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Nithin Kamath, who is the founder and CEO of online stock trading platform Zerodha, announced that the company has built a customer base of over 1 million.
He his twitter handle he wrote “We, at Zerodha, just got to 1 crore customers” and added: “looking back, the biggest tipping point was AADHAR for online account opening. Cannot thank the Government of India, the SEBI, and the exchanges and depositories enough for making this happen”.
He then explained how some of the things they’ve done have resulted in “unintended benifits” and helped the company grow over the past 12 years. Kamath said “The plan to rely on word-of-mouth and have a single offering for all customers had benefits that we never thought of at the start.”
He says “When customers are introduced by family or friends who are existing clients, they also tend to help bridge the knowledge gap about the platform at the start. A huge challenge for consumer apps in a complex business like ours. Can’t thank our customers enough for this.”
Kamath says the idea of charging customers to open an account also helped the company’s success. Nithin explained:”We started by charging account opening fees to cover costs. We soon realised that the fee also created a sense of seriousness; trading is risky and isn’t like installing a gaming app. Also, only those with intent open accounts, reducing compliance costs of inactive accounts.Avoiding spam calls, emails, and push notifications helped the platform gain credibility.”
“Don’t do unto others what you don’t want to be done unto you, has been at the core of everything we do. This meant no spam calls, emails or push notifications to open accounts or trigger trades. This also helped us gain credibility, the biggest challenge in the broking business.” the founder said.