We have many partners and customers who might be creating these ads, but we have never done any marketing and advertising ourselves ever. We never pay partners or even customers any upfront money to put these ads as well, we just do a flat percentage share of the brokerage revenue generated.
The context of us talking about not spending on advertising is that
- If we spend money to acquire users, then the business is wired to constantly figure out ways to generate this cost in revenue from customers. Most times, this isn’t right for the customer, like trying to get customers to borrow or trade more or trade riskier products. Sharing this from a Zconnect post from earlier this year.
Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you
This has been the foundation on which we have built the business from the start, not just in our product but in every aspect of the business. You can read this post by K or Kailash, our CTO, to know more about how we actively disengage . We don’t do any data mining and find ways to trigger you to transact in the markets. When trading and investing, we understand that doing less or nothing is the right thing to do. This is also why we haven’t ever sent emails or push notifications nudging you to trade.
We only reach out digitally to customers when there is a product or business update. We did have a sales team who would call back customers who signed up but didn’t finish onboarding, but we stopped that process and moved the entire team to support. We didn’t want to call and disturb customers or prospects who have not asked us to reach out to them. Interestingly, it didn’t make any difference to the customer onboarding rates.
- In a low-cost business model like ours, if we spend Rs 3000 to Rs 5000 acquiring a customer, it is almost impossible to recover that cost. If the business can’t recover the cost then it is forced to constantly raise external funding, which eventually forces the business to do things which may not be again right for the customer.
Your question now would be, isn’t what we pay to the partners and referrals a marketing and advertising cost? As I mentioned, we only pay a small percentage of the revenue generated and nothing for acquiring a customer. None of our partners are allowed to interact with the customers directly and instigate them to trade or anything else. This way, there is Rs 0 cost of acquisition for the business, and we don’t have to worry about the two points I mentioned above.