Priya Menon explained money to her cousins. Two million strangers were listening.

Priya Menon did not set out to build an audience. In 2020, working as a chartered accountant in Bengaluru, she began sending voice notes to a family WhatsApp group explaining, in plain Malayalam and English, why a cousin’s “guaranteed” investment plan was not, and what a mutual fund actually was. The notes were forwarded. Then they were forwarded again, by people she did not know.

Today Menon’s Instagram account has 2.1 million followers, her podcast is among the most downloaded personal-finance shows in India, and her newsletter, Money, Plainly, is the business that pays for all of it.

Before the camera

Menon grew up in Kochi, the daughter of two schoolteachers who, she says, “were excellent with money and terrible at explaining it.” She qualified as a chartered accountant at 24 and spent six years in corporate finance, where the vocabulary of money was a wall between her colleagues and everyone else in their lives.

“Nobody is bad with money,” she says. “They were handed a language nobody taught them. I happened to be bilingual.”

The turning point

The voice notes became short videos when a cousin pointed out that the same questions arrived every month. The first video, on why a fixed deposit is not a savings plan, was filmed at her dining table in one take. It reached half a million people in a week. Menon kept her job for eighteen months and posted three videos a week before leaving, a decision she made only after the newsletter had paying subscribers.

Nobody is bad with money. They were handed a language nobody taught them.

Building the audience

Her format has barely changed: one question, one answer, no jargon, and a refusal to recommend specific products. That refusal cost her early sponsorship money and, she believes, built the trust that now sustains the business. “People can tell when the answer was written by the advertiser.”

The podcast followed in 2023, recorded in the same room as the videos, and the newsletter a year later. Instagram brings the audience; the podcast deepens it; the newsletter is where readers pay.

The newsletter is the business. Everything else is the doorbell.

What didn’t work

A financial-literacy app, built with a co-founder in 2024, was shut down within a year. “We built what investors wanted to fund, not what my readers asked for. My readers asked for a Tuesday email. I gave them an app with notifications.” She returned the remaining money to the investors and has not raised since.

The business

Money, Plainly has a paid tier, a free tier that is several times larger, and a small team of three. Menon’s book, published in 2025, spent months on Indian bestseller lists. She takes sponsorships only on the podcast and only from companies whose products she does not discuss on the show, a rule she publishes on her website.

What she has learned

“Trust is the only asset in this business, and it compounds slower than money and disappears faster.” She measures the newsletter by replies rather than opens, and reads every one.

What’s next

A version of the newsletter for first-generation earners abroad, beginning with the United States and the Gulf, where, she says, “the questions are the same and the answers are in the wrong language.”