The Story Behind Markets by Zerodha: Our Journey and Future Plans

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

Nithin Kamath

. 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.