Groww: If Your Customers Don't Love It or Hate It, You've Already Lost
In a Nutshell
Groww succeeded by building full transparency, seamless onboarding, and frictionless payments—features customers never explicitly requested but deeply valued—leading to explosive organic growth and near-perfect retention from day one. The team reduced risk to a single question mark (monetization) while obsessing over strong customer reactions, rejecting neutral feedback, and operating with zero revenue for four years before unlocking it through stocks. Key principles include writing down non-negotiable values upfront, maintaining clear ownership among co-founders, and prioritizing genuine enjoyment of the work over external advice.
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Most of the time founders would not build exactly what customers directly ask for but instead read between the lines. Customers did not explicitly say to show all products, display full transparency, and make payments frictionless, yet those were the actual needs.
Lalit Keshre joined the Y Combinator Winter 2018 batch. The original vision was to enable everyone in India to invest. Groww went public in November.
Lalit grew up in a small city in central India. His grandmother wanted him to become an IAS officer and coined the blessing "IAS bhava." Exposure to Steve Jobs and Apple in 1997-98 rewired his thinking. He attended IIT Bombay during the 1999-2000 dot-com boom when everyone around him was starting companies, which made the idea of being independent exciting.
Groww is Lalit's second startup and third if counting his student startup. All previous attempts failed. The first idea tried at Groww was a robo-advisor in 2016, inspired by Wealthfront and Betterment. At that time India had over a billion people and hundreds of millions shopping online at Flipkart, yet fewer than 20 million investors. The robo-advisor approach did not work.
Customers kept asking "why this product and not that one." This led to the insight that Indian customers value choice and transparency, similar to the Flipkart model. The current Groww product launched in May 2017, one year after starting in May 2016. The hypothesis was to open everything with full transparency, seamless payments, and seamless onboarding.
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