Good business storytelling needs to understand this. It may express whatever opinion on the subject it covers, but it must hold reverence for enterprise at large.

Which is why we’re being absolutely serious when we tell you that you have to check out The Ken’s new podcast, called Intermission.

Intermission isn’t a breezy listen. The first episode is a seven-hour long deep dive on Asian Paints. But it’s a show made with love and care. An entire month of research sits behind every hour you finally hear. That’s a rare thing in a time where a single prompt can create an unending waterfall of “content”. This, we assure you, isn’t content, it is craftsmanship. You’re probably sick of all the synthetic word-material we’re drawing in, but this is to slop what an Hermes bag is to the plastic output of a Chinese factory.

That care shows in little things.

Take it from us: when you’re really trying to tell the story of a business, you find yourself falling a little in love with its product — even when it looks mundane from the outside. That’s one of the first things you realise when listening to Intermission. It takes something as plain as paint, and marvels at it in a way that fills you with wonder too. Paint, as The Ken tells it, is at once a marvel of chemistry, history, texture, and so on. They spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about teflon. They throw in little nuggets, like how, in the middle ages, mixing colours was against the natural order of things. As they go through their many rabbitholes, paint becomes a little magical.

Part of that magic, though, comes from process. Paint is fascinating, in great part, because of the labours that go into the business of paint. They help you see the thin coating on your wall for what it is: a chain that begins in a distant chemistry lab, and then flows all the way through to your home; via factories and stockists and dealers and humble painters. You learn to appreciate the industry’s marvels, like how dealers can offer ten thousand shades of paint with just 500 litres of stock. You realise just how brutal the competition for painters’ loyalties can be. You learn to respect the complexity involved in painting a single wall. You see the entire machine, one gear at a time.

Meanwhile, The Ken also gives you a sense of the wider world in which Asian Paints’ story unfurls. The podcast gives you a glimpse of why this company had to begin in Mumbai; or why it was only a Gujarati businessman that could have run this company. It tells you just how important a single date — in this case, June 30, 1997 — can be to the life of a company. For brief periods, this becomes a history podcast rather than a business one. But that only makes you see the company as a living thing.

Above all, this is a well-told story. It is told with patience, and with detail, and with a sort of confidence you don’t always see in India. It respects you, dear reader, trusting that you will stay with it for seven hours because the story deserves that sort of time.

This is the kind of work we’re proud to support, in whatever little way, here at Zerodha.

Watch the first part here:

You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, Krishna here.

Every day, on the Daily Brief, we write about so many things under the sun. One day, it’s how transformers work, another day it’s on printed circuit boards, and yet another, it’s how India’s state finances work, or China. We’re no experts on these things, but we spend a lot of time researching them, obsessing over rabbit holes in a quest to find a satisfying answer where there might be none. So far, that seems to have worked.

But something is missing.

In our workflow, it becomes difficult to speak to the people actually building things, running operations, making decisions, and dealing with real-world constraints. We do speak to such experts, and love doing so. But we don’t do it enough.

We want to rectify this now. We want to understand what you do, how you think about your industry, and where common narratives about your work miss the mark.

So this is just an open invitation. If you’re an industry expert, an analyst, an entrepreneur, an investor, an economist, a policy professional, or someone deeply involved in any space we write about (which is everything) — we’d love to talk. No agenda, no “interview” pressure. Just a conversation to learn.

If this sounds like you, or if you know someone we should speak to, you can comment below or reach out to us at krishna.lohia@zerodha.com.

Today, we’re talking to Pranav Agarwal.

Pranav is the only person on the team who truly deserves to be called a writer. He takes crude first drafts and, somehow, turns them into pieces people actually love reading.

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and watch the videos on YouTube. You can also watch The Daily Brief in Hindi.

Check out more of Pranav’s writings here:

Today, we’re talking to Kashish Kapoor.

Kashish is the only one even slightly qualified to do this job, which is to say, he's finished CFA Level 1.

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and watch the videos on YouTube. You can also watch The Daily Brief in Hindi.

Check out more of Kashish’s writings here:

Today, we’re talking to Krishna Lohia.

Krishna has been working on the Daily Brief since the very first episode, and the only reason we still have jobs is that he wakes up at 6 AM every day.

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and watch the videos on YouTube. You can also watch The Daily Brief in Hindi.

Check out more of Krishna’s writings here:

Today, we’re talking to Pranav Manie.

Pranav Manie, aka DJ Easy Money Sniper. Manie is Zerodha’s resident DJ and one of India’s most popular business nerds on the internet.

You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and watch the videos on YouTube. You can also watch The Daily Brief in Hindi.

Check out more of Manie’s writings here:

Hi folks, my name is Krishna, and along with my colleagues Pranav, Kashish, Maine, Bhuvan, Vignesh, and Meher, we bring you The Daily Brief every day in your inbox. It’s been more than a year since we have been doing this, and one question that a lot of people have asked is: how do we research?

I had written a long answer to that on our Reddit forum, so I’m just pasting it here. I hope this helps :)

People keep asking us this: “How do you guys research these stories?” And honestly, there’s nothing secret about it. We don’t do anything fancy or groundbreaking. So here it is.

There are four or five of us on the team, and most of us just read. A lot. We start early around 6 a.m. and go through 40–50 different websites, articles, and reports every morning. That includes everything from The Financial Times, Business Standard, Economic Times, and Bloomberg to random research papers, government reports, and brokerage notes. We even look at journals and academic papers, the kind of stuff nobody really touches in India. This has been ingrained into all of us because of our Guru: Bhuvan.

Now, the goal isn’t to read everything. After doing this for a while, we have developed a kind of instinct for what might turn into a story. Like, if the markets fall and someone says a thousand crores “vanished,” that’s not a story. But if a company’s putting up a ₹5000 crore plant, let’s say, a semiconductor plant, now that’s interesting. You can dig into what chips are, how they work, where India stands in the global chain, and so on.

So through the morning, we keep sharing interesting stuff we find in our internal chat group, links, reports, screenshots, random PDFs, whatever catches our eye. This goes on till around 11 a.m., when we all hop on a call.

That’s when everyone pitches what they’ve found. Each of us has our own area we’ve sort of gravitated towards over time. For example, I usually end up reading more on quick commerce, hospitals, and consumer stuff. So when we’re discussing stories, we lean on each other’s areas of strength.

Then we pick what to actually pursue. The main question is: does it matter to a lot of people? Is it something that’s both impactful and interesting? And honestly, we’re a little selfish here; if it’s something we genuinely want to understand, we go for it. Now, this process has evolved over time but the core idea of learning is there since day 1.

Once a story’s locked in, the deep-dive starts. That can mean anything: reading Bloomberg pieces, going through research reports, watching management interviews, listening to earnings calls, checking investor presentations, or just doing an old-school Google search. Every story demands its own route. Sometimes you’ll find a detailed government report; sometimes you’re just piecing things together from five different opinion columns.

If it’s a big industry explainer, like on specialty chemicals, it takes even more reading. And we know we’ll still miss things, because this is a daily show. Each story has a hard time cap: we usually have to wrap the research and writing by 6 or 7 p.m. so it can go to editing. Not everything we read makes it into the final script; only the main meat does. The rest gets left out.

Editing usually takes 30–40 minutes, the story is shot, and then overnight, the video gets cut and prepped to go live the next morning.

That’s pretty much it. We’ve been doing this every single day for over a year now. And luckily, haven’t missed a single one.

The Indian stock market has never been more mainstream than it is today. The post-pandemic explosion of interest has been nothing short of spectacular, bringing a dramatic influx of new traders into the market. That's a good thing.

However, a lot of newcomers think trading is incredibly easy, and many believe that they can get rich overnight from trading. As Nithin often says:

The stock market is probably the toughest place in the world to make easy money, especially in the long run.

That always holds. Despite endless statistics showing how difficult trading is, people convince themselves they'll be the exceptions until they learn the hard truths the hard way.

Losing a few thousand rupees when you are 25 to learn the reality of trading is better than blowing up your savings at 35 when you’ve got bills to pay. Mistakes are part of the process. Sometimes our hardest lessons come from actually making mistakes rather than just reading about them—that's just fundamental human nature, and we don't think anything will change that.

From the very beginning of Zerodha, educating users has been core to what we do, and we’ve done this through Varsity, Varsity Live, Z-Connect, TradingQ&A, Markets by Zerodha, Zero1, and many collaborations.

The goal has always been not to tell people what to buy and sell, but rather to teach them how to think about the very act of buying and selling. That old line about fishing applies here:

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime

Educating people about the markets is something we take seriously. We've never resorted to cheap gimmicks or shoddy content when it comes to financial education because we're deeply passionate about helping people make better decisions.

But the issue is that from about 2018 onward, and especially in this post-COVID period, there's been a spectacular increase in the number of so-called "finfluencers" in the stock market. A lot of these people aren't just unethical—they're downright frauds who thrive on peddling courses, seminars, books, and all manner of "trading secrets" that supposedly make people rich.

What they're essentially doing is selling greed by setting completely wrong expectations, like making 5% a month. Just as a footnote: not even Jim Simons makes 5% a month consistently, but that's beside the point.

There's a whole industry of shady actors with massive followings who build these courses and set the wrong expectations. Just take a cursory look at SEBI's enforcement orders section, and you can see numerous cautionary tales about these fraudulent influencers.

This has become a huge problem in the Indian markets because these people attract newbies by setting wrong expectations. In some cases, people don't just lose some money; they get taken for a complete ride and lose their entire life savings.

Introducing In The Money by Zerodha

Zerodha Varsity has pretty much everything you need to know about any aspect of the stock market. But there was one area where we hadn't done much: a trading-specific channel where we talk about what's happening in the markets—not just trading concepts, which Varsity has already well covered.

That's why we're starting this new YouTube channel and newsletter called In The Money by Zerodha. The goal is to continuously track the markets, analyze them, and help you make sense of all the madness. In doing so, we also want to educate people about the reality of trading and the complexity involved.

In The Money by Zerodha

Let's be real: the trading space is packed with hype and clickbait content that makes it nearly impossible to find what actually matters. Through this newsletter (and our accompanying video series), we're taking the long road to understanding trading.

We're launching two main series:

The first is a weekly show called The Long and the Short, where we do two things: one, we bridge the gap between theory and practice in trading; and two, week after week, we break down market developments, share data-driven insights, and provide simple yet powerful frameworks to help you think more clearly about your trades and strategies going forward.

The second series is an educational series where we're trying to debunk all the nonsense being peddled by fraudulent actors in the stock market.

We’ll be clear: the goal with this channel is not to give you tips or tell you what to trade. Rather, it's to help you make sense of the market and, crucially, help you avoid obvious mistakes because losing money is much easier than making money.

For this initiative, we’re collaborating with Sandeep Rao—a market veteran with over two decades of experience, and he's also a SEBI-registered research analyst. He has spent years thinking, writing, and speaking about trading and active investing; he brings deep expertise and a balanced perspective to this space.

We need your help (seriously).

Here's the thing—we still don't have a completely clear idea of what this channel should become or exactly what we should do. Ultimately, this channel is only as good as the value you get out of it.

That means we genuinely want to know your feedback, suggestions, ideas, and thoughts. We need your help in shaping this into something useful that you actually get value from.

Unlike other people who casually say "please leave a comment," we're actually saying it and meaning it. We go and read and reply to each and every comment, whether it's here on Substack or on YouTube.

So please, please, please—give us all your thoughts. This is your chance to help build something that actually serves the trading community the right way.

What topics would you like us to cover? What kind of market analysis would be most helpful? What trading myths need debunking? Let us know in the comments below.

Leave a comment

Hello, folks! My name is Bhuvan, and along with my wonderful colleagues — Pranav, Anurag, Krishna, Shubham, Prerana, Vignesh, Nithin, Meher and Kashish (I hesitate to call Kashish wonderful, but I guess I have no choice) — I'm involved with the YouTube channel and series of newsletters that go under Markets by Zerodha.

How it all started

This channel started really on a whim. It was born out of a discussion we had internally with . He said that there isn't any single good daily podcast in India that gives you a sense of what's happening in the financial markets.

That was our trigger. We brainstormed through a ton of different ideas about what to do, but ultimately, we had to start somewhere and take our shot.

So we started with a simple daily show. We weren’t trying to tell people about the ups-and-downs of the markets themselves — that problem was already solved by traditional financial media. The bigger problem was that many people didn't have good resources to understand why anything was happening. Nothing told them of the context in which things were happening or its historical perspective, if any, and without that, the path ahead seemed obscure.

The early days

When we started, I had absolutely no idea how to do this. In the first few months, it was just Anurag and me writing all the stories. Anurag hated working till late, and I've spent many sleepless nights editing scripts until right before they were to go on. Thankfully, things have become much easier now, but it was all a massive learning curve.

Even though it might not show, a lot of effort goes into everything you see on the Markets YouTube channel and in the newsletters. And that’s because we don’t always know what we’re talking about; we’re constantly learning on the job.

That’s our philosophy: we approach everything on this channel as people who are learning. We’re hobbyists. The world has had enough “experts”; it needs more amateur geeks and nerds who delight in learning about new things and sharing them with the world. That's how I see myself, and that's the attitude I ask all my wonderful colleagues to have when they're exploring different rabbit holes.

Current success

We started Daily Brief late last July. It has quickly become India's most popular daily finance podcast. At present, we have 100,000+ subscribers on the YouTube channel, almost 10,000 people tuned in separately on Spotify, Apple, and other podcast platforms, and 30,000+ subscribers to the newsletter on Substack.

I would be lying if I said I don't feel an incredible high that we've managed to achieve this in less than a year. Not because we want to be media moguls — we know very well how quickly this could all fall apart — but because there are so many people who seem to care about the things we care about. As nerds that are out to do an honest job of exploring our fascinations, there are few things this gratifying.

Successful experiments

Along the way, we've never stopped experimenting.

One of the reasons this channel is what it is today is that we constantly keep trying new things. Some experiments have worked well, like "Who Said What" or "The Long Answer". We also started a weekly book club and it’s been fun. There have been other ideas I promised, which, for a variety of reasons, we couldn't make work.

You’re going to see a lot of this churn ahead too. I'm not a cruel person when it comes to killing my babies.

Future plans

Everything we do, we approach from a place of pure curiosity. But increasingly, I've been thinking about what comes next. Some day, we want to become the go-to destination for people to learn about all things finance, in India and across the world, in different styles, formats, different cadences, and at different points in the day.

Here's what we're thinking about:

1. Daily Brief and After Market Report: We already have Daily Brief, which is a morning show—something to complement your finance newspaper. But what if you're driving back from the office and want to know what happened in the market that day? We tried turning our After Market Report newsletter into a video, but it was a half-hearted attempt. One thing we want to do is create a really good evening show that serves as a wrap for the day's events in the Indian market and, to some extent, the global financial markets.

2. Live Format: I'm excited, though I don't really have a clue how to pull it off, about doing some sort of live show. I don't want to call it news — that's a loaded term. But could we do something live where we reimagine financial news to make it more useful — a little slower, deeper, broader, but more insightful? That's a shot I want to take.

3. Trading-Specific Content: This is already in the works. Within the next month or so, you should see a pilot where there'll be exclusively trading-specific content. It won't be on the Markets channel — we're thinking of creating a separate channel for it.

4. Chasing Rabbits: We used to do a show called Roundtable, which eventually became Rabbit Holes. Pranav and I did the first episode. The idea is to pick out a couple of interesting topics and then deep dive, tumbling down those rabbit holes and sharing what we learn. I loved having that conversation and am excited about continuing this show.

5. Please Help Me Understand: I personally host a podcast called "Please Help Me Understand." It had taken a backseat because of bandwidth issues, but has finally re-started. I plan to speak to experts, understand complicated things, and then present them for a broader audience.

6. One Thing We Learned Today: As a small side project, we started a website called "One Thing We Learned Today." It's pretty self-explanatory. I started this as an internal project to encourage everyone on the team to learn something new every day—it could be anything. My colleagues have written about everything from protein powder to kombucha and shared it on the website. We've managed to keep the site going in fits and starts, but I have a feeling there's something more to be done there.

I know that a lot of these ideas might seem messy. Part of that comes from excitement, and part of it is because many of these concepts in our heads haven't been validated by feedback yet. So all of you reading this should let us know if these ideas are good, bad, or downright horrible.

Our broader aim here is to learn as much as possible and share it with all of you. That’s what we’ve done so far, and we can't wait to continue doing just that.

Last Saturday, we held the fourth session of our little book club. It wasn’t anything fancy. We all sat in silence in a sterile white room and poured over books for a couple of hours. And then, once we had our fill, we sat and talked about what we read.

If you looked in from the outside, you would have found it deeply unexciting. You may have wondered how empty our lives are, and if we were so starved for social company that we were willing to tolerate idle silence for two hours, just to have other people around us.

But if you stepped in and read with us, you would have learnt our secret: all this time, we were filling our souls with joy.

As a recovering reader, let me tell you why.

The problem with books, when you start reading, is that they are terribly boring. They’re misfits in a digital era. They aren’t built to manipulate you, or to feed your fantasies of sex, fame and belonging. They aren’t engineered to give you measured hits of pleasure, in dosages prescribed by an all-knowing algorithm, the way they give drugs to lab monkeys.

Books can’t game you. They don’t tap into your brainstem; they can’t ping you with waves of dopamine.

That’s why it’s so bloody hard to read. The worst moments of our book club all come in the first half hour. People keep looking around awkwardly, between attempts to drag their eyes through the length of a page. The poor things are horrified — they’re suddenly wondering why they sacrificed a Saturday morning to sit by themselves in a random office building. You can see them itch for a feed to swipe their fingers to.

But if you brave through the awkwardness, you get to joy. The books begin to perform their spell. People relax. Reading becomes easier. You start hearing turning pages. People lose themselves — now, they’re nodding, and making faces, and smiling to nobody, all while staring into their books.

You know, until recently, I had almost forgotten the feeling of being taken in by a good book. That sense of being lost in someone else’s ideas for hours? You don’t get that in the digital world. It’s not the sort of thing you get in the innards of a database. In an AI-drenched world, it feels human.

Reading is a selfless activity. Books don’t indulge you. They’re a commitment. They don’t give you easy pay-offs; they make you work. You have to play your part in the dance. You have to match your mental rhythms to those of the author. You have to trust them, and go where they take you. You have to give them time.

But in return, a good book can leave you stunned. Because you give so much of yourself to it; because you’re taking the profound effort of making each of the author’s words ring in your head, every word cuts deeper. A single well-told line can knock you out. There’s nothing that compares. A good book is like a warm, happy marriage in a hook-up filled world.

Here’s why I think we’re on to something with this book club. At the end of each of our four sessions, people looked refreshed. Sitting in a room full of strangers is an odd, awkward thing. By the end, though, that never seems to matter. Fascinations, it turns out, are as potent a social lubricant as any liquor you can find. You can see books leave their mark by how people forget themselves, and their social defences, and give in to child-like wonder — about stories, ideas, and even sentences. And what is more beautiful than that?

So why join our book club? Because it will help you replace pleasure with joy, and your fantasies with fascinations. And those are wonderful trades to make.

If you’re in, come see us this coming Saturday morning!

Link to our book club.

If you’ve followed The Daily Brief, you know it’s the go-to for quick, daily explainers on what’s happening in business and finance.

If you’ve seen Big Perspective, you’ve probably caught a few long-form interviews with fund managers and experts.

If you've caught Who Said What, you're already up-to-speed with the obscure, interesting, or insightful takes that people across the internet are sharing on the topics my team cares about.

And if you’re into macro stuff, chances are you’ve heard our infrequent weekend shows breaking down policy, markets, and global trends.

But there was something missing.

A space between quick daily updates, macro breakdowns, expert chats, and quirky internet takes—something slower, deeper, and more narrative-driven. A show where we don’t just tell you what's happening in a sector, but take you through it: the questions, the research rabbit holes, the "wait, that doesn’t make sense" moments. All of it.

I’m calling it The Long Answer for now—because naming stuff is harder than you’d think (seriously, we tried). So, if you've got something better, wittier, or catchier, drop us your suggestions!

It’s a new documentary-style series I’m trying out. I pick one sector, one big trigger, and then go all-in—with research, storytelling, and interviews with people way smarter than me.

You can expect me to:

• Pick topics I genuinely want to geek out on.

• Spend hours diving into intriguing rabbit holes.

• Speak with experts who've spent decades thinking deeply about these topics.

• Understand it thoroughly (or at least convince myself I do 😉).

• Stitch it all together into a compelling narrative-driven documentary.

This isn't a recommendation show; it's a curiosity show.

Ep 1: Can Birla Opus Win the Indian Paints War?

For the first episode, I picked a sector my boss said was “too boring” to start with.

I took that personally.

So we kicked things off with one of the most quietly powerful industries in India—decorative paints.

It sounds niche, but the numbers will make your eyes pop:

• Paints have created some of the biggest stock market returns in India.

• The top three players have ruled the sector like an oligopoly for decades.

• And now, Kumar Mangalam Birla has walked in with a ₹10,000 crore war chest to shake things up.

I asked myself:

• Why is this industry so tough to break into?

• What makes paint such a good business?

• Can Birla Opus actually disrupt the market—or is this another failed challenger in the making?

• And if competition explodes… does the entire sector suffer?

I also roped in two brilliant fund managers—Rakshit Ranjan and Raj Mehta—to help us make sense of what’s happening beneath the surface.

Now, if you're a video person, I highly recommend you watch the full video. But if you prefer reading and want the hard-hitting insights, here’s what you need to know:

1. Paint is a Consumer Business, not a Chemical Business

At first glance, paints seem straightforward—chemicals in a bucket, right? Wrong. What actually sets apart successful paint companies isn’t chemistry; it's consumer understanding, branding, and how quickly the paint reaches your doorstep. Paint, it turns out, behaves a lot like toothpaste or shampoo—classic FMCG products.

Think about it: When was the last time you picked paint based purely on its chemical composition? Probably never.

Paint-buying decisions are driven by availability, trust, branding, and how quickly you can start the job. That makes paints less about mixing chemicals, and far more about understanding what you, the consumer, truly want—and delivering it faster than anyone else.

2. Distribution is Everything

Paint is bulky, heavy, and awkward to transport, which makes distribution a nightmare. Yet, it’s precisely this challenge that has created some of the biggest winners in the industry. Companies that cracked distribution—like Asian Paints and Berger—don’t just dominate; they practically own the sector.

For dealers, the most critical factor isn’t how much profit they can make on a single bucket. It’s how quickly they can move their inventory—something called inventory turnover. Even if the profit per bucket is razor-thin, dealers can thrive if they're constantly selling and restocking.

This is where supply-chain velocity comes in. Imagine you’re a dealer, and your paint supplier delivers new stock not once a week or once a day—but multiple times daily. Would you ever consider switching to a supplier who comes only twice a week? Probably not. This relentless efficiency is what makes distribution the silent but unbeatable competitive edge in paints.

3. Tinting Machines are Kind of a Big Deal

Here’s another hidden secret: Tinting machines. Every paint company offers thousands of color variations. No dealer, big or small, has the physical space or financial capacity to stock them all. The solution? A tinting machine—basically a high-tech blender—that lets dealers mix and match any shade instantly, on demand.

But here’s the catch: these machines are large, expensive, and usually fit just one or two per store. Once a dealer installs your tinting machine, it becomes incredibly difficult for them to switch brands. You’re effectively locked in, guaranteeing dealer loyalty for years. Tinting machines quietly become a fortress-like moat, one that's hard for any competitor to cross.

4. Pricing Wars Rarely Win Market Share

Before I started this research, I assumed that if a new player entered a market and slashed prices dramatically, they'd quickly gain market share. Turns out, paints defy that logic completely.

Over the decades, multiple entrants have come in, tried slashing prices, and accepting lower profits (ROCE) in hopes of capturing market share. Almost every time, they've failed. Why? Because simply reducing prices isn't enough unless it directly makes life easier for dealers, painters, or end consumers.

Dealers don’t choose paint brands because they're cheaper. They choose brands that reliably help them sell paint faster and keep their businesses running smoothly. Pricing wars in isolation don't achieve that; they're just burning money without creating sustainable competitive advantage.

5. Painters and Dealers are the Kingmakers

As consumers, we love to think we're fully in control of our buying choices. But with paint, I realized something surprising—most of the time, the painter chooses for us.

Think about your last paint job: Did you personally go and buy the paint bucket from a store, carefully picking among brands? Or did you leave it to your painter, who probably recommended the brand that was easiest for him to source?

Dealers influence painters, and painters influence you. This invisible chain of influence means branding in paints works very differently from typical consumer industries.

Sure, having a Bollywood star or cricket icon endorse your paint brand helps build credibility—but the real buying decision is quietly made by your painter, influenced heavily by what the dealer keeps stocked. This subtle behind-the-scenes dynamic completely changed how I think about branding and advertising in the paints business.

6. Be Very Wary of Overcapacity

Lastly, I stumbled upon a business concept called the "capital cycle," which honestly, sounds way duller than it is. In simple terms, when an industry consistently makes high profits, new companies and investors jump in, building extra factories, adding huge capacities, hoping to share the pie.

But here’s the thing: By the time all this new supply finally arrives in the market, there's often way too much paint for everyone to sell. Profits collapse, companies merge or shut down, and investors flee. Eventually, after the dust settles, only a handful of stronger survivors remain, and profits rise again.

Historically, the Indian paint industry hasn’t been very cyclical. But now—with the massive entry of big-pocketed players like Birla Opus and JSW Paints pouring thousands of crores into the market—we might be entering uncharted waters. Is this paints’ "Jio moment," triggering a brutal price war and a massive industry shake-up, like we saw in telecom? Or will paints be resilient enough to absorb the new competition?

Honestly, I have no clue. But it’s something every investor (and curious observer) should keep an eye on.

At the end of this research rabbit hole, did I come out with all the answers? Absolutely not. In fact, I probably have more questions now than when I started. But that’s okay. Because that’s exactly how real learning feels—it leaves you less certain, but more curious.

Paints taught me that the deepest insights often come from the industries we least expect.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Drop your feedback, critiques, questions—everything. I want this series to improve with every episode.

Until next time,
Kashish Kapoor (KK)