Discover how Groww built a fintech empire by obsessing over customer love, not profit. Learn the product strategy that created 40M+ users and organic growth.
How to Build Products Customers Love: Groww's Winning Strategy
Key Insights
- Customer love beats revenue: Groww operated as a zero-revenue company for four years, betting that deep customer engagement and word-of-mouth growth would eventually create multiple monetization opportunities
- Read between the lines: Successful products aren't built on explicit customer requests, but on understanding underlying needs through direct engagement and observation
- Radical transparency wins: Offering complete product access with zero commission, despite seeming counterintuitive, became Groww's biggest competitive advantage and drove organic growth
- Design obsession matters: Every founder must be a power user of their own product, spending 2+ hours daily using it and 2+ hours talking to customers
- Regulation reduces complexity: Choosing to operate only in regulated zones eliminated 40% of the market but dramatically simplified decision-making and execution
- AI democratizes startups: Modern AI tools have reduced the barrier to entry so dramatically that one person with a clear vision can now build what previously required 10-15 people
The Birth of Radical Customer Obsession
Lalit Keshre's journey to building Groww, India's largest investment app with millions of users, began not in Silicon Valley but in a small city in Central India. His grandmother hoped he would become an IAS officer—a prestigious government position—but discovering Apple and Steve Jobs fundamentally shifted his perspective. When he attended IIT Bombay around 1999-2000 during the dot-com boom, witnessing peers launch their own ventures made entrepreneurship seem possible, even exciting.
However, Groww wasn't Lalit's first startup. His earlier attempts had failed, including Groww's own initial concept. In 2016, the team launched a robo-advisor model inspired by its popularity in the United States. But they noticed something that didn't make sense: despite India's population exceeding one billion people, fewer than 20 million were active investors. The robo-advisor approach failed to gain traction, forcing them into an intense period of iteration and questioning.
This failure proved to be their most valuable teacher. Instead of assuming they understood what customers wanted, they began obsessively asking what customers actually needed. Users frequently inquired about products not yet available on the app. They asked why certain products were missing. This insight, combined with observations from Lalit's previous experience at Flipkart where customers valued choice and transparency, led to a revolutionary hypothesis: what if they simply opened up the platform completely?
From Failed Robo-Advisor to Explosive Product-Market Fit
The revised approach launched in May 2017, just one year after the initial venture began. Groww's new model offered every available investment product, complete transparency on fees and performance, seamless payment processing, and effortless onboarding. The team hoped for 100 customers monthly but were shocked to acquire 600 in their first month—a powerful signal of product-market fit.
This decision seemed counterintuitive at the time, especially when the focus should have been on revenue generation. Operating with zero commission on mutual funds contradicted traditional fintech business models. Yet Lalit and his co-founders believed that if a product had low customer acquisition costs, high retention, strong engagement, deep customer love, and facilitated large transaction volumes, the company would eventually find ways to monetize. This wasn't blind faith—it was a calculated bet based on understanding their customer psychology.
The breakthrough came through relentless customer engagement. The team set up WhatsApp groups, actively participated on Quora (hugely popular in India at that time), and even visited movie theaters to talk directly with potential users. When you have only a handful of customers, extracting meaningful insights requires more than surveys or analytics. It demands direct, intimate conversation. They listened not just to explicit requests but read between the lines to understand deeper needs—whether for transparent product information, frictionless payments, or the psychological comfort of having all options available.
Within 10-15 days of launching the new product in May 2017, they experienced what Lalit calls the "aha" feeling. The buzz was palpable. Customers were talking about them organically. Growth was almost entirely word-of-mouth, driven by genuine customer enthusiasm. Even today, years after reaching millions of users, the vast majority of Groww's growth comes from organic channels, with customers recommending the app to friends, family members, and even their children.
The Power of Strategic Constraints and Radical Honesty
One of Groww's most important early decisions was deliberately restrictive: they chose to operate exclusively in fully regulated zones. India's financial industry includes unregulated areas, regulated areas, and grey zones. By consciously obtaining necessary licenses and operating within the complete regulatory framework, Groww sacrificed approximately 40% of the potential market. This seemed irrational from a growth perspective, yet it was strategically brilliant.
This commitment to regulation eliminated countless variables and simplified decision-making dramatically. There were no complicated grey-area negotiations, no regulatory ambiguity, no political risk. Every decision could be made cleanly within clear legal boundaries. This clarity allowed the team to focus intensely on what actually mattered: understanding and serving customers better than anyone else.
Monetization presented another strategic moment where customer obsession trumped short-term revenue thinking. When Groww launched with mutual funds, the company earned small commissions. But their customers—vocal, digitally sophisticated, and increasingly empowered—began demanding "direct mutual funds" with zero commission. This created an apparent paradox: how does a company make money if it eliminates its primary revenue stream?
The answer reveals Groww's sophisticated understanding of business dynamics. If a product achieves very low customer acquisition costs through word-of-mouth, maintains very high retention, drives strong engagement, cultivates genuine customer love, and facilitates large transaction volumes, the company would find monetization opportunities. This wasn't theoretical—it proved true. As customer demand for stock trading grew, new monetization channels emerged naturally. The company eventually monetized through spreads on stocks and other financial products, but only after building an unshakeable foundation of customer loyalty and usage.
Design Obsession: The Non-Negotiable Requirement
Among Groww's ten core commandments, one stands above the rest: obsess over design. This isn't aesthetic design alone—it's the entire user experience, from how features are presented to how transactions feel. Lalit practices what he preaches with unusual intensity. He personally uses Groww's product for more than two hours every single day. Beyond being a power user, he spends another two hours daily talking directly to customers who are actively using the product.
While Groww employs QA teams and dedicated quality assurance professionals, the deepest insights come from founders being actual users and maintaining direct contact with customers, especially power users who notice issues first. This approach echoes Paul Graham's famous advice: if you're building a consumer product, build it for yourself. This ensures you always have at least one customer, even when you're starting with nothing.
Every release and every app feature that Groww launches is thoroughly tested by the founding team before deployment. Lalit has established a clear expectation with his team: when launching a new feature, expect two types of customer messages. The first type: "This is just awesome, I love it!" The second type: "This is terrible, I hate it!" Both reactions are not just acceptable—they're desirable. They indicate customers care deeply about the product and have strong emotional responses to changes.
The real problem, Lalit explains, is when customers feel complete indifference. When a new feature launches and customers neither love nor hate it, when they simply don't care enough to comment, that signals a deeper failure. It means the feature hasn't moved them emotionally or functionally. In consumer products, indifference is the enemy. Strong positive or strong negative reactions both represent engagement and care.
Co-Founder Alignment: The Overlooked Secret to Scaling
Groww's success with four co-founders is unusual—maintaining alignment between even two founders is notoriously difficult. Yet everyone who has worked with this team consistently notes their remarkable alignment and ability to move with both urgency and consensus. How did they achieve this rare dynamic?
The foundation is core value system alignment, which Lalit distinguishes carefully from strategic alignment. While strategy changes year by year like "something written in pencil," core values should be "written in ink." When the four founders started Groww, they meticulously documented their value system in a comprehensive document. This wasn't vague mission-statement language. It specified exactly what they stand for, what they won't do, what compromises they'll never accept, and which choices they'll always prioritize. Their first principle was crystal clear: "We will always be customer-first, customer-obsessed."
These foundational decision-making principles have prevented conflicts for over a decade because they establish what Lalit calls "decision architecture." When disagreements arise—and they inevitably do in any startup—these principles provide the framework for resolution. If fundamental conflicts arise, everyone already knows the hierarchy of values that will determine the outcome.
Beyond values, Groww maintains radical clarity around ownership. In the earliest days, all four co-founders did everything. Harsh took customer support calls and handled KYC verification. Ishaan, the finance-focused founder, wrote code when needed. Everyone created content, including crude videos from 9-10 years ago that reveal their hands-on approach. But beyond this total flexibility, each founder owned specific domains with complete accountability. For technology, one founder is the designated owner responsible for final decisions in that realm. This clarity prevents the ambiguity that destroys many co-founder relationships.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the four founders genuinely enjoy each other's company. Even on weekends—the only time they don't physically see each other—they're constantly messaging on WhatsApp about business developments. On Monday mornings, they still feel excited to go to the office. During a founder's journey filled with ups and downs, this genuine enjoyment of each other's company transforms a co-founder relationship from a business arrangement into something far more powerful: a partnership sustained by real friendship and shared enthusiasm.
Building for the Next Generation: Evolution Beyond the Initial Vision
As Groww scales and the broader landscape shifts toward AI-powered decision-making in investing, maintaining customer obsession becomes even more critical. Lalit acknowledges that younger team members understand their own generation far better than older founders ever could. This recognition—that context changes rapidly and yesterday's wisdom may be outdated—drives Groww's strategy of surrounding themselves with younger talent and perspectives.
The competitive landscape is crowded with new consumer AI products, yet Lalit's approach to competition is counterintuitive. Rather than obsessing over what competitors are building, he focuses intensely on customers: their preferences, how those preferences are shifting, how trends are evolving, and how technology like AI will improve their experience and productivity. Paradoxically, worrying excessively about competition actually distances you from understanding customers. The best competitive response isn't defensive—it's obsessive customer focus.
Lalit's personal experimentation with AI coding tools informs this philosophy. By actually using these tools himself, rather than discussing them theoretically, he understands their possibilities viscerally. He noticed that modern AI tools eliminate much of the tedious "housekeeping" work in coding, suddenly making previously complex tasks achievable. This hands-on experience sparked ideas he could promote throughout the company. It's the same principle as customer engagement: you can't deeply understand something you don't directly experience.
Groww's wealth management initiative reflects this evolution mindset. Groww customers tend to be especially prudent and intelligent, so their wealth grows faster than average. As wealth increases, customer needs change fundamentally. A product journey requires continuous evolution as customers grow. If Groww failed to evolve alongside its customer base, smart founders would build alternative products addressing these emerging needs. Wealth management represents Groww's commitment to remaining indispensable as its customer demographic matures and their financial complexity increases.
The AI Era Changes Everything—Except What Matters Most
The rise of AI and cloud-based tools has fundamentally altered startup economics in ways that deserve careful attention. Building a product in the "internet world" previously required a specific sequence of hiring: three engineers, a product manager to guide them, a designer for aesthetics, operations staff if logistics were involved, and business people to handle P&L, revenue, and costs. Launching a startup required approximately 10-15 people as a baseline.
The current era, powered by AI and advanced cloud tools, has compressed this dramatically. A single person with a clear vision of what needs to be built can now sit down with free or affordable cloud credits, design the product, manage it, code it, automate operations, and launch it. The barrier to doing something has fallen so significantly that the startup landscape is being democratized in unprecedented ways.
Yet even as the "how" of building has become easier, the "what" remains as difficult as ever. What product should you build? What do customers actually need? Which problems are worth solving? Understanding customer needs and wants remains the non-negotiable foundation. You can leverage many AI tools to assist in that discovery process, but you absolutely must nail this fundamental understanding first. Once you've figured out what needs to be built, the execution—the how-to part—has become much, much easier than in previous decades.
This distinction matters enormously. Young founders can now focus their precious cognitive energy on the hardest question: what should we build? The AI and cloud tools handle execution details that previously consumed months of effort. This shift potentially elevates the quality of startups because founders can maintain deeper focus on customer understanding rather than getting trapped in technical complexity.
Final Wisdom: The Antidote to Overthinking
When Lalit offers advice to aspiring founders, he leads with apparent contradiction. First, don't listen to advice from older people like him when starting a company. The world changes too rapidly, and any guidance is rooted in contexts that may no longer apply. Younger individuals have far better intuition about the current landscape.
Yet despite this warning, his actual advice is simple: do something that doesn't feel like work. When you're engaged in it, time should evaporate in a blur. You should genuinely enjoy it. Someone recently asked Lalit what sacrifices he'd made building Groww, and after careful reflection, he realized he had made none. The team always enjoyed building it. Yes, there were tough moments, but fundamentally, building Groww was fun.
This philosophy runs counter to the startup mythology that celebrates suffering, sacrifice, and endless grinding. But consider the logic: if building your company doesn't feel like work, you'll maintain the energy, creativity, and persistence required to navigate inevitable challenges. If you're forcing yourself to do something you don't enjoy, burnout and poor decision-making become probable. The founders who succeed long-term typically found something they were genuinely excited about.
Conclusion
Groww's journey from a failed robo-advisor to India's leading investment platform reveals timeless principles about building products customers genuinely love. The path wasn't about chasing the biggest market or maximizing early revenue—it was about obsessively understanding customers, reading between the lines of their requests to identify underlying needs, and building something so good that customers couldn't help but recommend it to others. By maintaining radical honesty about what customers actually wanted, choosing strategic constraints that simplified decision-making, and keeping founder alignment grounded in shared values, Groww created one of India's fastest-growing consumer fintech companies. As AI tools democratize startup creation and new founders enter the space, the lesson becomes even more relevant: the tools for building products have never been easier to access, but understanding what to build has never been more important. Start by doing something you genuinely love, obsess over customer understanding above all else, and trust that execution becomes far easier once you've identified the right problem to solve. That's how you build products customers don't just tolerate—products they genuinely love and advocate for passionately.
Original source: Groww: If Your Customers Don't Love It or Hate It, You've Already Lost
powered by osmu.app