Shipping a fintech savings app 0→1

Joined Wealides as founding-team Product & Growth. MVP product into Spare change →Savings App,. Six months later: ₹1.14Cr monthly GMV, 1.7K DAU, ~50K MAU, CAC under ₹60

Discovery

Spent first three weeks on calls — 40 prospective users, 8 fintech operators, 3 payment-rail partners. The wedge: middle-class Indians wanted goal-based savings but users' self-discovery was in vain. We realised Spend, Save, Invest criteria should be the way.

Activation that changed the trajectory

• Bangalore Tech Summit — built a 3-step kiosk flow: scan QR → Download App → Instant Gold on 1st transaction. Achieved 800+ first interactions, 200+ same-day transactions. The line at our booth was the marketing.
• Targeting Social Communities on Field and on Social Media that helped up gain real word of mouth traction due to real value on each transaction.
• Whatsapp/Telegram Community program helped us partner with Group Admins and tuned own referral rewards according to partnership.

Growth loops

• Referral with mutual reward (₹50 each side + Recurring, capped) — 30% of new installs
• Customer Success ecosystem: CSAT +10%, churn −20% -We won the Razorpay Rize Program helped us gain internal products at discounted rates that helped us activate our Customer Service Ecosystem.

Initial traction was gained by understanding what users wanted: -- A Gateway to spend save and invest all in one platform, we partnered with Augmont as a gold partner and created Gold-backed savings wallet that enabled users to buy gift cards and claim cashback on those as Digital Gold that was instantly credited to users wallet.

Regulation

As per RBI Guidelines no KYC was required of users who accumulated digital gold of <2L Per annum, this helped us onboard user friction free, and only those users we identified that were powering through needed some assistance with KYC that happend <2min/User

What I'd do differently

Early Pivot from Spare Change platform to Full scale UPI Pay application that serves Stores + Gift Cards + UPI ecosystem that could leverage existing offering