Building 23percent club in the Open

I studied engineering at IIT Madras and later went through the NISM route into the markets — the formal path India has built for people who want to work seriously in finance rather than treat it as a side interest. Somewhere in that process, the thing that stuck with me wasn't a specific trade or a specific fund. It was noticing how much of what actually moves people's financial outcomes has almost nothing to do with picking the right product, and almost everything to do with whether they understood, and stuck with, a plan at all.

That's the whole reason 23percent club exists.

What I decided not to build

The easier business to build, honestly, would have been an advisory or distribution business — recommend products, earn a commission or a fee, help people one relationship at a time. It's a legitimate business. It's also not what this is.

23percent club doesn't manage anyone's money. It doesn't take a cut from any fund, broker, or insurer for pointing you toward them. The calculators on this site don't recommend an instrument — they just do the arithmetic on whatever assumptions you type in, honestly, whether the number that comes out is encouraging or not. That constraint was deliberate, and it stays deliberate as the platform grows.

Why "in the open"

I'm writing about the building process itself — not just the finished features — because I think the way this gets built matters as much as what gets built. A platform whose entire pitch is "we'll teach you, not sell to you" should be legible about how it operates, including the parts that are still unfinished, still being argued about internally, or still wrong.

That's what this category of posts will be: the actual decisions, including the ones I'm still not sure about. Not a highlight reel.

What's next

The roadmap isn't a secret — it's on the site, the same way everything else here is meant to be. Tools first, because a calculator you can trust is worth more than an essay you might skim. Education content built around a real content rotation, not sporadic posting. Legend stories that try to find the sharper, less comfortable version of a well-known lesson instead of the easy one everyone already repeats.

None of it works if the trust breaks. So the trust comes first.

Source: NISM — Investor Certification Examinations