Zerodha’s fascination with community led startups

Recently Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath invested Rs. 10 crores in the finfluencer Sharan Hegde’s community led startup The 1% club. Sharan Hegde created an online community where he teaches financial literacy and wealth management through his Instagram account which has a follower base of 2.3 million people. He has been creating contents daily religiously since more than 3 years and this is his first external investment.

This is however not the first time Zerodha invested in a community led startup. They had previously backed another community driven startup Finshots which regularly posted contents and interesting stories simplifying financial information. Zerodha invested Rs. 4 crores in Finshots when they were just creating contents and had no commercial products or even a monetization strategy in place.

Finshots co-founders Pawan Kumar Rai, Shrehit karkare, Bhan Harish Gurram and Lokesh Gurram were building a community by posting one content per week when one of their videos on Jet Airways caught the eye of Zerodha’s CEO Nithin Kamat who then called them to his office where they had a nice discussion and realising the potential behind the content community commerce Zerodha invested Rs. 4 crores in Finshots.

Zerodha’s investment was a shot in the arm for Finshots which boosted their confidence and strengthened their journey of simplifying financial information. They expanded their team, hired content writers and started posting interesting contents daily. They launched an advisory first insurance platform Ditto Insurance in 2021 which has been going great. The interesting part was Finshots’ founders were not looking for funds when they met Nithin Kamat.

And the interesting part is in both these incidents Zerodha was the first investor.

Perhaps the reason why Zerodha’s Kamath brothers are so fascinated with community led startups is because they themselves built India’s one of the early unicorns and made their way to become the country’s one of the youngest self made billionaires by leveraging this same community content commerce model where they first created a community by educating people about the stock markets, creating awareness and then monetising the community via commercialisation.