I’ve invested more than Rs 30 lakh through Mutual Funds in the last few years and spoken to 10+ Mutual Fund investors and advisors, and read a few books on investing. Here are some lessons so you can save several hours of research 🧵 This may not apply directly to your situations and you must always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. DYOR & other disclaimers apply.

🧵 Been learning more about personal finance the past few weeks (6 books, lots of articles, dozens of podcasts). At the risk of oversimplification, here's everything I know. Usual disclaimers apply. DYOR. And no, I didn't use ChatGPT to write this. Let's start at the start: Track your finances. This is life changing and fairly easy to do. Note down your monthly income, expense, investment, surplus. Don't complicate it with apps and trackers, a simple spreadsheet will work as well as any app.

When I see "serious" entrepreneurs, my instinct is to run. A $100 bn + company, the world's 2nd largest smartphone maker, Freshworks, and several other startups infuse the idea of "play" in their work. Here's a thread. Mike Cannon - Brookes and Scott Farquhar started a tech support company in 2001. They worked nights and days until they landed on a hit product called Jira, which helps companies manage projects, track bugs, and such.

Digital India’s low trust problem is at its worst. Some real stories. Indian army, LIC, a grieving widow, nothing is spared.

Mrs. Raghavan (name changed) picked up the call on her landline. The caller said that her husband had a life insurance policy and she was now eligible to make a claim. After walking her through some formalities on several occasions, the caller asked her to send in a cheque of Rs 50,000 so he could release the insurance amount.

Here's a confession.

I had little to no knowledge of this thing called product marketing until about three years ago 😳!

Turns out, it's one of the most important teams behind successful startups. If you’ve ever seen a company with well-choreographed events, great customer stories, well-informed sales and marketing teams, and just great pitches, they’ve probably got a great product marketing team working behind the scenes.

⚡️ Many of you won't recognize the man in this photo. Or the young man in this photo.

1/ India’s early stage ecosystem is set to explode. Thanks to 'fuck you'​ money

“A people too must live before it can philosophize,” philosopher and author Will Durant concludes in his book The Story of Philosophy. 2/ Lebanese-American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes that concept a bit further when he says that to be free to do what you want the way you want to, you need something called “fuck you” money. At family dinners, it's referred to as financial independence.

1/ ⚡️How do you go think of creating a marketing strategy for your SaaS startup? Here's @arun_pattabhi, the chief growth officer of @freshworks on how: I like to think of two broad dimensions before crafting a marketing strategy. 2/ The first one is around the complexity of the product and the second one is the complexity of the buying environment. Your marketing approach and strategy will change depending on these two factors.

1/ Content can be a powerful way to grow your startup — whether it is to build a brand or acquire customers. Here's @stephsmithio on how.

People often ask me if they should start with a podcast, a blog, a newsletter, and so on. These are all just forms of content. 2/ Content is a way to articulate ideas to an audience. So there’s no correct answer to this.

However, I do encourage people to start out with written content. This is because the written content ecosystem, although more competitive, is a lot more developed.

1/ ⭐️ Lot of startups underestimate the power of brand in the early days especially now because you can acquire customers through paid channels. But it's absolutely critical if you're a product led company. Here's @ginag on how they thought about brand at Duolingo. 2/ The brand personality, how users relate to the company and the app, and what it means to them is crucial. The copy being super friendly was always intentional.

1/ The world’s 3 largest smartphone companies currently are Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. Apple is 45 years old. Samsung is 83 years old. And Xiaomi? Just about 10 years old. 2/ It is not only the world’s 3rd largest smartphone seller, but was one of the youngest companies to make it to the Fortune 500 list with revenues of $37.7 billion (2020) and profits of over $2 billion.

When Xiaomi started out, China was a battlefield of over 400 brands.

Listening to @balajis and @MohapatraHemant on @LightspeedIndia's #ExtremeEntrepreneurs series.

Paraphrasing some points I picked up from @balajis. You don't need to come to the US to build billion dollar companies because the west is in decline. Technology is global. Examples

a) Decentralised crypto
b) Getting to Mars
c) Transhumanism

Online grocery market in India is competitive. There's Amazon, Flipkart, JioMart and several others in this space. But BigBasket, reportedly valued north of $2 bn, has held its own. A thread. @RavBhatia ⚡️Grocery is expected to be a $790 billion market by 2024. Of this, online grocery is expected to be around $18.2 billion. (Source: @RedSeer)

🔥🔥If the story about @getpostman talking to investors to raise at $2 billion valuation is true, it is really a marker of an orbit shift for Indian SaaS. Thread 👇🏽 What's truly remarkable is that Postman is doing this with some 250 employees. Even if you come from the funding is not a mile marker school of thought, it has 10 mn devs and 500K+ cos using their product. This easily rivals top Silicon Valley Companies.

Funny incident. We post an ad to sell our son's old pram on OLX. We get a call from a prospective buyer in just a few hours. He wants to buy the pram. I offered to show it to him before taking money. He didn't want to see it. He also didn't want to bargain on the price. I thought we were slightly on the higher side.

A practical guide to fixing your social media addiction. Here's a thread from what I've learned. First, I tried to figure out what makes social media so addictive. Don't skip this bit, because you can't beat it if you don't know it.

So Cambridge Analytica in India. Let’s see what we have here. Long thread coming up. Cambridge Analytica is owned by SCL Group (earlier known as Strategic Communication Laboratories) is British behavioral research and strategic communication company.