smallcase: A Disruptive Business Model in India

Vasanth Kamath, Anugrah Srivastava, and Rohan Gupta founded smallcase in July 2015 to introduce new investors to Indian equity markets. They envisioned the creation of an easy-to-use platform for advisors to make investing hassle-free for their clients. smallcase built an investor-friendly financial ecosystem with advisors, brokers, and other market participants. The company helps build low-cost, long-term, diverse portfolios. Each smallcase is a portfolio with its own theme/strategy and objective. The investor may use the trading and Demat account services from any of the registered broker partners. SEBI-registered advisors (stock market experts) create and manage smallcase’s portfolios. Since smallcase is a portfolio with multiple stocks, it provides diversification benefit, reducing firm-specific investment risk. Smallcase’s business model is built on a low-cost, subscription-based pricing model, which is a departure from the traditional brokerage model that charges fees for every trade. This makes it easier for small investors to access professional-grade portfolios and diversify their investments with a low minimum investment amount. smallcase also offers other innovative features, such as the ability to automate investments, which enables investors to buy stocks on a regular basis and at a fixed amount, thereby reducing the need for constant monitoring and manual intervention. The platform’s constituents pass proprietary filters set by the respective advisor, so investors don’t have to decide. If one of the portfolio stocks pays a dividend, the money is directly credited to the investor’s bank account. The case highlights the disruption in the conventional investment market that are brought about by smallcase. It discusses the business model of smallcase both in the B2B market (advisors) and B2C market (investors). Through the journey of smallcase, the customer centricity, competitor benchmarking and subsequent customer acquisition leading to improvement.

Learning Objectives

• To help students use the Lean Canvas model to manage value propositions and in turn create new growth engines.
• To help startups use customer centricity to disrupt existing businesses.
• To help identify value propositions and devise promotional strategies in the Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) business models.
• To analyse and develop go-to-market strategy from a sustainable business model point of view.

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