What Zerodha Teaches a Small Business About Growing Without Ads (and What It Can’t)

In January 2025, Zerodha’s founder Nithin Kamath wrote that the company “may be the only B2C company to have reached this scale without ever advertising”. Business Today, reporting the post, put the scale at more than 1.6 crore people investing and trading on the platform, with almost 30% of customers arriving through referrals.

Most owners I meet in Vashi, Thane or Belapur hear a story like that and file it under “nice for a fintech”. A typical example is a CA practice, a coaching class or a clinic spending a fixed amount every month on ads and wondering why the phone goes quiet the moment the ads stop. The question this article answers is narrower and more useful: which of Zerodha’s habits can a small Indian business actually copy, and which ones depend on things you do not have?

A note on method. Every claim about Zerodha below comes from Zerodha’s own pages (its About page, charges page, support articles and founder’s blog posts) or from reputable press reporting the founder’s own words. I have no connection with Zerodha. It is used here as a case study, nothing more.

1. What Zerodha actually did, in its own numbers

Before taking lessons from any brand, it helps to separate what the company has said from what people have written about it. Here is the short version, limited to figures Zerodha or its founder published, with dates.

Sources: Zerodha About; Zerodha 10th anniversary post; Business Today, 20 Jan 2025. Company-reported figures, not independently audited here.

Two things stand out. First, the referral share is large but not the whole story: roughly seven in ten customers came some other way. Second, the timeline is long. Ten years separate the start of operations from the anniversary post, and the numbers that get quoted today sit on top of fifteen years of compounding.

Kamath’s explanation for skipping ads is blunt. Business Today quotes him saying “If we had advertised, much of our profits would have gone to Google and Meta”, and, in an ET interview, “You don’t look at an ad and decide to invest in stocks. It’s always a friend or family member who influences you.” He also says, honestly, “Whether avoiding advertising was the right call, I don’t know.” I find that last line the most useful one. Even the person most associated with the strategy treats it as a bet.

2. Lesson one: make your price impossible to misunderstand

Zerodha’s charges page reads like a menu. Each product has one line and one number. In a category where many people expect to be confused by fees, that clarity is itself a reason to trust the company.

Source: Zerodha charges page, checked 30 October 2026. Statutory charges (taxes, exchange fees) are listed separately on the same page. Shown to illustrate how pricing is presented, not as investment advice.

You probably cannot, and should not, give your core service away for free. The lesson is the format, not the number. Look at how many small business websites in Mumbai say “contact us for pricing” for services that have a fairly predictable price range. Every one of those pages sends the visitor off to ask someone else first, and that someone else might recommend a competitor.

What this looks like at your scale

• A clinic: list consultation fees and the price range of common procedures, with one line on what changes the price.
• A coaching class: publish fees per batch, what is included, and the refund rule if a student leaves in the first month.
• A contractor or interior firm: you may not be able to quote without a visit, but you can explain how you price (per square foot, per item, materials separate) and give a typical range for a 1BHK or 2BHK.
• A B2B supplier: a published minimum order and delivery charge saves a phone call for both sides.

The fear I hear most is that competitors will undercut a published price. Some will. But the customers who choose purely on price were never going to be loyal, and the ones who value clarity will trust you sooner. Notice that Zerodha also lists the statutory charges separately and in detail. Being clear about the parts that are not in your control matters as much as the headline number.

3. Lesson two: teach before you sell

Zerodha’s Varsity describes itself as “an extensive and in-depth collection of stock market and financial lessons”, covering topics “from savings and taxation to option strategies and technical analysis”. The page states plainly: “No signup, no pay-wall, no ads.” In the 10th-anniversary post, Kamath describes it as having grown into “one of the biggest MOOC educational initiatives on capital markets in the world”.

The key detail is “no signup”. Varsity does not hold the content hostage for an email address or a phone number. It simply teaches, and it trusts that some readers will later remember who taught them. That is the opposite of how many small businesses approach content, where every PDF is gated behind a lead form.

You do not need a library, you need ten answers

A small business cannot build Varsity. It does not need to. What it needs is honest answers to the ten questions customers ask before buying, written once and published where people look: your website, your Google Business Profile, and a WhatsApp message you can forward.

• A dentist writing “Root canal or extraction: how a dentist decides” in plain language.
• A CA firm explaining which GST returns a small trader files and when, with a link to the official portal.
• A solar installer showing how to read your electricity bill to estimate system size.
• A packers and movers firm listing what drives the cost of a local shift.

These pages also help with search. People type exactly these questions into Google, and a clear answer on your site is the sort of page that can show up for them. It is slow, which is the point. Each page keeps working long after an ad would have stopped.

See also: For how this kind of content ranks, see how to get on the first page of Google.

4. Lesson three: protect customers from their own worst decisions

This is the lesson I see copied least, and I think it is the most powerful. Zerodha built what it calls Nudges. Its support page defines them as “real-time alerts shown on Kite, our trading platform” that “warn users of risks associated with a particular trade before they execute the trade”. Examples include warnings on illiquid stocks with a market cap under ₹100 crores, on stocks promoted through social media tips, and on companies in insolvency proceedings.

In the 10th-anniversary post, Kamath wrote that after these warnings were introduced, “the penny stock trading volumes on Kite have dropped by more than 50%”. That is a company-reported figure. What matters for us is the intent: a business deliberately adding friction that reduces some activity on its own platform, because that activity tends to hurt customers.

Every trade has its version of a penny stock, the purchase a customer will regret. A short-term business benefits from selling it. A business that wants referrals benefits from talking the customer out of it.

Illustrations by Infoways, not data. Each one costs a sale in the short term and earns a recommendation in the long term.

There is a commercial reason this works. A customer who was talked out of a bad purchase tells that story. “He told me not to waste money on it” is one of the most repeated sentences in Indian word of mouth, and it is worth more than any discount.

5. Lesson four: design the referral, do not just hope for it

About 30% of Zerodha’s customers came through referrals, according to Business Today. A small business often gets a much higher share than that without trying, because so much local buying in India starts with “do you know a good…?”. The problem is that most owners never make it easy for a happy customer to pass their name on.

The modern version of word of mouth is largely public. When a friend recommends a clinic, the next thing the listener does is search for it on Google and read the reviews. Google’s own help page on local ranking says local results are “mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity”, and that “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking”. A recommendation that leads to an empty or neglected profile loses some of its force.

1. Ask at the moment of relief. The day the repair works, the result comes in or the work is handed over, send a short WhatsApp message with your Google review link.
2. Reply to every review. Google’s page notes that replying “shows that you value their feedback”. A calm reply to a bad review is read by every future customer.
3. Give people something to forward. A clean one-page link with your services, prices and location is easier to share than “search for us”.
4. Thank referrers personally. A call or a handwritten note does more for a small business than a points scheme.

See also: The full playbook is in our guides to getting more Google reviews and the Google Business Profile.

6. Lesson five: keep the product simple enough to recommend

People recommend things they can explain in one sentence. Zerodha’s pricing fits on a phone screen, and its free products are described in a line each. I am careful here: Zerodha’s public pages do not claim “simplicity” as a strategy in those words, and I am not going to put that claim in their mouth. But the structure of what they publish is easy to repeat to a friend, and that is the test that matters for a small business.

Try it on your own business. Can a happy customer explain what you do, roughly what it costs and why you are good in one breath? If the honest answer needs a five-minute conversation, you are making referrals harder than they need to be. Usually the fix is cutting the menu: fewer packages, clearer names, one obvious first step.

7. Where this advice breaks down

Zerodha’s story is easy to romanticise. Here is where I think copying it goes wrong for a small business.

• Time. Zerodha started in 2010. A no-ads strategy compounds slowly. If you have rent and salaries due and an empty pipeline, stopping ads to “grow like Zerodha” is a risk the founder himself calls uncertain.
• Market timing. Zerodha grew while large numbers of Indians were opening their first trading accounts; its own post notes that Nudge was aimed at first-time investors who arrived in the markets during the COVID lockdown. A local business in a stable or shrinking market has less new demand to ride.
• Scale economics. A ₹0 price works when a very large customer base makes money in other ways. A small business that copies the price rather than the clarity will simply lose money.
• Product category. Investing is a high-trust, high-research decision where education naturally helps. For impulse purchases or emergencies (a plumber at 11 pm), being visible at the moment of need, often through ads or Maps, matters more than teaching.
• Survivorship. We study Zerodha because it worked. Many businesses also avoided advertising and stayed small. The habits here improve your odds; they do not guarantee an outcome.

My own view: for most small businesses the right answer is “both”. Run modest, measured ads to keep enquiries steady, and spend the same energy on the trust habits above, so that each month a slightly larger share of customers comes from referrals and search. Over two or three years, that shifts the balance without betting the business on it.

See also: If you are weighing paid against organic, see Google Ads vs SEO.

A Zerodha-style checklist for a small business

Zerodha’s founder says he does not know whether skipping ads was the right call. What is clear from the company’s own pages is the set of habits underneath it, and a ten-person business can start on every one of them this month.