Zerodha has a booming content platform within, but it has no plans to milk it

• Established as a free web-only platform in 2014, Varsity was launched also as an app one and a half years ago.
• The app is closing in on a million downloads, and registers 85,000 page visits every day.
• However, Zerodha has no plans ever to turn Varsity into a paid platform.

Stock brokerage platform Zerodha has been silently building its content platform – Varsity, the self-declared unicorn’s financial literacy platform. Launched as a free web-only platform in 2014, Varsity was also launched as an app one and a half years ago. And today, while the app is closing towards a million downloads, it also registers 85,000 page visits every day.

Even with such great numbers coming in, Karthik Rangappa, VP, Education Services at Zerodha, says that the company has no plans ever to turn Varsity into a paid platform.

“Varsity works on a single point agenda - to make Indians financially literate. We have been working towards this goal for the last 6 years. We continuously update the portal with new and relevant content and also respond to user-submitted queries on a regular basis,” he said.

Varsity’s growth story

While Zerodha itself has been witnessing great numbers since lockdown and a heightened interest in trading from millennials, Varsity isn’t far behind. Currently, Varsity covers and offers certification in 12 topics such as Business Valuations, Options trading, Futures trading, Personal finance among others.

The goal remains to create awareness about trading with no vested interests.

"A common theme through our ventures, be it Zerodha, Rainmatter, Varsity or True Beacon – has been democratizing participation in the financial ecosystem. Whether it was our decision to remove management fees from True Beacon or making Varsity free. The idea is to make participation in the financial ecosystem possible for a greater number of people as participants in equity markets in India is very low,” said Nikhil Kamath, Co-Founder and CIO True Beacon and Zerodha.

Varsity users could become Zerodha users – but the startup doesn’t necessarily promote it

Having such a large user base from a content platform, one would imagine that Zerodha would want to take advantage of it to push the users of Varsity to become Zerodha clients too. However, Rangappa said they never advertise and push products on Varsity. “We do have a nondescript 'open a Zerodha account' link at the bottom of the page, clicking on that leads them to the account opening page. Although several thousand users have clicked this link and opened accounts with us, this is not a metric to track for Varsity,” he said.

Rangappa added that everything else that happens “is the second-order effect at play”.

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