Jul 27, 2022
Jar's journey has been fascinating to follow for a while now. It's incredible what they've accomplished in such a short time. This is an app that allows investors to easily invest in digital gold. I had explored digital gold at moneyguru, but it wasn't feasible for us. My biggest challenge at that point was getting users to understand the concept of investing, let alone mutual funds, and in spite of building Gurugyaan, a content platform that educates the user on all things finance and investing, it was a long game and I wanted quick activation. Digital gold seemed like a great way to get users at the top of the funnel and get them used to the concept of saving and investing but the regulations did not allow it and they still don't.
A great thing about gold is that the Indians don't have to learn anything about it. It's culturally embedded in the way we save, the fact that Indian households own more gold than anyone else proves this. I still believe it remains one of the best commodities to introduce millions of Indians to the world of investing and eventually selling them other securities that are more monetisable.
Jar seamlessly combined the nostalgia of a piggy bank with the most common form of saving in India. My first impression after opening the app was how simple it is. You can buy gold with just a few taps and that is the main reason for the app's success.
Keeping this simplicity while adding new products will determine whether their rocketship growth can be sustained. The challenge is more complex than it appears, there is a history of apps that have gotten cluttered at this stage and completely lost their steam. Their biggest accomplishment is that even though they could have given away a lot of freebies to gaslight their growth, they didn't buy users with high unsustainable rewards and this should pay off in the long run.
With 5 million customers and 100 transactions per minute, the company is currently well positioned for future growth. At this point, Jar will have to just concentrate on the unsexy parts of building products. It will be all about optimising the app performance, and stability, improving parts of their UI, experimenting with multiple retention tactics, improving customer support timelines, and building different microgames instead of adding a lot of features and cluttering the app. If they plan to sell more than just gold the key will be to disclose these features progressively to their users so that the critical functionality of the app is not compromised.
In the long run, their biggest challenge would be the regulations with SEBI and RBI looking to bring digital gold into their regulatory framework. This would completely change the core functionality of Jar with users needing KYC and random bank authorisations to even start investing. While it would be easier to sell other regulated securities on their platform, the competition would become too high if all SEBI registered partners could sell digital gold as well.
In my experience with the app for the past few weeks, there are a few things that could be improved.
- In-app notifications: Although these notifications might work to inform, the UI is horrible. There is a lack of clarity in both the icons and the content. Colour coding failed transactions to red, highlighting the right words, and simply having better icons for each type of notification would make a huge difference. They have partly got it right on the transactions tab but in-app notifications are awful. Either they should get rid of this completely or fix it.
- Better secondary screens: While the primary simplistic flow of the app is great, secondary screens like the locker could be so much better. I'd love for it to look like a piggy bank with my savings in it and be more animated. Just for that nostalgic feeling. May be have a chart hidden somewhere to check historical prices. The key is to always main the perceived simplicity and not mess up the core flow.
- User engagement: With personalised time-based notifications and Shub muhrat nudges, they have mastered the timing aspect of notifications, but the next step would be to make its content more cultural based on demographics and segments. This is what Dunzo and Zomato do well, and content is equally important. While they seem to have great copy for their ads, they could do with some of that for their notifications. Also, this is a moving target, methods get saturated very fast, and having a quality team that aces this repeatedly would set them apart.
- Physical gold delivery: It needs to be possible to convert existing digital gold for physical delivery. Packaging and design could be completely redesigned for GenZ and Millennials. This would be great for gift-giving.
Finally, I would like to reiterate that staying true to their core values of app simplicity, habit forming, and timely nudges will be the key to their success going forward. It will be interesting to see how they implement other securities into their stack and how they grow. It would be a shame if they cluttered it up with too many features which would just make users move on to the next simple gold savings app.
