem right, we are just helping the existing people, existing investors to kind of you know we are just easing their troubles.
00:35:41
Speaker
So, two things for us was we need to push more content as in like once in a week or once in 10 days is not going to make the cut. And we need to be talking about topics that have a wider reach. For example, if I talk about Asian paints.
00:35:58
Speaker
Only the people who have already invested in Asian paints or who are actually considering Asian paints as an investment opportunity might read our content. Somebody like you, let's say you never invested or somebody who is not in this market, he doesn't care much about Asian paints. Now, if you want to basically get these people interested in anything in finance and business, you need to talk about a wide range of topics.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, the second thing is that people's attention spans are pretty less, right? Our articles use it to be like 12-15 minute reads and that's kind of again, you know, a very niche audience would actually spend so much of time, right? I mean the current, you know, the generation and these people want much shorter form, easy to digest content.
00:36:41
Speaker
So, that's when we decided we need something a bit different and even before people can actually get into stocks and stuff, they need to understand more about what's happening in the entire economy as such. Why specific policies are required, why specific companies make certain business decisions. So, that's when we decided we'll get into something that is short form, high frequency and content that has a bigger audience base.
00:37:11
Speaker
Yeah. So we had this idea of FinShots back in December, 2018 itself, right? But we couldn't get anything, you know, ahead in this mainly because we didn't have the resources and we didn't want to let go of whatever we have built with Finsception till date. I mean, if you have to start FinShots, it's going to be like, you know, the existing audience are not going to find it that relevant.
00:37:33
Speaker
Right. So whatever, you know, 1000, 2000 subscribers that we have built in is kind of, you know, it's like, you know, you lose everything that you have built in the last six, seven months overnight. Right. And we were not, you know, uh, ready to kind of, you know, let that go. Right. Yeah. But once we kind of, you know, secured an investment from zero that we know that, you know, we have, we can now have resources at hand. We can experiment a bit and.
00:37:55
Speaker
From here, we can figure out what we can do, right? We can take some chances at least. Even for example, if this thing doesn't go up, right, we can still, we'll still be able to survive for, you know, a few more months to try out new things and then see where we go from here. So then you started Finshots when, like which month? We started this in August, August 2019. I think the first Finshots we released is on 16th August. And you use social media to spread the word about it and
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So by then, uh, I think we built a small, you know, a niche of audience for us on Twitter. And we were not on LinkedIn, you know, that big back then we were primarily on Twitter. And, uh, you know, we had almost, uh, I think 10,000 subscribers on finception, right? Yeah. By May, June. So our entire initial users for fin shots kind of again came from the inception audience itself. Right. And, uh, yeah. Okay.
00:38:49
Speaker
So, and how did the growth happen there? Like if you can tell me like subscriber based, like, you know, at what rate did it grow and what really was driving that growth? Like in your analysis, you know, what drove that growth? Oh, I think, you know, in the initial Finception days, we were pretty much focused on, so the entire team is primarily focused on content itself, right? How do we generate good content out there, right?
00:39:16
Speaker
Hardly worked upon, you know, increasing our reach, right? We didn't work a lot upon distribution. We were active on social media, but we didn't have, you know, we didn't have a dedicated plan on how we are going to expand this. Right. And I mean, we tried a couple of things with finception, but it's just that, you know, we couldn't get those things really going. Right. Yeah. And with fin shots, what we did is, you know, both of our responsibility is just increasing the reach with fin shots.
00:39:44
Speaker
And Sreehit and we have another Akshay who interned with us almost for like nine months before we kind of hired him full-time. I think he's our first employee as well. So both of them would work on fin shots. It's a completely walled out thing. You take care of content and we are going to ensure that this content gets good distribution.
00:40:06
Speaker
And we kind of, you know, started being very active on social media, right? We would post stuff, post interesting stuff. We would try different new, different things. For example, a lot of infographics and other things that we see, right? So we tried them during Finception days, but you know, it's just that we couldn't scale those things up a lot back then. But now we have, you know, some resources at hand. So we mainly worked on distribution part. Right. And what were the numbers like? Like how many subscribers in the first month and how did it grow?
00:40:36
Speaker
I think in the first month we had around 15k. I mean, because I think in the first two days itself, we had like 7,000 subscribers coming in, right? From the, from Finception. Yeah. Right. And I think by end of November, 2019, we were at 50,000. Yeah. So what we do is, you know, most of the initial users came from, you know, your undergrad and, you know, your MBA colleges.
00:41:04
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So what would power and do is he would reach out to all these colleges. So every college has this finance economics or commerce clubs, right? They have every week or, you know, monthly, they have their own newsletters and a bunch of other stuff that they push out to their students. And what we said is great. You know, why not try our content, right? Now, this is going to be helpful for you to be, you know, up to date on what's happening in knowing the business finance and the economy world.
00:41:32
Speaker
And more often than not, your group discussion topics at B schools is going to be on one of these things, right? They're not going to ask them and give you political topics, but it's more of, let's just know whether for example, okay, is GST helpful? Or should GST rates be cut? What happens then? You know, stuff like that. And with fin shorts, what we do is we kind of, you know, get deeper into these issues, right? Now, if you read the regular newspapers, you get the headlines. Now you may not know why and how things are happening, you know, behind those headlines.
00:42:02
Speaker
With Finshorts, you get the entire overview, right? You just need to spend like three minutes to get the entire understanding of any topic that we're talking about. So, and what is the current subscriber base that you have now? Right now we are at 1,75,000. So it's almost like viral growth, like from 15,000 in the first month to like, you know, 1,75,000 is a fairly fast ramp up. Yeah.
00:42:28
Speaker
I mean, I doubt there's any other newsletter which would have seen this kind of scale. Yeah, we haven't come across any other newsletters operating at this time. There are many in US, but in India, I think we are one of the few big newsletters out there. So, what do you think is your long-term play now? Are
Future Plans in Financial Advisory
00:42:49
Speaker
you still thinking of the Ken kind of a model where it becomes a paid subscription to access this or what's the monetization plan?
00:42:58
Speaker
Well, at least for now, we don't want to monetize fin shots directly. At least the content monetization is not on the cards for us. So, you know, along with all these things, right, as we are working, so we were pretty approachable to our audience on WhatsApp, at least in the back end of inception days. So a lot of people would kind of, you know, again, right back to us saying, you know, I have this much of money with what should I do? Right? Or how should I go about investing? Or basically, it's like, you know, you have a lot of
00:43:26
Speaker
financial questions right now there isn't there isn't anybody out there who is going to help you with making these decisions right for example a lot of my you know friends from I am would ask me this okay so I mean all of us graduated with 20 lakhs of loan and these people are earning money now
00:43:45
Speaker
What is a better option? Should I repay the entire loan as soon as possible, right? Or should I, you know, because you get some interest benefit on, you know, the income tax benefit on the interest that you pay for your loans, right? Now, what is an optimal solution for this, right? And similarly, for example, okay, I'm saving 50K now, where should my money go, right? Even after, you know, you're studying at these colleges, at big colleges, you're still, you don't have any clue.
00:44:11
Speaker
Mainly because none of our curriculum talks about anything about financial literacy per se. What is a good financial decision, what is not. Most of the products out there in the market are typically your aggregators or marketplaces who want to sell products. You go to a mutual fund platform, they just want you to invest your money somewhere.
00:44:34
Speaker
I mean you hear things like start with 500 rupees investing, start with as well as 100 rupees. But nobody is going to actually give you true advice on what is a better way to manage your money. So right now what we are doing is
00:44:51
Speaker
We are building a holistic financial planning tool, right? So, that's going to be there to help you with any financial decision that you have to make, you know, in your life, right? So, the focus, you know, till now has been on increasing the reach of this product. For example, if you look at a simple thing like an online insurance or online mutual funds, right? From your 2010-12 till date, the objective has been to increase the reach of these products to people.
00:45:19
Speaker
before this is they were kind of you know very niche you know they would only be sold by you know some or the other uncle who is trying to sell you analysis policy and stuff. Now the next phase for this is going to be on personalized advisory right what fits for you may not fit for me right every person is unique every you know case is unique so you need to provide advice you know from case to case basis.
00:45:42
Speaker
Right now, so we want to take the focus away from whatever it's a selling this products because the selling is not the objective for us anywhere, right? Giving good advice to you is my objective, right? For example, let's say you come to me saying, Hey, Bono, I have like, you know, three lakh rupees with me. What should I do? Right? The first thing I'm going to tell you is create an emergency fund, put
00:46:02
Speaker
you know, one, one and a half lakh rupees or whatever the amount we calculated to be right in a fixed deposit. Now, I'm not going to get anything if you park your money with your HDFC bank, right? I'm nowhere in this play, right? Yeah, you may get some money. I mean, I may make some money in case if you invest somewhere or if you do somewhere, but that may not be an optimal solution for you, right? Yeah.
00:46:22
Speaker
So our focus is going to be on solely helping users to make better decisions, not just trying to sell or push some product to them. So what would this look like? Would it be like a mobile app in which you enter information about your financial status and assets and liabilities and then it gives you advice through an algorithm? Is that what it would look like? I would say 80% of it would look like that because
00:46:48
Speaker
Most use cases can be automated or you can have like a predefined solutions and conditions, right? At the same time, there will be many cases which may not be possible to kind of automate or to automatically calculate stuff. So, there will have like the real advisors who will be talking to you, understanding your case and then going from there.
00:47:08
Speaker
Okay. So this product that you're going to make, it'll be like a subscription product. Like how will you monetize it? Yes. Yes. It's going to be on a subscription, you know, method. So our belief is that, you know, when I'm giving advice to you, right, I should be completely giving it.
00:47:25
Speaker
only because this is going to actually help you as an advice right now in the current ecosystem what happens is that you know the incentives are kind of you know at times can be misaligned as in for example let's take simple case of a regular mutual funds
00:47:41
Speaker
So any platform that is out there, you have a better incentive if you push a mutual fund that is going to give you a better commission. You don't want to simply sell an ETF or a debt mutual fund where you make 0.5% compared to a small cap fund that's giving you 1.5%.
00:47:58
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So, I mean, there'll be platform. There are platforms that kind of do honest advice, but still your incentives can be at times misaligned. Right. And at the same time, uh, you cannot look at all these things independently. Right. So our plan is that, you know, if you think our advice is not working for you, you're not going to pay me next year. Right. So both of our incentives will be aligned in case if I'm my only revenue source is if my customers are my only revenue source. Hmm. Okay. Okay.
00:48:27
Speaker
And you would kind of leverage the Zerodha platform for people who actually want to go ahead and invest money. Within the app, people would be able to do transactions through Zerodha. Would that be? Yes, yes, yes.
00:48:42
Speaker
So our focus is mainly on people who are not participating in these markets per se. So we are not giving any solutions to people who want to invest directly in stocks per se.
00:48:58
Speaker
A good user for us to start off with would be somebody who just graduated out of college, got his first job, and he's able to save like 10-15K a month, let's say. So how do you plan for this person's future? So we're going to cover everything from
00:49:19
Speaker
insurance to your retirement planning. Any financial plan should essentially start with protecting your downside. You have to focus on growing your money, but before you get there, you should first try to protect your downside. Insurance is a place where you start to safeguard yourself from. This is coming from my personal experience.
00:49:41
Speaker
So when I joined, I am in 2016, I know I had no kids, I'm not going to have any income. So I didn't want to be any burden on my parents, right? In case if anything is required for me, right? So the first thing I did was I bought a health insurance, right? Now I didn't use it in 2016. I didn't use it in 2017. I didn't use it till last quarter of 2018 when I
00:50:06
Speaker
I caught with Deng Yu, right? And I was hospitalised for almost 15 days, I believe. And the medical bill came out to be 70,000 rupees in a small hospital in Ahmedabad. Like it's not even like, you know, your five star or multi-specialty hospitals, right? Now, if I didn't have the insurance back then we would have been bankrupt and we would have packed our backs and moved back.
00:50:28
Speaker
When we were moving from month on month paycheck to paycheck sort of a thing and 70,000 would have kind of simply pushed all of us out completely. It's like this. I always used to think that I'm unnecessarily paying 10,000 every year to these guys where I'm not getting anything out of it. But in the third year of my insurance, that is something which saved us.
00:50:54
Speaker
Okay. Okay. And you said that you would also have like human advisors in addition to some automated suggestions. So that would end up being pretty expensive. No, if you have like human advisors talking to the users, I mean, so we're not talking of something which will cost a couple of hundred bucks a month. Like it might end up being costlier than that. Right.
00:51:16
Speaker
I mean you're right it's going to kind of you know push up the costs but I believe that is the right thing to do right just copy pasting you know the same solution to everybody is not going to work and the other belief is that since we're not giving stock advisory to people right so we're not going to have for example if I talk to you and set up your entire financial plan and you don't chart out your plan for the future
00:51:40
Speaker
It's not like you're going to come to me every week asking you what is happening, what is not happening. You may have like, you know, you want to review things a couple months down the lane. Three, four calls at max in an entire year. And most use cases can be automated. For example, like I said, what is
00:52:01
Speaker
a good amount of a house loan that you can take, right? If you take, if you purchase a house for 70 lakhs, how is that is going to affect your retirement, right? Or compared to if you purchase a house with one CR, right? Will you have to forego that foreign troop you have been planning, right? Now, people typically kind of, you know, look at all these things in different silos, but all these things are actually very well, highly interconnected stuff.
00:52:27
Speaker
What financial decision that you make this year is going to have an impact on how much money or how much expenses that you can make five years down the lane. So you need to look at all these things in a holistic fashion.
00:52:41
Speaker
So this I imagine would be a pretty complex product to build. I mean you'd have to take into account so many different variables and like what do you see is the timeline for launching this and like you know how big is this project that you're planning to do or are you planning to launch a simpler version and make it complex as you go along?
00:53:03
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. This is going to be pretty complex. So, like I said, the first initial version that we had planned, right, was to take one small use case, like somebody who just graduated out of college, maybe say like, you know, with an education loan. And yeah, you start from there, right. And slowly we'll kind of, you know, go forward. And yeah, in fact, we wanted to launch this, like, you know,
00:53:27
Speaker
in the month of May itself, but after COVID, the situation of the economy or the stock markets per se is not that encouraging, I would say. And we didn't feel like the markets are good at that point in time to kind of get into an invest.
00:53:46
Speaker
Because we don't know what we're getting into, right? A small economic downturns can always be accounted for when you're building your portfolios, but something like the scale of COVID or something like this is kind of, we never saw anything like this before, right? And we were not convinced that we should even be putting our money in any of these things. And we kind of withdrew our own money as well from wherever we have invested, right?
00:54:13
Speaker
Now, when you're not doing, when you're not investing, you should tell somebody else to go ahead and invest. So we said, you know, we're not going to launch this product until we feel the time is correct for this. You would like these advisors, would they be like, you know, you would hire people on your payroll and then train them and all, or would you like work with existing financial advisors and like, what's the plan there?
00:54:36
Speaker
Well, at least for the initial few days, we want it to be completely in-house. So right now, the problem for most financial advisors is that the same person has to take care of marketing, customer service and research and portfolio building and everything as well.
00:54:55
Speaker
Now with us, what we kind of plan to do is that, you know, the advisory and all those things are going to be handled by a separate team and the financial advisory, like, you know, talking to each and every customer and then figuring out the solutions will be kind of, you know, handled by a different set of people, right?
Scaling and Team Challenges
00:55:13
Speaker
Are there comparable products or companies which are doing this in the US or any other market, like what you're planning to build?
00:55:22
Speaker
Yes, I think there are a couple of them. We have a website like Wealthfront and Betterment. But again, they are pretty much focused only on investments. Whatever money you are saving, the platform is going to help you.
00:55:43
Speaker
Now, our belief of financial planning is that it has to be an end-to-end solution. I have to account for everything that you have, like starting from your insurances, to your investments, to let's say you're planning to take some loans. Now, you should be able to get advice on that as well.
00:56:02
Speaker
So that's what we're going to do is, I mean, obviously we're not going to have all of this in the product right from the start. We may start, you know, we'll be starting off this with insurance, most likely in the next two to three months, we may get this out, right? And once we are done with the insurance, then we're going to bring in the basic level of financial planning. And from there, we're kind of going to build and upgrade the product as we go forward. Okay.
00:56:24
Speaker
So would it also have integration so that you can actually see what is your portfolio worth? For example, let's say you recommend to a user that invest in equity mutual funds, and then he's able to do those investments through the Finception product. And he's also able to see what is the present value of his investments. And he's able to see what is his insurance and what is the loan amount due and all of that. Like, are you planning all those integrations?
00:56:53
Speaker
It has to be a one-stop solution for anything you want to do with your finances. The bigger problem for people is not about finding these products, but about making this decision on what is good for you and what is not good for you. For example, you may purchase insurance like two times in your entire lifetime.
00:57:14
Speaker
And nobody has ever trained you on this, right? And if you make a mistake here, I mean, you'll see the benefit or you'll get to see these things only when you know, you have to use these products, right? I mean, God forbid you wouldn't want to use any insurance product, right? You may want to buy a health insurance, but you wouldn't want to be in a place where you go and use this, right? You claim some benefits and stuff, right? Now, and when you realize that, you know, you actually signed up for a wrong product, you would be kind of completely caught. You're not even in a situation to
00:57:44
Speaker
cover it up or, you know, I meant for it. Right. Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Pretty interesting. So, you know, what do you see as the next level of learning that you personally need to do? Like what is it that personally drives you that this is something I want to learn?
00:58:06
Speaker
Well, I think it's about scaling up the team right now. I mean, one of the biggest challenges for us has been, you know, kind of hiring good people into the team, right? Because I mean, on the face of it, people look at like, at least like back when we were hiring developers, right?
00:58:22
Speaker
in November when we had like hardly 50,000 subscribers and people looked at simple like okay it's just a blog right and we didn't have a product out there to showcase it to the people right I mean any techies would typically want to work on big products and stuff you wouldn't work on want to work on a simple newsletter website per se
00:58:39
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So far as the challenge still kind of, you know, remains on the hiring front, I would say. Okay. So why did you make the move from Ahmedabad to Bangalore? Um, well, uh, so, uh, we wanted to, I mean, our product is going to be kind of integrated very well with zero though. Right.
00:58:56
Speaker
So, we felt it will be more convenient if you work out of here and at the same time hiring tech and other resources in Ahmedabad is a bit difficult. We had options between Bangalore and Hyderabad but again we would have got same kind of tech resources but since Zeroda is here we felt it's going to be more convenient for us.
00:59:17
Speaker
And at the same time, Zerota has been kind enough to provide us with a working space as well. So in their head office, they have space for all the startups that they intubate until you kind of grow into a big team, like 25, 30 people, you can work out of their office itself. They have a working space for all the startups there. So that kind of, again, helps us kind of save some money as well. Right. So why would say we regulate you? You're not actually selling anything, any financial product, right?
00:59:46
Speaker
No, I'm giving you advice, right? Now I'm going to tell you, okay, of 30,000 rupees that you're going to save, you put 10,000 rupees in mutual fund A or, you know, in particular ETF, right? So anybody who is advising people, right, should be qualified enough and you should have the investment advisory license from SEBI.