I covered the gold loan market in my Chapter 1 & 2 (links in comments) but lot of people asked how can the market be so big. Do we have so much gold in India? ✴ The answer is that we have lot more gold in India than we can even imagine. Official figures by World Gold Council pegged this at 25000 tonnes (in a 5 year old analysis). That number is being quoted everywhere in analyst presentations of Banks, NBFCs and Fintechs. ✴ But if we just go back 12 years, India imported over 15000 tonnes including 5000 tonnes since the last WGC report. So OFFICIALLY we have over 30,000 tonnes (that’s ..read more

On the occasion of Onam, I have put together some fascinating facts about Kerala: ✳️ If Kerala was a country, it would have the highest gold reserve per capita in the world ✳️ Kerala spends 27x more than the national average on purchasing gold every year ✳️ Kerala amounts for almost 20% of India’s private gold reserves which amounts to roughly 20 lakhs crores ✳️ Kerala consumes 60,000 KG of gold every year and it has over 6000 jewellery shops. This is roughly 2gm of gold per capita per year. While we all know about Southern states love for gold, the relationship Kerala has with it is ..read more

We keep hearing about India’s love for gold. Data reflects that clearly. Indian households own gold worth ₹8,00,00,00,00,00,000 (80 lakhs crore) which is almost 40% of our GDP, accumulated over decades. In Comparison, RBI holds just 3% of total gold in India and our temples have over 16% which is almost 16 lakhs crore (our temples are rich!!!). And this gold has been donated to temples by common people like us. This precious assets gave birth to a very unique business in india almost a century ago, called “Gold Loans”. Gold became the gold standard for a secured loan in an unorganized sec ..read more

Original published by me at https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/opinion/why-npci-had-to-extend-upi-market-cap-deadline-by-two-years-9649961.html January 2023 was suppose to bring in a bizarre regulation (if I can call it so) to restrict popular UPI Apps to stop growing. NPCI came up with a novel idea in March 2021 to save UPI from the concentration risk. Well the reasons were not entirely unfounded as UPI was suffering from large tech outages starting from a big bang issue that happened in 2020 when PhonePe went down due to moratorium on Yes Bank. That’s when we all realized our dependency on an ..read more

I have made a small effort to present the list of unicorns based on few financial parameters. Hope you like it. I have taken good care in compiling this. If you find any errors, please mail me at dabbot@gmail.com and I will fix it. Top 20 Most Valuable Startups *Listed (market value based on current share price)Top 20 loss making startups Top 20 by Revenue Top 20 Youngest Unicorns Top 20 B2C startups Just 9 out of 57 B2C startups have shown profits in FY21 (15% profitable) Top 20 B2B Startups 12 out of 38 B2B startups have shown profits in FY21 (31% pro ..read more

This blog has been authored by indiagold cofounder Nitin Misra, it was originally published at Times of India: An Uber for asset backed loans - Is the future of secured lending branchless? It’s late at night, you finally got time to binge your favourite show on Netflix and need something to munch. But there’s nothing in the fridge. Consider this parallel universe where there are no food delivery apps and you have go to a restaurant to get the food! Or think about this — you have a train to catch. You need a taxi. But there are no taxi apps and you actually need to go to a taxi stand yours ..read more

Life time value (LTV) of customers is one of the key metric measured by startups to offset a heavy one time customer acquisition cost. In simpler terms, it is the approximate value (in money terms) a customer could deliver through their lifetime on your product. This helps startups (consumer or SAAS) in allocating the budgets for customer acquisition (CAC). Ideally CAC should never be higher than LTV unless you are yet to unlock the full revenue potential of your product. Also, it is important to calculate LTV when you have seen few cycles of acquisition, churn & monetisation. Calcul ..read more

India is world’s no.1 in app downloads on Android with 23bn downloads in 2021, almost 2.5x of USA. This make Google Play Store one of the most powerful platforms in the country as they control almost 15bn downloads if we exclude side loads and alternate app stores. Last year Google announced, apps that are offering in-app purchases of digital goods, have to use Google Play’s billing system and pay 30% commission to Google. While this rule existed but Google never enforced this strictly. Currently, most apps offering digital music, IAP, OTT subscription are using external payment gateways payin ..read more

Whether an organisation is big or small , whether it is dealing in the finance or marketing domain, one thing is common in all organisations that they need to survive and grow: BUILD SALES FUNNEL TO COLLECT LEADS. More the number of leads, more the chance you have to convert them, and more is the growth you can achieve by handling the leads in an efficient manner. But what happens if your leads stop flowing in the system — it will be a nightmare, right ? Last week we @indiagold also came across the same situation. Here’s an insight into what transpired next. But before that let ..read more

How indiagold rolled out more than 365 releases in less than a year — the concept of feature flag Having bugs in production is a nightmare for anyone. It becomes even more challenging once your user base grows significantly. On top of this if you are using a mobile app, iOS or Android, you can’t fix any bugs immediately since every release has to be approved before it is available for the public to download. So the nagging questions for any fast-growing engineering team remain: How do you ensure high-quality releases with minimum bugs/disruptions? How do you reduce the technical de ..read more