Nithin Kamath has written it plainly: Zerodha does not advertise, does not have a sales team with targets, and does not do much marketing. What it did instead was price flat and low, which made the product itself the thing people told friends about, and roughly 30 percent of its users have come through referrals. It also built Varsity, a free, deep, plain language library of market lessons with no paywall and no ads, which brought in people long before they were ready to open an account. The Kite API turned developers into a distribution channel, since anyone building a trading tool on top needed a Zerodha account. And it stayed at about 1,000 people while the business grew five or six times, which is what let the economics work without spend.
2 hand-picked resources, 2 India-specific, 2 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it The founder saying it in his own words: no ads, no sales team with targets, not much marketing, and about 1,000 people while the business grew several times over. Primary source for a story that gets exaggerated elsewhere.
From Nithin Kamath (Substack) by Nithin Kamath Long read
Open nithinkamath.substack.com →Why we picked it Go look at the actual asset rather than reading about it. No signup, no paywall, no ads, and it is the top of Zerodha's funnel. Useful if you are wondering how deep free content has to go before it works as distribution.
From Zerodha by Karthik Rangappa Ongoing library
Open zerodha.com →How gtm teardowns reads from a different seat.
