Case Study: Learn How Alinea Invest Went From Zero To Launch In Eight Weeks In Their Quest For Product-Market Fit
Case Study: Learn How Alinea Invest Went From Zero To Launch In Eight Weeks In Their Quest For Product-Market Fit
The Alinea Invest founders success so far comes from one decision: avoid over-optimizing on the small stuff, and focus on feedback from launch to move forward.
Introduction:
Alinea is a mobile investing app for the next generation. They match their users to stocks based on their interests and offer bite-sized insights so one can invest in the companies they believe in.
Problem: In the past year, investing has become widely popular especially with young people, however, most are not making educated investment decisions. This investing culture has been created by existing platforms that have lacked the right education, community, and messaging for Gen-Zs.
Market: Today, the (TAM) purchasing power of college students in the United States is $593 billion, and when you look at college students’ daily spending power (SAM) in the United States - that number is $60 billion.
Solution: Alinea is a new experience to make investing personal, simple, and insightful. We do the homework, so our users can make informed decisions.
Team: Eve Halimi, co-founder and co-CEO, previously worked in strategy under the CEO at Contentsquare and has a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University. Nikhil Agrawal, co-founder and CTO, is a former software engineer at Credit Karma, a second-time founder, and has an M.S. in computer science from Northeastern University. Anam Lakhani, co-founder and co-CEO, is a former Citibank market analyst and has a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University.
Executive Summary:
Problem: What Features Do You Launch Your App With?
The most serious challenge that the Alinea team faced is deciding what features their users would most need at their app’s launch. Their user interviews helped the team figure out which features to prioritize based on the frequency of certain pain points that came up in discussion.Market: What Is Driving The Culture Behind Younger Generations Investing?
One central question the Alinea team had to answer was understanding what is spurring Gen Z’s to get into the market. By answering this question, they can build their app around cultural trends that enhance or strengthen existing user habits rather than building them from scratch.Solution: Using Community To Drive Early Adoption Of Alinea
The founders have found that their long-term, unfair advantage is built on community. The team figured out early on that by building their app around investing communities rather than individual use, they can more effectively explore what will build user retention going forward as they grow.Team: Figuring Out The Optimal Time To Launch
Timing happens to be everything when it comes to startups - the launch of the Alinea app would be critical to getting those first early adopters that can help the startup iterate and find a path forward. Finding this optimal time was possible through open communication from each co-founder in terms of what each one thought was best, then finding consensus around a plan going forward.Takeaway: Optimize For User Feedback, Not Perfecting App Features
It’s incredibly easy to get stuck in the weeds perfecting some key feature but only delays you from getting feedback from users. Launch, then iterate.
Case Study: Alinea Invest
Problem: What Features Do You Launch Your App With?
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
Alinea is an investing app for Gen-Zs, and one of the critical issues we are addressing is how Gen-Zs can make informed investment decisions. One of the problems we encountered was deciding what features to prioritize for our initial launch. After speaking to several hundred potential users, we narrowed our focus to three main areas for our company: general, financials, and impact.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
Deciding what features to launch with is critical for our product-market fit journey since the initial feedback we receive will guide our product roadmap. The feedback we will receive from customers the following launch will determine how close or far away we are from product-market fit.
We understood the pain points our community experienced - the confidence struggle of making informed investments. When chatting with customers, we realized one of the initial obstacles is getting started. Most Gen-Zs who had not invested would tell us, “I don’t even know where to start.” We knew that was the first pain point we would have to solve, and one way we could do that was by making things familiar. That’s why we decided to build a personalization feature that would match users to stocks based on their interests. This was to create a starting point for users’ investing journey, so they could start exploring stocks.
We had to understand what the roadblock was and signal confidence for those who didn’t feel confident enough to start investing. If a potential user told us they were interested in but hadn’t started investing, we would ask why. Most of the time, the answer would be, “I don’t even know where to start.” We knew that would be a major pain point to be solved. The other segment of our potential customers had started investing with small amounts of money but still did not feel confident with their stock picks. We also knew this pain point had to be addressed. Lastly, through growing interest and market research, we found Gen-Zs wanted more transparency on companies they were investing in, so we had to cater to this as well.
Market: What Is Driving The Culture Behind Younger Generations Investing?
Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?
We use a few lines of questioning to understand our customer’s pain points and build accordingly. The first thing we ask our customers is, “Have they started investing their money?” The answer to this question will determine what comes next. If the answer is no, we ask, “why?” Often, the answer with GenZ’s is they want to get started but don’t know where to start. After going through this line of questioning, we’ve built a way to personalize stocks to individuals, so they have a starting point. Otherwise, if someone is already investing their money, we ask about their experience on the platform. What do they like and dislike? Based on these answers, we build a features list to help our users make informed investment decisions.
Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?
Apart from the customer’s pain points, we’ve discovered how culturally relevant investing has become, and with that, we’ve seen the dangerous side effects of social media. With the recent Gamestop events, Gen-Zs turn to social media and memes as soundboards for investing advice and end up blindly investing. Research suggests that following the crowd and hype has significant consequences, as we saw with Gamestop’s plummeting price from its highs.
Additionally, we spoke to Gen-Zs, who had already dabbled in investing but didn’t feel too sure how to evaluate and research stocks. To solve this pain point, we condensed dense SEC filings and earnings reports into bite-sized chunks so users could easily digest this information and evaluate companies. There were many choices on what type of information we could provide, so we started by asking our users what they would most want to know about a company before they invested. We would always pose the question - “You have $1,000 and 20 minutes to invest in a stock - what do you need to know?” Based on these answers, we prioritized which features to build: The C-Suite, Risk Level, How They Make Money, and Impact Scores. We had ideas for more features such as an IPO calendar and social profiles, which we decided to launch in later versions.
How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?
Since we are GenZs, we understand the obstacles GenZs experience when it comes to investing. When we struggled with investing, we turned to our friends and classmates for advice and, as a result, built investing communities on campus. Today, we have Alinea investing communities at ten different campuses with over 65 community coordinators, who are also our initial users.
While many young retail investors have started to participate in the market, certain demographics are still far behind. One example is female investors. On platforms such as Robinhood, female users are less than 20% of the user base, and the number drops even lower to ~14% on platforms such as ETrade. Similarly, minority groups such as Blacks and Hispanics also continue to fall behind on stock market participation. Alinea is for those who feel like they don’t belong, and we wanted to create a space for those who don’t feel like investing is for them.
Our strategy was to talk to our customers to understand their investing journeys and motivations. By understanding why they chose certain stocks or platforms, we were better able to design solutions that would address their pain points. We also consulted books like “Marketing to Gen Z” and research reports, but ultimately talking to our community and potential users proved to be most helpful.
Solution: Using Community To Drive Early Adoption Of Alinea
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?
We have interviewed hundreds of potential customers to understand their pain points and desires. After understanding the common threads amongst answers, we decided to make sure our solution addressed problems GenZs encountered when trying to make investing decisions. For example, certain platforms are filled with psychological nudges to get you to trade no matter what - the colors red and green are known to cause panic and induce dopamine and push notifications create a sense of urgency. On the Alinea app, we wanted to create a platform that would allow people to experience stock investing without the stress and anxiety of playing an adrenaline-filled video game.
What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?
Firstly, having one-on-one interviews with potential customers helped us better understand insights to incorporate into our app. Second, through our community coordinator program, we co-host webinars with campus clubs and organizations to discuss investing and the Alinea app. While this is not scalable, we gained lots of insight into our customers’ preferences and sentiments on investing and market events. Our community is the core of Alinea, so we’ve always had events and discussions to create a space to talk about investing, especially if you’re not familiar or a complete beginner. We host bi-monthly chats with our community members and clubhouse talks. We even sent out heart-shaped chocolate smash cakes to thank our community for growing with us for our launch.
What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?
Transparency and direct communication are most effective when communicating with our potential customers. Through our community coordinator program, we have a constant communication and feedback loop. Our community coordinators are all in a group chat where we shoot out questions and receive instant feedback. Following our launch, we scheduled one-on-one feedback calls with all of our community coordinators, and based on their feedback, we started to iterate right away. We had a process to prioritize what to iterate on based on how many times we received the same feedback.
The most common feedback was on top of the list, while future features to build are on the bottom of the list. Additionally, we decided to follow the 80% optimizing and 20% building new features rule. If the most common feedback was “easier” to iterate on, we started to move with that right away. Before any optimization, we addressed bugs as an absolute priority. For example, if there were bugs with authentication or KYC - those came before optimizing existing features and building new ones.
Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.
Alinea started as a school project for an entrepreneurship class. In its earliest days, we consisted of a community of newbie investors who wanted a different experience. This included our friends and classmates, including female friends who weren’t exposed to investing, non-finance savvy friends, and risk-averse friends. We saw people lean into the events we were hosting at school and started to see a need for this type of community. We initially started to have students from Columbia reach out to us to help with community events. We then formalized the process and started posting in student Facebook groups.
By the fall of 2020, Alinea had a community coordinator program at four campuses with 20 community coordinators, and by the spring of 2021, we had grown to 10 campuses with over 65 community coordinators. Our community coordinators’ role is to lead Alinea communities at their respective campuses and create discussions and dialogues around investing - much as we had originally done so ourselves.
At the core, Alinea is a community of new investors. Our community coordinators have been essential to the instant feedback loop we have, whether with branding, marketing, or product. At launch, our community coordinators will be using the Alinea app and will offer feedback, which we can then quickly iterate on.
Team: Figuring Out The Optimal Time To Launch
If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?
The timing of our launch was a huge debate within our team. It was a difficult decision when to launch since there were so many moving parts in place, especially as we were going through Y Combinator. Ultimately, we all drew out our departments’ timelines and the milestones we would individually need to hit. This really helped us determine the timing of our launch. We also struggled with defining “launch” - was it a test flight? Was it the App Store? We were afraid we may be launching too early at times or too late if we waited for more features to be built. By mapping out the timing of the milestones we had to hit, we agreed on what the timing of our launch would look like. These discussions also helped us for future planning by having processes in place for our departments to make collective decisions.
We’re still a lean team of three, so we haven’t reached the scaling stage yet. However, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to grow professionally and personally by taking on new challenges like launching an investing app in under eight weeks!
What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
We have not made any hires yet. However, when we hire, we will want our team to be mission-driven and passionate about the problem we are solving.
If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?
First, we are a passionate and fast-moving team of co-founders. Second, retail investing is an exciting space with high growth potential. Third, there are endless learning opportunities as we continue to build for our community.
Takeaway: Optimize For User Feedback, Not Perfecting App Features
What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
Your customers have the problems, but ultimately you need to build and test the solutions.
Perfect is the enemy of the good - when you try to over-optimize, you may be missing an opportunity to move fast.
What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?
Our hardest problem will be collecting feedback from our initial users and iterating quickly to deliver a fundamentals-driven investing experience for Gen-Zs.
Click Here For Alinea Invest’s Founder File:
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Ross Cranwell, Founder of Milk Video: Milk helps companies turn their high-quality video recordings into valuable repurposed marketing assets that can be used to drive traffic, leads, and sales.
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