What I learnt this week

Minimums, cold calls, fintech headlines, risk, and culture

1. Enemy number zero

We talk a lot about pricing and cost discipline in the past 2-3 years. Value-based pricing. Cutting marketing, keeping a lean team, managing burn. But one cost that rarely gets called out is the cost to serve. Specifically, the weight of maintaining thousands of accounts that contribute little but still require real operational effort.

The $0 minimum account was introduced to reduce friction. Let people try the platform before committing. But it comes at a cost: more support, more compliance complexity.

Sarwa wasn’t built to serve micro accounts. We built it to help people build meaningful wealth. Somewhere along the way, we started accumulating too many accounts that do little and cost a lot.

You can’t stay focused if you’re constantly distracted by volume.

Same story with $0 commissions. It sounded good initially but now I think that outside the US, it usually signals one of two things: a business losing money on every trade, or one making it back often through hidden fees.

A $100 to $500 minimum captures most serious intent.

We’ve already shifted pricing last year. The next step is being more intentional with who we serve as something we’re exploring.

The old way:

• Spend like there’s no tomorrow

• Growth at all cost

• Chase unicorn status

• Build large teams

• Stay unprofitable

• Use paid ads to cover the gaps

• Number of users

The new way:

• Build with global teams, embrace remote

• Focus on cashflow

• Stay profitable

• Run lean with a core team and specialized contractors

• 1000 true fans model

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2. Wealthfront, Robinhood, and fintech’s real pace

Wealthfront might go public. Nearly two decades later, the model is proving that low-fee, product-led wealth platforms can work. But it takes time. A lot more time than we thought. AUM compounds on trust, habit, and time in the market.

Contrast that with Robinhood. The stock jumped after tokenizing OpenAI. Sam Altman denied collaborating with them on it. It sounded like a derivative product dressed up as innovation.

I don’t get the excitement around tokenization. Especially for US stocks. The infrastructure is already strong. Liquidity is deep. Transfers are fast and cheap. Exchanges are moving to extended trading hours. What problem are we solving?

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3. Notes from Taleb’s risk training

I took the risk training from Taleb this week, some highlights:

• Failures at a local level improve the system. Restaurants close. The industry gets better.

• Options are better than forecasts. Contractual protection beats statistical prediction.

• Tinkering risks are fine. Ruin risks are not. Learn the difference.

• Rationality is defined by staying alive over time.

• Simple systems that don’t break are underrated.

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4. “It's been a year, but it feels like I’ve done five”

A teammate shared these thoughts during a recent check-in.

“At first I thought the culture was too good to be true. But it’s real.”
“I’ve worked across onboarding, payments, compliance, pricing, and open banking.”
“It’s rare to feel this much ownership.”
“I wouldn’t get this kind of exposure anywhere else.”

We talk a lot about product and the trust within the culture that leads to long tenures and a long-term mindset.

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5. Cold calling isn’t dead

I was catching up with family from Canada who work in wealth management at a firm managing more than $10B. What always surprises me is how little has changed in their approach. To this day, the number one way they get clients is still cold calling. Not content. Not SEO. Not paid ads. Just the phone.

And it works. It’s fast, human, and direct.

At Sarwa, we never cold called. But we always believed in warm calling. In the early days, we’d reach out to anyone who showed interest. No pitch. Just “Thank you for signing-up. Anything I can help with?”

It worked. We brought it back recently, and it’s working again.

I don’t think it’s about picking one channel. Email, ads, content, social, all of it has a role. But real conversations still move things forward. Picking up the phone might still be a very underrated growth tactic.