How Zerodha makes money (and does marketing)?
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Zerodha doesn’t charge any brokerage in buying or selling shares. They only charge for Intraday and FNO trades. That’s how they earn their money.
How Zerodha makes it’s Money, how they do their marketing and why did they take the bootstrapped startup approach to a unicorn ? 
Explained in a thread 
Before starting let’s understand what bootstrapping means.
A bootstrapped company is the one which doesn’t raise external capital.
Their founders invest their own money into the business.
Zerodha doesn’t charge any brokerage in buying or selling shares. They only charge for Intraday and FNO trades. That’s how they earn their money.
This is what made people attracted to their platform initially. People were charged next to nothing on Zerodha when other brokerages were charging so much.
The other thing they focused on was the product. They made sure the product is high quality and it’s very easy to understand and use.
They also focused on fast registration process to help you start trading as soon as possible.
This is what happens. If you remove the friction people face in their lives, they reward you with business.
A lot of traders started loving the platform due to their low costs and an easy and frictionless trading experience.
What happens when you love a product ? You recommend it to your friends right ?
That’s exactly what happened with Zerodha.
They spend no money on their marketing. For marketing they’ve taken the affiliate route. Affiliate marketing is basically you earn a commission on everyone you recommend.
This is how people started recommending Zerodha to others and also made a commission out of it.
This is what actually led to the growth of users on Zerodha.
There’s another thing to this. Zerodha started Varsity as an educational platform for learning to invest and trade.
Now most of the people who start learning from Varsity open accounts on Zerodha to start practicing what they’ve learnt.
That’s a great client acquisition strategy. You’re basically helping your new potential clients learn and that converts so well into customers.
Why did Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath think about bootstrapping ?
Because they wanted to maintain their control over the company and have independence over their decision making.
When they started making money they found that there’s literally no point in raising money.
Nithin feels that it’s very important to have your product right, your business right but you can’t project growth at a certain pace. Essentially Zerodha doesn’t like having targets of growth in a year or so.
That gives them freedom to build at their own pace, which can only be possible if you’re bootstrapped.
Most companies don’t survive because they aren’t able to raise money for a year or two.
But bootstrapped companies like Zerodha can stay on the track all the time while having a recurring and sustainable business.
The market in India is so big that if you stay for long, persevere and have a strong way of making money, you’ll not just survive, you’ll prosper.
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