Article · 10 min read

Zerodha marketing strategy: how it grew to number one with almost zero ad spend

Apex Influence Free Beginner India

The best known Indian proof that a no budget GTM can win a category outright: a cheaper product worth talking about, Varsity as a free education library that earned trust before signup, and a referral loop on top. It is the concrete version of the advice to be useful in public rather than buy attention.

  • Zerodha replaced advertising with three compounding things: a cheaper product, free education, and referrals.
  • Varsity, its free plain-language market library, earned trust before the signup and keeps working for free.
  • Content takes three to nine months to show results versus days for ads, but the traffic does not stop.
  • Bootstrapped with no outside funding, it still led a category owned by deep-pocketed banks and brokers.
Open on apexinfluence.in ↗

The question it answers

  1. We are bootstrapped with no money for marketing. What does GTM look like without a budget?

Read with it

  1. Podcast · 80 min listen 7 Myths About Selling B2B SaaS In India ft Unicommerce Founder Kapil Makhija Siddhartha Ahluwalia with Kapil Makhija
  2. Walling bootstrapped five companies, so this is the rare GTM book written by someone who never had money to waste. The... MicroConf Book · Book, about 200 pages The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital Rob Walling
  3. Cohen names the exact trap a broke founder falls into: running the same tactics as a million other companies and being... A Smart Bear Essay · 15 min read If you build it, they won't come, unless… Jason Cohen
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →