A finfluencer and entrepreneur Sharan Hegde
One can assume that Sharan Hegde, a finfluencer-turned entrepreneur, has a certain amount of cockiness, creating a financial education firm—The 1% Club, with annual revenues of ₹61 crore and backed by investors—at 29. Hegde sits casually, dressed in black jeans, long-sleeve beige T-shirt, accessorised by a cuboid men’s locket.
Outside his room, The 1% Club, located in a Mumbai suburb, is a startup-styled company, of which he is founder and CEO.
As he speaks, you can see a young-but-fast maturing personality—among the most followed financial influencers (finfluencers) in India, who is mastering the art of social media. In a few years, Hegde has built up an impressive scale: Finance with Sharan has 3,23,000 followers on YouTube, 2.7 million followers on Instagram (as of September 26) and The 1% Club has over 60,000 lifetime members, and also includes another platform, ‘The Personal CFO’—an investment advisory registered with Sebi (Securities and Exchange Board of India)—where people who are too busy with their jobs get access to experts to help them achieve their financial and tax goals.
But the space which Hegde and other finfluencers operate in is highly visible and under scrutiny. Their presence has increased as a new set of thousands of investors entered Indian equities, without clarity on their investment goals and a wafer-thin ability to take risks. The Nifty 50 index has seen a 222 percent rise from the pandemic lockdown low in March 2020, resulting in a sharp rise in mutual fund investments, hedge funds and digital-focussed brokerage firms.
To curb the risks, Sebi has, in the past year, been clamping down on operations of unregistered investment advisors, where unregulated people advise potential new investors with stock tips and steps to make quick money.
“I want to change the way India looks at money. What people don’t realise is that high salary doesn’t mean you will be financially secure,” says the Mangaluru-born Hegde. “For a happy content life, a person needs three things—money, a healthy body and stable relationships. And people might say money doesn’t bring happiness, but I think the lack of money definitely gives unhappiness.”
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Business Model
The idea to strike it rich is every young person’s ambition growing up. Hegde, who was academically strong, somehow wandered through four years of mechanical engineering at RV College of Engineering, in Bengaluru. His earliest dabble with anything stocks was on a Sunday afternoon in 2014 watching a business television channel with his friends. “This was my Eureka moment, where I thought of doing an MBA and becoming an investment banker in the United States,” he adds.
Post engineering, Hegde started to learn nuances of the financial world, studying balance sheets and cash flows of companies at KPMG India and then PwC as a management consultant between 2018 and 2022. During this phase, he had started to invest his savings into index-based funds and taking the risk of investing in US-based stocks through an ICICI Bank account.
The next Eureka moment came when he started to post financial content on YouTube during the pandemic followed by similar educational content, with the help of sister Shreya, on Instagram. Finance with Sharan is a multimedia new-age platform where he talks about investing in asset classes, investing in US equities etc.
Hegde works with 100 brands where payment could be per brand or on an annual basis. He is paid by Google AdSense for displaying advertisements of brands on the channel.
Besides organising investor summits, Hegde, in 2022, set up The 1% Club to drive people towards financial freedom through courses relating to mutual fund investing, stock markets, credit card management, insurance planning, loan management, real estate investing and vacation planning. Discount broking pioneer Zerodha’s co-founder Nikhil Kamath has a 10 percent stake in The 1% Club.
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The third channel, launched six months ago, is Personal CFO where upper middle-class members will be advised by experts in their respective fields about where to invest, manage tax planning, plan credit card management, get the cheapest loans etc. This is for a fixed annual fee. A year or so down the line, Hegde does not rule out recommending stocks.
Looking ahead, Hegde would like to build his podcasts like British content creator Steven Barlett, who runs the ‘Diary of a CEO’ by calling high-profile guests. “What I appreciate is great storytellers… I think there is a shortage of such people,” he says.
Hegde has enough on his plate but will want to scale up all the businesses in the coming year. He is currently in talks with venture capital firms for a possible fund raise of $10 million.
“Sharan has been able to build a profitable and scalable business around this activity of finfluencers. I don’t think too many people have been able to do that,” says Saurabh Mukherjea, founder and chief investment officer of Marcellus Investment Managers. Mukherjea adds that, in every sphere of work, one will see stars who will garner the lion’s share of the business. “But the ones who matter… you will be able to count them on the fingers of you hand.”
(This story appears in the 18 October, 2024 issue
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