Success leaves clues. Finance Strategists sat down with Vineet Patawari, Co-Founder of Elearnmarkets.com. He shared his thoughts on the past, present, and future of the company, as well as the insights he has gained from running the business. Q: Who are you and what’s your background? I am Vineet Patawari, Co-founder and CEO of StockEdge - which is India’s most highly rated Stock Market self-research tool for retail investors. I have also co-founded India’s biggest dedicated financial marketing training platform - Elearnmarkets.com I am personally very passionate about building scalable consumer tech products, performance marketing, team building, and enhancing individual productivity. I love learning more, being more productive, and talking about these aspects. I am a qualified Chartered Accountant. I went to IIM Indore in the year 2006 and my MBA was completed in 2008. This was the year when CAT went online. I always had intentions of doing something in the education field but had never thought of doing it online. After CAT went online, though, my thoughts naturally drifted in that direction. It was obvious people would start studying on the internet so in 2008 I started a venture called “Fireup” which was online CAT preparation. In 2014, I co-founded Elearnmarkets.com with Vivek Bajaj who was my senior at IIM Indore. Q: What is Elearnmarkets.com? Elearnmarkets.com is India’s biggest financial market training platform, which has hundreds of courses, premium webinars by 150+ market experts, two million registered learners, and has the biggest repository of financial market content with thousands of hours of videos in 7+ Indian languages. Elearnmarkets.com trains people on various aspects of stock markets and related elements such as Stock Markets, Commodities, Currency, Mutual Funds, Insurance, Financial Planning, and Wealth Management. The Edtech platform offers career-oriented online courses, many of which provide the students with a joint certification from renowned industry bodies like NSE Academy, NCDEX, and MCX. Elearnmarkets.com also regularly conducts workshops and webinars on various financial topics, which are taught by market experts and celebrity stock market trainers. Their expert-led recorded and live online finance courses are available in English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, and Gujarati. These products are available on a freemium model with over two million registered users already availing the benefits of it. Elearnmarkets.com is available on multiple platforms with over six million page views/month on our website. Q: What separates Elearnmarkets.com from its competitors? Elearnmarkets.com is a niche player concentrating on the finance sector, which intends to meet lifetime needs of learning finance, tracking financial markets, and earning and managing money. No other existing platform combines all the requirements of a learner and practitioner of finance in such a compact and simple manner. The industry is fragmented with various people doing various work independently. We are trying to work on an integrated model with the right knowledge as the core requirement of the user. For example, the financial market training industry has multiple individual trainers. Elearnmarkets.com is a platform that strives to bring together learners and subject matter experts related to finance. Q: What led you to start Elearnmarkets.com? Poor penetration of financial education is a major problem in our society and Elearnmarkets.com was one of the pioneers in recognizing this. Since then the organization has focused on training retail investors in various aspects of financial management across the country. Q: Where do you see things headed for you and the company in the next five years? Both Elearnmarkets.com and StockEdge are now generating revenue with satisfactory unit economics in place. Next we will scale them in terms of onboarding more users and improvising the technology. We are also evolving StockEdge as India’s first Social Investing platform with credible financial data and unbiased robo analytics. This will need significant investment in technology, data, and machine learning. For this effort we will be raising Series A funds. We are a Kolkata-based company with 250+ team members. The motto of our organization is to simplify financial markets for Indian retail investors so that they can make better financial decisions. We wish to impact 50 million Indian retail investors by 2024. Q: Who has been your biggest inspiration, and why did they have such a significant effect on you? Talking about inspiration, rather than individuals, I take a lot of inspiration from the books I read. I love to read extensively and much of my inspiration comes from the authors who have written those books. Recent books have been Blitzscaling, by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. Once you read that kind of book, what happens is you go and there is so much content available online that you can learn so much from that single person. Hoffman has got a podcast, he has got a video channel which is like scaling up, something like that and you can learn so much from him. So, my current inspiration is Mr. Reid Hoffman but the next book I read will probably change it. That’s how I see it. Though it may be difficult for some to that process, that’s how it is for me. Q: Knowing what you know now, what advice would you have given your younger self? I personally believe that it is “Perseverance!” Once you are into something, you need to be all in. You need to stick out your neck and let it hang there a while. To build anything valuable takes time. Don’t be blinded by the glamor or the fund raising news that pours in from every direction. You hear only the positive news and not about the hundreds or thousands of businesses that fail. So the point is, for some, it might happen faster and for some, it might happen slower but if you are there it will happen to you. This is number one. Number two, you have to be consistently a learning machine because the environment changes every day. People change and to manage them requires constant learning. It is extremely important, in my personal opinion, to know that “Until your learning curve is steeper than your organization’s growth curve, you will not sustain forward progress.” Ultimately, you need to grow yourself continuously by meeting new sets of people, learning about new opportunities, and reading new books. Learning and perseverance are the two things that you should know from day one that if I am getting into this field, it will take time and it will take a lot of learning for me so you should be prepared for that.” Q: What has the experience of building the business taught you? Business building is a roller coaster ride that can be very demanding on our emotional and physical well-being. There is so much learning every day, especially when you are trying to build a scalable enterprise taking along hundreds of smart people with you. An entrepreneur has to be good at product development, sales, marketing, people management, scaling up, fundraising and so much more. This might look overwhelming, but my experience is that you need to take a leap of faith and then stick around. You need not be the smartest person but should be a learning machine to adapt to new technologies and market trends. To inquire about Course Offerings at Elearnmarkets.com, call 9830994463 / 9748222555 or email us at [email protected]. 
Introduction
Who is Vineet Patawari?
Business
True Tamplin is a published author, public speaker, CEO of UpDigital, and founder of Finance Strategists.
True is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance (CEPF®), author of The Handy Financial Ratios Guide, a member of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, contributes to his financial education site, Finance Strategists, and has spoken to various financial communities such as the CFA Institute, as well as university students like his Alma mater, Biola University, where he received a bachelor of science in business and data analytics.
To learn more about True, visit his personal website or view his author profiles on Amazon, Nasdaq and Forbes.
