WOW STORY OF THE DAY: She Cleared CA on Her First Attempt, Taught 10,000 Students Live, and Built a 5.3 Million YouTube Community

Pune, a Teaching Family, and Nearly a Decade in the Classroom Before the Camera

CA Rachana Phadke Ranade was born on June 26, 1986, in Pune, Maharashtra, into a family where education was the highest value. Her father was an educator. Her mother was a teacher. Both her grandparents were teachers. Her brother Rajesh Phadke is also in the field of finance. Education and financial thinking are family languages.

She studied at Abhinava Vidyalaya English Medium School in Pune before completing her B.Com in Statistics from Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce. She cleared her Chartered Accountancy exams on the very first attempt, a feat reflecting the academic discipline that would later define every piece of content she created. She added a PG Diploma in Business Management and a Master's in Business Studies from Savitribai Phule Pune University.

Rather than entering corporate practice or consulting, Rachana chose to teach. She joined Expert Professional Academy in Pune, spending nearly ten years teaching finance subjects to CA and MBA students and teaching 10,000-plus students through live classroom sessions, while simultaneously working in auditing for nearly a decade, building expertise in both the practice and the pedagogy of finance.

"My mom was a teacher, both of my grandparents were teachers. So maybe I can say it runs in my blood," she says.

Those ten years inside classrooms gave her something most finance creators on YouTube never had: a decade of real-time feedback on how students struggled with financial concepts, where the confusion always appeared, and which explanations consistently produced that moment of sudden clarity. That pedagogical intelligence became her greatest competitive advantage.

YouTube 2019, Marathi Expansion, and the Mission of Har Ghar Investor

In 2019, Rachana launched her YouTube channel CA Rachana Phadke Ranade with one mission: make stock market and finance easy for everyone. She was not entering a creator competition. She was extending a classroom she had already been running for a decade.

The content strategy was precise and values-driven. She covered stock market basics, mutual funds, SIP investing, fundamental and technical analysis, futures and options, tax planning, and personal finance through practical, step-by-step videos with real market examples and quizzes rather than quick-rich schemes. Courses range from beginner-friendly fundamentals to advanced programmes including Magic of Mutual Funds, Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Futures and Options, and Value Investing, all priced to be pocket-friendly and genuinely accessible.

She became a YouTube NextUp Winner in 2019, selected for the prestigious program recognising the most promising creators on the platform. That early validation confirmed that the market was hungry for exactly what she was offering: credibility-backed, jargon-free, deeply educational finance content from a qualified professional.

Her mission evolved into a phrase that now defines her entire brand: Har Ghar Investor. Every household, an investor. Not through speculation. Through genuine financial education.

In 2025, she launched three new courses including Magic of Mutual Funds 2.0, Marathi course Maitri Mutual Fundshi, and a Marathi Pro Investor membership, taking her platform into regional language education for the first time and dramatically expanding her addressable audience across Maharashtra and beyond.

Rachana believes deeply that women should stand up and take active part in financial decision-making at the household level. She aims at altering the power dynamics concerning gender and money, a conviction she brought to the ET Women Forum in 2025 where she served as a panelist for a session titled "Financial Freedom First: Unlocking Wealth Creation for Women."

She conducted exclusive financial literacy sessions for CBI employees and corporate teams at Uber India, Accenture, Amdocs India, and Google India, bringing the mission of Har Ghar Investor from YouTube to boardrooms and government offices. The Economic Times featured her in a profile titled "Meet CA Rachana Ranade: The YouTuber Who Has Built a Fortune by Decoding Stock Market Jargon."

She founded Rachana Ranade and Associates and built her complete education platform at rachanaranade.com. The platform and all its courses, membership programmes, and digital assets are 100% self-owned with no external investors.

Scale and Real-World Impact

The Most Powerful Educators Are the Ones Who Built Their Credibility Before They Built Their Audience

The sharpest lesson from Rachana Ranade's journey is this: the most enduring finance education platforms are the ones built by people who spent years inside classrooms before they ever faced a camera.

Rachana taught 10,000 students live. She audited for a decade. She learned exactly how Indian students struggled with finance, where the confusion appeared, and which explanations worked. When she took that knowledge to YouTube, she was not learning in public. She was deploying ten years of pedagogical intelligence at digital scale.

"Financial literacy is for everyone, students, homemakers, professionals or retirees," she says.

She cleared CA on the first attempt. She taught in classrooms for a decade. She is a classically trained singer who chose finance education as her life's stage. She took the classroom to YouTube. And 5.3 million people followed, not because she was entertaining, but because she was genuinely, consistently, irreplaceably useful.

Sources: InvestKraft, Business Viewpoint Magazine, MyJar, The Biography World, Metastory, X @rachana_ranade, LegalVidur, deAsra Foundation