bhushan patil

🇮🇳 Fintech is dead. Long live 🇮🇳 Fintech. Globally, everyone in Fintech is wondering how to figure out profitable venture scale growth to justify their valuations which are falling fast. 🇮🇳 India is no different unless you are in denial and in fact, Fintech in India has bigger problems around profitable monetization -- add the regulatory updates to this & you have an even greater challenge to brave. Besides F&O, where there seems to be a clear profit pool as demonstrated by multiple companies, the rest of fintech is simply a hard and long journey - it all boils down to making money from lending followed by tiny amounts of money from payments, insurance, investments and the likes where you are a middleman shaving off a small slice for yourself. Billions of dollars have been spent over the past decade for us to collectively arrive at this conclusion so it may be best to take the lessons learnt & conclusions concluded and build forward. The good part is that we have a large TAM that is made of multiple sub-markets each of them having 10s of millions of users potentially - some have these already, some will get to this over time. So what we are seeing is that the best teams are figuring out and sticking to one core wedge: a neobank, a credit card, a UPI app, a SaaS app, a gold investment app, a alt investment app, a vertical offering for fleet owners or infuencers etc. They use the core wedge to get to millions of users (some have the capital to go faster, some don't have as much capital so they are hacking channels one by one and getting there slowly but surely) and then expand from the core to sell their users all the other financial services offerings that are relevant and are personalized for their slice of the TAM. ( I am leaving the broking folks aside as they have the beauty of F&O to constantly give them a cushion to build the rest on and the overall push to invest in mutual funds etc gives them a good tide to ride on.) With capital markets unlikely to look anything like they did in the ZIRP era, as an early-stage fintech founder (Seed to Series B), you have to re-underwrite your own vision, conviction, and determination and be clear that it's at least a 5+ year journey from here to build a sustainable business --- many have gone through this over the past 18 months and many others are in the process. Its hard because you have to overhaul everything you thought about your plan in the 2020-2022 timeframe. Those in growth stage (Series B & beyond) have the capital but potentially an even harder problem to solve because they have to go FROM the model of burning 100s of millions to make 1s or 10s of millions TO burning far lesser while making far more. The key is to not forget the lessons learned - easier said than done :) So the problems are hard and harder BUT those with revised conviction after all the mayhem are more determined than ever, based on what we are seeing. So, Long live 🇮🇳 Fintech. 💪

I have a joke on Zoom, but I will tell you on Team.