Selling an asset class most investors had never held

A company named after its plumbing

The business existed to bring fixed income to Indian retail investors — invoice discounting, asset leasing, bonds, fractional real estate, digital gold. The proposition was genuinely useful: exposure to strong companies through the debt route, taking credit risk rather than market risk. An alternative to equity for people who had only ever been offered equity.

It was called Leaf Round — a name assembled from leasing and asset financing. Accurate, and useless. It described how the machine worked to an audience that did not yet know there was a machine.

The product had been built scrappily, which is exactly what a young startup should do. My job was to work out what the funnel actually was, restructure the flow, and decide whether the brand could carry what the company was trying to become.

The constraint was comprehension, not acquisition

It is tempting to read a growth brief as an acquisition problem. This one was not, and treating it as one would have wasted a great deal of money.

Which produced the insight the whole engagement turned on. In an unfamiliar category, an investor who does not understand the instrument does one of two things: nothing, or something hasty. The first is bad for the business. The second is bad for the investor, and worse for the business eighteen months later when it surfaces as a complaint, a refund, or a regulator.

Rename for ease, restructure for clarity

Rebrand around the act, not the mechanics. Leaf Round became Tap — chosen for its association with ease of entry into something unfamiliar, and its proximity to the act of investing itself. A name a first-time investor could approach without first understanding asset financing.

Split the brand along the business. Two arms under one mark: Tap Capital, raising capital for companies, and Tap Invest, allowing retail investors to put money into those same instruments. One brand, two audiences, no confusion about which side of the transaction you were on.

Restructure the organisation to match. I led the investing side end to end — product, engineering, customer success, sales and marketing all reporting in — while remaining custodian of brand and marketing across both entities. Owning the full stack on one side is what made it possible to fix the funnel rather than describe it.

Inbound, because self-serve does not survive a high ticket

Acquisition ran through the conventional channels — Meta, Google, some influencer-led storytelling. The difference was what happened after the lead arrived. At this ticket size, expecting an investor to self-serve their way into an instrument they have never held is optimistic. Leads were generated by marketing and closed through inbound sales.

The content requirement became the operational bottleneck almost immediately. Every instrument needed its own explanation, and the volume of instruments was growing. Producing that by hand does not scale, so a meaningful part of the work became automating its production without letting the quality fall to the level where it stopped doing its job.

Targets became the operating rhythm. The first crore-rupee day was a genuine milestone — the sort of thing the whole office marks. Then the question became how many of those you could string together in a month, and after that, how far past it you could go.

What it delivered

The trajectory is the clearer story. The first crore-rupee day was worth marking; within the year, monthly volumes had passed that threshold many times over, and then close to doubled again. Alongside it: a full rebrand, an organisational restructure, and a lower cost of acquisition than when I arrived.

And the number that mattered most to me — complaints stayed low throughout. In a category where investors are buying something they have never held before, complaint volume is the honest test of whether the comprehension work is landing. Growth bought at the cost of confusion shows up there first. It did not.