Finance With Sharan On Finfluencer Scams + More!

I don't think se's really come after you but I think the definitely the media has come after you media was criticizing influencers for promoting crypto 1 month later they're promoting cryptocurrencies the interpretation of the se's consultation paper is that you cannot promote direct stocks or direct mutual funds in exchange for money do you think there's new content formats in finance that are untapped I think it's kind of saturated if you ask me when I created content I knew less than 1% of what I know today a lot of things came because I was forced to learn new things to create content I try to keep emotions as much as possible away from my money decisions what's the Creator to entrepreneur Arc been like most people think that okay Sharon has 2 million followers on Instagram it's not my followers it's at the end of the day still Instagram's followers the day that the company employee starts talking like you that's when you know you've done a good job so ladies and gentlemen we have

a very special guest today this is finance with Sharon heg my story with Sharon goes back a few years I met him when he had just started to pick up as a content creator he was planning to do an MBA his life path was going to be very different from what it is today from there to the journey he's had now which is him becoming an entrepreneur running an organization I think has been spectacular to watch from the outside and he's also been through his fair share of ups and downs in fact over the last year the finance Creator versus Media battle has been escalating and Sharon has been at the Forefront of that uh taking all the punches and also Landing some punches of his own So today we're here to hear his story hear his thoughts on the future ladies and gentlemen welcome to another episode of OnePlus open conversations

CH let's start by talking about houses now I keep going on Instagram I'll keep scrolling and then suddenly you'll pop up on my feed and it'll always be you and some Media company right where they've got a mug shot of you they've got you in the place saying houses are bad don't buy houses now I know you and you've come home several times right and we've had this conversation about houses where you've actually had the need to be nuanced about it and I'm not going to do the evil thing of just clipping you out and saying don't buy house yeah I'm sure there are exceptions to buying a house so the my first question for you is give me five reasons you would buy a house why should somebody buy a house I know there are infinite reasons not to buy a house I'll go with mine first I think buying a house gives you a lot of psychological safety everything that I've ever bought in my life is purely emotional purchase even the things that seem rational it was an emotional purchase even when you order food there are plenty of options but you order things that feel more appetizing right um and I think houses in my opinion give you buying a house gives you that psychological safety I know my mom I think 20 years ago uh she bought a house it was on loan she was just like it's psychological safety for me because I already have kids give you give me your opinion on this I think um two reasons what I can think of why somebody would or I would buy a house uh the number one reason is that I have a lot of money right I have already taken care of the basic Financial necessities of life meaning I have saved enough money for funding all my lifestyle expenses like maybe you know a car you know vacations whenever I buy a car before the house of course yeah I mean I own a car right now right and because it's a significantly uh smaller purchase in terms of amount it dwarfs a house when I mean a car I don't mean like a you know 50 lak MK you mean like something 78 l i mean like a 78 lak car right can be lower as well a three four like high 10 as well right because that really changes the quality of a lifestyle significantly um the second uh yeah I mean there's lifestyle expenses like car you know ordering out food whenever you want going out for vacations if and your kids education your own Financial Independence if all of that is done which is typically like you know five to six CR Mark and beyond that if you have another 10 15 crows be my guess you know buy a house the second reason I would um recommend someone to buy a house is if they are not really financially sound and disciplined what I mean by that is the only uh positive effect of not buying a house is that you do not spend the saved up money right like see if you buy a one CR house in Bangalore it's an 880,000 Emi versus renting a 1 CR house would be like a 30 35,000 rupees rent that Delta which is 40 45,000 now if you're a financially sound person you will invest that Delta uh if you're somebody who uh feels like you know I'm not going to be uh able to control the money that's coming into my bank account right A lot of people um spend way more than they can just because money is available in the savings account uh but if you're somebody who is very financially sound money coming into my savings account there's an automatic sip going into mutual funds these kind of people should uh will actually make full benefit of not buying a house um and I think vast majority of the people will are not in this bracket if you ask me um take credit cards for example such a simple product you spend whatever you can spend and then return the money back at the end of the month half of the money that a credit card company makes are from people who cannot return the money that they've spent because it then gets carried over to the next month and it becomes a massive credit card that's 50% of a credit card's Revenue comes from that the remaining 50% comes from the uh the merchants in which you are swiping like if you go to big Bazar and swipe that 1 2% money is going to the guard company the remaining half comes from defaulters the defaulters so a large number of people are not financially sound and financially rered because it's not taught to them in schools so I think in these two situations um you should probably buy a house and the last one is kids like you mentioned right once you have kids the whole equation changes um and you do not want to kind of move one house to another house um because then you'll have to move one school to another school um and here again there I mean I think I could manage doing that even if I'm in a rented house but I'm sure a large number of people would feel the pressure and they'll be like you know [ __ ] it let me just but you don't feel that need for the psychological safety that you know you have a house now you can go aggressive at things you know this is your land of like this is your base of operations and you spend some money on it and you're like okay I'm committing to this for 10 years 20 years whatever it is I think

that's a very emotional way of looking at it right I don't look at money as like that right it's at the end of the day it's money house is your money versus investments in mutual funds is a money but do you buy the argument that money is a reflection of um it's basically a reflection of society emotions projected onto goods and services do you feel that way because it's like when I spend money right I'm spending money on something that I want to like I feel a certain way I want to feel psychological safety buying a house and therefore I spend money on it I want to feel like my neighbors and my friends think my child is cool and I am cool that's why I'll throw a big wedding right if you look at the top spending in India it's like 99% of his is emotional yeah like how do you keep that air gap between what you find emotional and what you think is rational for you according to your reserves I think there's no correct answer to this right emotions control a lot of things I try to keep emotions as much as possible away from my money decisions uh because the more emotions you bring into it the more mistakes you're going to make um the example that you told me that okay if I buy a house I have the financial security to go aggressive um I look at it differently let's say 2 CR house we are in Bangalore 2 CR house now 2 CR in a house versus 2 CR invested in the markets I think I would get more Financial Security with 2 cres invested in the market because once two 2 CR is invested in the markets with anything that I do further on I will still be aggressive because that 2 CR is going to protect me if something happens here whereas in a house 2 CR is in the house now if something bad happens to me I'm going to have to sell the house right how will I how will the house support me if something bad happens to me right it's just going to give me a roof over my head 2 CR is still generating 20 30 lakhs every year which can still pay for my rent and all of my expenses so it's a different way of looking at it people maybe look at 2 cres as a pile of cash I don't look at two CR look at it as a uh asset invested in high yielding assets which grow faster than house I think it's just the way of looking at it differently interesting this is a question that's that everyone always asks you there's never been a long form answer to this that I've seen mainly because it's shorts and reels they clip it out to a minute yeah so thank you so much for explaining it for everybody I think now there's no an in your answer I mean forget me right who am I to say I mean look at people who are thousand times richer than me they don't have houses I mean you know the Kut Brothers you know nikil Kut he has three houses all on rent right I mean who am I to say don't buy a house look at the people who have more money than then they know what to do with their money they are not buying houses M right so and it's not like they're not enjoying the fruits of big houses you can still rent it and

they are you're one of the few creators that's become an entrepreneur like there's a time where I saw you as a Creator like this guy creates Finance content he's creating you know funny content on the internet great but I think over the last 6 eight months you've transitioned to being an entrepreneur and it's a big Journey for you because I also remember the time when you started when we were chatting you were shank's place and you're like I'm going to go do an MBA yeah NBA was the thing going to do right and then your entire career pivoted to okay now I'm a serious Creator to now I'm an entrepreneur right what's the Creator to entrepreneur Arc been like because there are very few people in India that have done it properly and gotten to the scale that you've gotten to I think it was a need of the r uh for the for me definitely for me because if I had continued to be a Creator I was always at the mercy of social media I was that so most people think that okay Sharon has 2 million followers on Instagram um he's is popular and you know his life is sorted and all of that but people don't realize that it's not my followers it's at the end of the day still Instagram's followers uh Instagram has just given me the opportunity to reach out to them just because I'm relevant right now one day when Instagram decides I'm not relevant poof it's gone so I never really owned that distribution do you

think there are people at the back of Instagram deciding who's relevant or not or is just purely the audience I think it's purely the audience uh I mean a lot of people uh sort of have this theory that there is this red button which the which Mark zakok likes to press whenever he likes somebody but I don't think it's that I think it's the audience who is sort of making these decisions and it's very uh subjective and not just that let's say there is this great Creator who is continuously trying to uh you know who's still a great content creator and also improving year on year but what happens is the audience is just gets bored of that person right I'm tired of looking at this person's face right next I would give more of my time space to this fresh new face who is not as good as the previous Creator but I would still like to give an opportunity to this fresh new face uh the underdog right I always want to support the underdog two three years of being a star Creator you're not the underdog anymore right then you are a star right you are a celebrity and nobody likes celebrities if you think about it right very few uh only Sports celebrities are actually loved I think they get a lot of hate too yeah but I'm talking about if you compare it with an actor or a Bollywood well that's storytelling know if somebody's at the top you want to pull them down if somebody's at the bottom you want to push them up the I mean the media this cyclical thing they keep doing it's part of their it's part of how you get views both stars get pulled on only when they're not performing but as long as they're performing they are going to get the love but not the same for a Creator if a Creator is still performing well even if they're coming up with very nice information or very nice knowledge they will eventually lose the love of the audience so what I real realized early on is that I cannot continue being a content creator I need

to start looking at it as one part of a big business and that is something that you realize as you talk to entrepreneurs once you realize why a brand is coming to you then all the answers start clicking the brand is coming to you not because they are your friends the brand is coming to an influencer because you are a part of their marketing funnel and you drive traffic for them I they cannot reach out to the Audience by themselves because the audience hates companies because companies are only there to make money so the company will come to me to tell my audience that hey this company is good that is the only reason a company is coming to you so once you start thinking like that then you realize that my followers why should I expose my followers to other companies why can't I build something of my own which my followers will like because then because it's my own product I will have an advantage over these other companies right other companies are using me as a middleman but building a company is a

different ball game right now you got to hire lots of people you've got to build processes you got to raise money if necessary so the transition wouldn't have been easy from Creator to oh now I got to do all these things I think entrepreneurship is the one of the hardest things in the world to do right um not because it's consumes a lot of your time and energy it's just because of the context switching that you have to do every single thing all the way from like I I'm weak at Tech but that's not an option I still need to understand Tech in today's world because as an entrepreneur you cannot say that I'm not good at this I'll hire somebody else but it's not as simple as saying I'll hire this person to do everything and I'll just kind of observe it's not going to work you need to understand as much as possible because at the end of the day the vision comes from you uh if you hire a tech person um this person is at best going to be the technician or the implementer the vision still needs to come from you um then be it marketing content is already my strength um getting into sales getting into PR um everything you know everything you need to be doing and at the same time and you need to sort of understand what's happening everywhere that is one thing second thing is the team you cannot do

everything by yourself hiring is easy getting people for the first uh week is easy because you give them a salary they come um motivating them to give it their best every single time uh retaining them uh year after year because the real compounding effects of a company comes when the team has stuck around for at least I would say two or years because then the synergies come into play and that's bring but I think most people these days they can't stay in a company for like 2 three years it's hard and it requires you to expend so much energy to keep them together yeah I think it's

more than energy it's about um making them part of your vision right making them believe in it as much as you do because the day that the company employees starts talking like you that's when you know you've done a good job because then they're not just working for the salary they're working because they believe in the mission that you are working on see for an entrepreneur I would say most successful entrepreneurs are not exactly doing it for the money because for an entrepreneur to do what he or she is doing they would have already so for money to some extent because you could wish they're taking these kind of extreme risks think about it right you are raised let's say whatever millions of dollars and then you're working on a okay salary like not that high salary as well because the company is not making money it's pre- revenue and all of that how do you justify a high salary to your investors when your company has not started making money and you're going at it for 6 to 7 years the opportunity cost of that was maybe working for another company at 1 CR plus salary you could have done all of that but you chose to do this and the reason because money doesn't motivate you anymore you already so for money so I think a successful entrepreneur and when I mean Successful entrepreneur somebody who is going to have a pan India uh impact somebody who can at least you know generate maybe 300 400 crores of Revenue needs to really believe in the problem statement that they're trying to solve because money at the end of the like you said is a reflection of the value that you added to the society and that value comes from solving a problem so if you're very deeply passionate about a problem like really deep not just because it makes you money but because it helps somebody else only then you can you know drive a mission and a vision to it and then align the entire team towards it I think that is more difficult than you know increasing the salary every year and how do you deal

with you know there are bunch of people on Twitter for example who will you know tag you and say Sharon look at this guy he just talks about Finance makes funny stuff um and they're doing like a product management role or something in a company right yeah and they feel it's easy and I've seen some of these people actually go out and create content themselves right and then realize actually it's a lot harder a because talking is not the hard part right it's the risk of doing this and the chance of failure is like extremely high and second part is uh the competition is intense like pretty much everyone thinks it's an easy idea so they come start doing it that's the only time they gain respect do you like when you were an employee I'm sure at some point right uh what is something that you never realized back then that you now realize an entrepreneur things you used to say about entrepreneurs SL content creators that uh you just you've taken a complete u-turn on now so I've never really observed the content creator space before I became a content creator see when I started um the world was full of YouTube content creators and there were not a lot of people uh to begin with they were just The ogs Who been around for almost 10 years now so I didn't really you know follow them or study them uh to be honest I start when I started my content creation had I known what other content creators were doing I would not have achieved what I've achieved today because I started from a first principles method right I always thought about the audience and what they wanted um that is why I was able to create a new category right the category being entertainment Plus Finance like had I just studied other content creators and try to replicate them I would not have been you know where I am today so that is one thing second thing

when it comes to entrepreneurs I always thought these entrepreneurs are like the you know super intelligent people very well gifted um not everybody's cup of tea or these guys have you know basically super intelligent people who are uh made of something else The Chosen Few but then now what I realize is that it is not that they are super smart it is just that they are tell they are very good at telling a story to themselves to do it day after day because if you ask me right they also have insane risk capacity is one but I think more than that is to is the ability to uh sort of uh try something new agree I mean accepting that you will suck at it in the beginning uh but still keep at it and while you're doing it you will keep hearing a lot of people saying that it's not possible you cannot do it but even then keep doing it I'll give you my example when I created content I I mean I I knew less than 1% of what I know today right a lot of things came because I was forced to learn new things to create content and as I kept creating content sure I created I got a million followers 2 million followers that was just through distribution then next thing was for me to kind of get into uh like a proper serious educational uh kind of thing right instead of just entertaining the audience can I like hold the attention of my audience for 3 hours where I teach them the full details about personal finance planning so that again you get through that imposter Syndrome again like how can you do it there are better people than you don't even have a finance degree how are you going to be able to teach better than an MBA Professor or a CA degree or a CFA degree person so these sort of things um keep coming to you and a lot of people don't start just because of this so now what I've realized is that these entrepreneurs are the ones who are uh people who become constantly learning they realize that they're not the smartest that actually they don't really know a lot of stuff but they surround themselves with people who are smarter than them and quickly implement the things that they are learning in their business like a lot of people just read books and like to think you know would like to think of thems as really smart but one week later or two weeks later down the line they don't remember more than 90% of that book uh but I think an entrepreneur is somebody who takes those learnings either from a book or from their real life experiences by talking to other people and implements them in real life situations better than others and just the distance between

talking and doing is so far I mean even if your job is to talk like a content creator politician like I used to think when I was younger that these politician running the country they not doing a good job yeah then when I actually started running companies I realized oh [ __ ] imagine running a country they are the smartest people if you politicians are the smartest and the hardest working people of the country if you ask me like but that's a realization you get in your like when you get super old or you get to scale no when you think about it like that's again like when we both started off you know let's say from middle class tier of the society and in the if you now think about it our parents used to say that you know politicians are you know corrupt people they're not trustworthy they eat a lot of money and all of that right but then now that you are able to see the country from a much more macro view you realize that whatever politicians are doing there is no other way of doing it right in a country like India cuz someone or the other is going to complain yeah

someone so it's very easy to sit down here and look up at them and say you know they are bad and all of that like we all criticize people who be who are rich and wealthy right we think their life is so easy and you know why don't they you know help people who are not as fortunate uh but I think it's very easy to complain right one reaching that point whatever these politicians or you know ultra wealthy billionaires are it comes with a lot of U trial and error and a lot of mental stress which we can't even imagine right and if we had to if we want the kind of Life they're having you would I mean it doesn't come in an instant they have to go through some Next Level uh you know mind [ __ ] Journey which we can't even imagine right and most people do not want to take that path and they like to criticize and you can't have an easy family life you can't travel you can't do any of the joyous things that you find joy in your life the minute you decide to do that because you don't know when you're going to get a call that everything's crumbling please come yeah for sure yeah it's like you gain that respect I guess over the

years but uh this is the main thing right like as a your transition from employee to you know entrepreneur you now see entrepreneurship in New Light yeah what is the plan for the next one two years in your journey I think is to um I don't know yeah I think I hate this question because if you look at the last two years of my life um I could not have predicted any of it right like I don't even know what's going to happen one month later I'm living literally living uh I I plan month at a time right now one 1 to two years from now there is no way for me to plan it because I know it's not going to happen I can tell you what I want is to maybe creating a self- sustaining company which doesn't require me uh to create an awesome team which sort of independently comes up with new ideas and implements them and sort of you know creates a uh you know Revenue machine all by themselves Under the Umbrella of the organization that I've created and continue creating content because I love creating content I think that is one thing I know for sure that as long as people want to hear me talk because I know that I'm constantly learning and upskilling myself by talking to people reading books or whatever and I know that I'm able to decipher that in a way which the masses love and understand so I love that process so I want to continue doing that for as long as possible uh but in terms of an entrepreneurial journey I think just to refine the mission that I'm on which is spreading financial literacy and empower emping people to learn how to take control of their money because I think it all boils down to that uh you hear a lot of examples of unsuccessful entrepreneurs and the common threat that all of them have is they don't know how to manage their own money because they're not able to survive in the business world because if you don't understand how money Works how cash flow Works how accounting works you cannot run a business you might have the greatest team the best technology and all of that if you don't understand how uh accounting Works how finances Works you're not going to be able to run a business you'll fail at it miserably because you'll place your Blind Faith on people who you hire and they're going to skim on the top it's going to happen so I think the first step for the country's empowerment is to learn how to manage their own money and that I think I'm at a very unique position to drive that and enable that so on the entrepreneurial front that is my singular Mission and bring as many smart people as possible people who are uh the smarter they are the more smarter than they are than me the better it is if I can bring all of such people onto a mission uh which incentivizes us all that is something that I want to continue for the next two years I have a question so I

recently hired this guy or rather we were going to hire him but then we didn't hire him content wrer and CV looked good looked like he had some good experience then we hired him and then a week later we realized he's not actually good at writing content right I mean we completely encourage people to use a chat gbd or a Bard but if you don't know what you're writing content about very clear right you can't evaluate the outputs of AI so you're not able to do a good job of telling whether it's good output or bad output now he got caught so we spoke to him and we told him hey you know you're not actually writing the scripts and then I asked him why don't you take like two three months he's a computer science guy so I said why don't you take 2 three months why don't you learn a little bit uh why don't you explore the space and he said no I need a job he was just done with college he's like no I can't take two three months off I really need a job and one thing I've learned over the years is that some people just get a job right out of college maybe because of financial constraints or whatever and then just get stuck there cuz by definition if you're taking an entry-level job it's already you're not exploring anything new and like you said you won in content because you found an inflection point right short form you didn't look at anybody else you did something new in India yeah uh but that was also the result of a little bit of exploration after you were planning to go for MBA but you said I'll take some time off I'll explore and see if this thing works out so you had like an exploration phase do you think that exploration phase is was critical for you to be where you at how do you think young kids should look at an exploration phase is that even NE in a company or in their lives interesting question I think for me the exploration came because of more free time I think covid was the perfect environment for all of us to be exploratory in that time because it Fosters you see for most people um there are already a lot of preset options default options on what to do with your free time uh it could be catching up with your old friends going on watch for a movie Netflix clubbing concert so the capitalistic world has created so many entertainment opportunities for filling up all the free time that a person has Co removed a vast majority of that right so I strongly believe that what you do in your free time is the difference between being in the top 10% at something or. 1% of something that is it but that is very hard to do after doing a 9 to7 job a lot of people are not going to have the bandwidth to do something productive with your free time now a lot of people assume this to be you know okay maybe work longer hours or maybe do something you know a side hustle or whatever so I think the hack over here is to do something which is fun if you can do something fun which is also productive that is the only way you can think of uh exploring something outside so the exploratory thing while it's important it is very difficult to find something which you're going to have fun uh while exploring it and it's not necessary that you always need to do something productive in your exploring time sometimes it can just be about adding another dimension to your character a lot of people in India are very boring if I may put it that way because they all have very similar lives you go to the office you come back home you watch TV you go to sleep right when was the last time you uh find somebody who is very interested in let's say maybe an afficionado of an anime maybe he's very uh knowledgeable about sneakers very knowledgeable about cycle repair whatever gardening you know basically one particular interest which adds another dimension to your personality because that will pay dividends in your professional life as well because at the end of the day what people don't realize to climb up the corporate ladder or to become more successful it's not just about your skill set because there's also the relationship angle right because at the end of the day the decision maker is a human being who is maybe at a position above you and if you have more Dimension to your character that person is going to pick you because you are a more likable person I want to have you around more in the higher positions of the company so either work

on being more saying that you're saying that leadership at company weeds out generic people would I be can I compress it to that it doesn't weeds out but it significantly it it doesn't even give you a foot in the door let's say you very smart at what you do you're very you know knowledable and all of that but if I don't even give you an opportunity because I already judged you because you're a boring guy you're not going to get a chance but if you have some dimension in your personality which is very unique I'm naturally gravitated towards you so even if you're medior at your work I'm still going to give you more attention at the end of the day it's attention right similar to let's say two T-Shirt Company one t-shirt company is maybe making you know 100% pure cotton but the other t-shirt company is 80% 80% pure Cardon company has better marketing so I'm going to buy that than the other company's products similarly with human beings also you need to think of yourself as a marketing product if you focus more on yourself add more Dimensions to your personality you will sort of get more attention from the rest of the world because you get more attention doesn't matter if you have very high skill set or you know just enough good skill set you will still make it out there and what's the path like let's say I'm young I'm going to office 9 to5 should I like quit my job and take like a 3-month exploration period or should I just do it find a way to do it part time no that won't work nobody has that kind of luxury in India very few people um because I I'll tell you right um a lot of I I've spoken to a couple of entrepreneurs in the past 3 weeks uh who uh not had the luxury of wealth you know came from lower middle class family and when I asked them the same question how do you start a business because if you're not going to make money in the beginning how are you going to pay for rent food electricity bill um there was only one answer both of them had the same answer do two jobs you work on your business but at the same time in your free time you they were both doing teaching gigs they were going to a training Education Institute they were teaching something for example one of the guys was good at math so he went to this training institute and was teaching math he was getting paid by the hour right and another person was teaching something for cat right this person had not appli you know had not cleared cat yet but then went on teaching cat right so they were hustling so hard so there is a way to do both exploratory with the business and make you know make money on the side to sustain yourself but like it's a very hard path not many and also I think

the narrative is working against it like Naran morti came out and said the 70 hours thing right yeah um it got a lot of lashback yeah right people kept came out and said why should I work 70 hours and this and that right but you know as much as I don't want to get myself in trouble I do think that it's important for you to like especially if you want to do something great in life you should be willing to put like 60 70 hours in it

yeah I mean 100% but I think uh to each to his own right not everybody wants to uh sort of not everybody's identity is their work I genuinely feel like uh a lot of the what do you say contentment as I would put it is driven by dopamin release now everybody has different triggers for dopamin release maybe for people like you and me is our identity is by our work what we do in our professional life is going to maybe drive societal respect and out of which we get our dopamin release and that's how we gain purpose out of life and contentment not everybody works that way for some people it could be their kids they don't care if they are you know just a midlevel manager at a company but their kids give them so much joy that they don't really care about working 70 hours a week for some people it could be their friends and Social Circle for some people it could just be like I'm not going to work 9 to 8 I'm 5 and then I'm just going to you know plan you know a trip a weekend trip every but I think that's fine as long as you don't have expectations then of building a billion dollar Enterprise or whatever right you can't then you that's setting yourself up for like expectation disappointment true so

what happens is because we are in such a connected world today you are seeing every what is everybody up to that is not the case 30 40 years back now even if you are leading it's the grass is greener on the other side narrative right let's say for example I'm already happy I have you know beautiful kids great friend Circle I'm going on vacations now because I'm seeing this billionaire let's say you are the billionaire I'm going to see that your life is better than mine but you never got to see the beauty of my life about my kids and my friends and all of that because what I'm seeing is the tangible factor which is your net worth so I'm going to assume that okay your life is better than mine I'm going to resent you I'm going to start hating whenever you tweet on Twitter I'm going to trolling you right so I think this connected world that we are living in today because of you know meta and Google has sort of increased the anxiety and lowered the you know happiness index of the world because you just have so much more expectations in life and

you've been getting some of that this thing no because you've got to scale and seb's really come after you and yeah I don't think se's really come after you but I think the definitely the media has come after you yeah I think you know you made a nice video about this where you said that actually there are two kinds of influencers one is the stock tips people and then there's you who's disseminating personal finance information yeah but every media article I saw had your face on it when sebie cracked down yeah how do you feel about that yeah I mean actually it's a very big misconception it's more of a PR problem and I've spoken to a couple of people from sebi and they are all for the kind of content that I'm making right because it is not um you know direct uh advice what I mean by direct advice is saying by this which directly influences um your money in a particular company right see sebbi has perview over Equity markets now if I'm taking the name of a company and asking you to invest Now by virtue of my distribution I can influence the price of that stock make it go up right and then you will see that you made profits and then I will exit my money because I've made the profits and you are making the loss this is called a pump and dump SK scheme and this is what sebi is uh pro has a problem with I don't do all of this stuff because this is not my cup of tea I'm not going to take responsibility for your money on such a myopic level where I tell you to buy this particular stock and if that stock drops 30% 10,000 people lose money because of me I cannot live with that right so I think that is the first misconception that people have bucketed all of us influencers into one category um and the bigger problem like

you said is the media because the media is the one which is uh pumping information to the country and uh people year ago they were your friends they were my friends I would see you everywhere on all the media yeah so media is like that media is not your friend right they your that's what I that's what we thought media is our friend but they were again using you because they were getting their traffic into their website like we need to understand how a media company Works people think that you know your media companies like mint and economic Times are these you know holy temples of information where they're coming up with unbiased information to educate and keep the country you know financially aware but that's not how media Works based on how much traffic they can build on their website so that they can put ads of companies and make money out of it so during the covid boom because people like me were getting all the distribution it made sense for them to write articles about me because they knew that the eyeballs from here would come to their website due to which their ads Revenue will increase that's why they came to me I thought they were my friends because you know they thought okay I'm doing something good for the country so they wanted to talk about it but that's not the hidden agenda was they make more money from me today what has happened is because the narrative from beginning was Sharon is a influencer this that and now when the real miscreant which I mean the troublemakers uh started coming and doing this pump and dumb scheme they were also called influencer right and then the sebbi comes in now for the media the hot story is not Sharon is you know U uh helping with the financial literacy of the country now the hot story sebi is after influencers now who are the influencers which were causing problems the stock tip and the pump and dump scheme guys but what was the narrative from the beginning Sharon is also a influencer they failed to make two separate names because they knew that if Sharon is also part of the influencer ecosystem the views will still come to their website due to which that ad Revenue will still be there right so that is what happened and that is what is continuing to happen but yeah I mean that's life right uh we think the world is a fair place but the end of the day we are all fending for ourselves and if that's what the media has to do let them do it I mean we've been me and some other content creators

have been fighting against him have they've been quiet for the last 6 months because uh people saw the hypocrisy what mean by the hypocrisy is Media was criticizing influencers for promoting crypto and then one month later they're promoting cryptocurrencies all right and when you ask them what is this about what is this hypocrisy they're like hey they have this separate page called the ad space which is sort of like this wall where anybody can kind of come put money and promote whatever they want so by that logic are you telling me like if you want to promote band stuff in India you you're telling me that you can come on an economic Times or a mints website because it's like a free wall you can just put any flyer you want and that's the justification that they're giving to the public I think that's absolute hypocrisy right there's one piece where I do agree with them about this right which is that it is true that anyone can come like it's sort of a coin operated system you come there and you can put up an ad with you it's coming from your mouth yeah you are sort of saying that I think this is good whereas the media kind of has like distance from it by saying that okay this is the article this is the ad yeah but you feel that's not I think that is again a great area I feel I mean look at let's look at from the customer lens for get the law for law I know you're right because that's the reason why they're doing it right if they were actually law wrong as per the law they would have you know the government would come after them or the court but let's look at it from the customer lens right if you ask any average Jo today in India if you see an ad of promoting cryptocurrencies on economic Times page or on Hindustan times page do you are you going to be uh less influenced because it says promoted on the top are you not going to give it more importance because it says Economic Times on the top from a customer lens there's no difference right I'm still going to give it the higher importance because Economic Times is a century old brand which has been you know which is a legacy in this country they trust it more than you yeah me so even if you're telling me that by according to the law they are fine because they're clearly mentioning it's an ad I mean even I mention it's an ad right if I'm saying if I'm going to promote cryptocurrency they're going to say it's an ad so similarly if the media is going to say an ad does it make them less uh complicit I mean I don't I don't think so I think that's hypocrisy because at the end of the day the damage is still happening no the pump and dump schemes like for example when uh these newspapers are promoting cryptocurrencies uh eight of those cryptocurrencies where victims are pump and dumb schemes right now you're telling me that if the audience or the readers of those newspapers fell prey for that you're saying the newspaper is not to blame for that just because they put the word ad but the influencer is

but all the finance influen what banded together to kind of take this on what what's the plan no I think now it's over I mean it's not Hot Topic anymore right now we're just waiting for the sebi to come up with its uh you know official statements but you're getting a license anyway yeah we are but I think even if you do not get a license the consultation paper that sebi came up with I think they have made a mountain out of a mole hill I don't mean the sebi I mean the media right the interpretation of the se's consultation paper is that you cannot promote Direct stocks or in exchange for money direct stocks or direct mutual funds in exchange for money which most of us don't even do right so even if it comes into fruition it makes zero [ __ ] in our life last question Sharon you've been a

content creator for so long you took advantage of an inflection point which is short form content covid etc and you made it is there still space being a finance content creator I know that the tech is there like I can just use this phone it's got dual view I can basically shoot myself shoot a reel get it packaged get it out very quickly yeah in your case uh do you think there's new content formats in finance that are untapped what's a new Creator to do if they want to be a personal finance Creator I think it's kind of saturated if you ask me because at least in this year which is 2023 because of the whole issue with the pr angle of influencers right uh the media has already made it out that you know um talking about these influencers don't trust them and all of that so I think there's not really an opportunity for new Finance content creators to come up and create a career out of it because they're already going to get the hit from day one seeing the media is preventing new creators I think the damage is already done at least for the next couple of years I think until once sebie comes out with a new thing maybe let's say SE comes up with clear guidelines on how to be a finance content creator that's the part I don't like I mean the media has some good points but I think the part that I don't like is we discourage new people to come out and disseminate Finance content by just bucketing everyone together yeah I think what you and all the other Finance creators have done for India which is just improve awareness like I didn't invest till I was 26 and then I saw all these content creators saying you have to invest otherwise whatever I think bring all the money in your house yeah I'm doing literally the opposite of what you told me in this video but in general I think everyone's like uh more people have become financially disciplined because of what you guys have done and I think that's a good thing right and I don't like that we're discouraging the next wave of people from doing that just because no I think the damage is been done at least for the next 2 years uh but maybe let's say one and a half year from now I think people's perception also is very malleable I would say uh in the world of social media I think

perception will change and then there will be I mean let's say the current Finance content creators will sort of go out of fashion which will definitely happen like unless they have built a business around it they they' become a financial entrepreneur uh by use leveraging the distribution I think the current Finance content creators as we see them today will not be around after 3 4 years they will get irrelevant I am 100% sure about that um and that's true of any content creator forget Finance content creator any content creator has a shelf life of three or four years unless they have really cracked uh long form content for topical news meaning any trending new topic is coming you're making a video about Media Company being a media company you're being a reporter you are a news reporter unless you are that I think the shelf life for I mean that's why I pivoted as well right because that's the most highest longevity kind of content you could do correct so I think the shelf life of most content creators whether you're a finance or anything is three or four years so then there they have to be replaced no someone needs to come there's still a need uh for financial literacy for learning how to invest your money so the new age uh and the next wave of Finance content creators will come and how just the way I had to you know combine entertainment with Finance they might be come up with something entirely new and entirely different which we can't even think of right and then that will be the new wave of Finance but your

recommendation is if you're a young Finance Creator don't get into it right now don't get it there's no point there's like I mean you could do it but I don't see us it's saturated plus the sentiment Is Not Great correct it's saturated but it's already workr it right now and the sentiment is also not good so the both the macro and the micro view is not good interesting

Sean thank you so much for being here I learned a lot yeah and uh I'm glad that you know you were able to explain all your sentences like you're able to use 30 sentences to explain something because I think there's a lot of like bad clipping going on the internet there's always an out of context clip flying around the internet so thank you so much for coming and clarifying this for the audience thank you so much for having me here so this is the OnePlus open the flagship phone okay and we have a ritual where we gift it to all our guests I've taken an hour of your time I think okay and uh you deserve something in return so I like it I've always wanted one of these folders phon my dad had this flip phone it was very cool y this is really cool I'll tell you what I love about the phone right I can click this then let's say if I want another app I can just drag it here and then like your phone like your computer has multi tab I can start multi- tabbing the biggest advantage of this just having the two sides is that I can shoot on this and I can have my script on this that is the most valuable thing

that was Sharon he Finance with Sharon and you know you can hit like subscribe on this video make sure you follow me subscribe to me yeah and if you want to follow Sharon he has a word for you have to follow my man bro Finance with Sharon that was Finance with Sharon it was an interesting conversation and the cool part about my conversation with Sharon is he's always very honest with me he always Bears it all and I've seen lots of podcasts of his and I don't think he's ever been this vocal about everything that he's been through over the last couple of years and I hope you guys learned something that's it for me bye