Finshots College Weekly Programme.
the context
Finshots is one of India’s most widely-read financial newsletters. 500k+ subscribers. Finance made simple in under 3 minutes.
College students had always been some of our stickiest readers. They’d find Finshots early, stay for years, and eventually become customers of Ditto, their insurance product. But that audience was going quiet. Less campus buzz, fewer students talking about us online. The readership that powered a lot of early growth was slowly drifting.
the bet
No ads. No referral hacks. I wanted the simplest, most direct distribution channel possible: get Finshots into college inboxes through the colleges themselves.
The deal was straightforward. College clubs send a curated Finshots edition to their entire campus twice a month. We sponsor their events and send them perks. They get funding. We get thousands of inboxes we’d never reach otherwise.
the deck I sent cold - to placement coordinators, club leads, and whoever else needed convincing
the approach
Sounds simple. It wasn’t. Getting a college to agree to a campus-wide email for an external brand is a whole internal process. Club leadership has to buy in. Placement coordinators have to sign off. Sometimes faculty gets involved.
how I got colleges to say yes
warm network first
founders are IIM alumni - that opened a few doors early. used those wins to build the pitch.
cold LinkedIn, but with proof
leading every pitch with a partnership already closed. “we’re doing this with IIM-A and want to add your campus.” that changed the tone of every conversation.
recruit from inside
put out an ambassador form on Finshots for readers who wanted to get involved. got on calls with them individually. wasn’t looking for fans - vetted them for high intent: people who’d actually walk into their coordinator’s office and sell this internally.
arm them, then back them up
once ambassadors were in, gave them a brief, a sample edition, and backed them up on email with whoever needed convincing inside the institution.
the edition
I took the best of what Finshots published over the past two weeks and compiled it into a college edition. Topics picked for what students actually care about. Summarized, packaged, sent twice a month through the clubs.
Not a forwarded newsletter. Something built for this audience using content we already had. Easy to produce, relevant to the reader.
the first college-wide email - sent to announce the partnership and bring new readers into the fold
And if you’re wondering what these readers actually read every two weeks - here’s an edition.
the impact
23k
subscribers from 7 colleges in 3 months
~1k
avg readers per college per edition - sticky from week one
These were real readers. They came back for the next edition. Some eventually converted into Ditto users too, which proved the whole thesis: get them reading Finshots in college and the downstream trust is already built by the time they need insurance.
reflection
A college newsletter doesn’t sound like a breakthrough idea. And it isn’t. But in marketing, an intuition backed by real user behavior will outlast any clever viral loop. Every time.
This programme still runs at Finshots today. The distribution channel I built on my second marketing job has survived multiple team changes and still works years later. That’s the thing about boring ideas that are rooted in actual user behavior. They compound.
Once you find a channel where users get immediate value from your product, you don’t need to be creative. You just need to build on it. Most marketers overthink distribution. The best channels I’ve ever built started with a simple question: where are the people who already care?