Millions of parents across America are now saying “yes” because Greenlight made it easy, safe, and fun. In 2014, Tim Sheehan and his co-founders asked a simple but profound question: why isn’t anyone helping kids learn how to manage money?

Banks’ Blind Spot: The Case for Targeting Kids

For decades, banks ignored younger customers, focusing on adults who generated immediate revenue through loans and credit cards. With customer acquisition costs in finance being notoriously high—often exceeding $300 per customer—targeting kids was seen as unprofitable. Kids didn’t earn, didn’t need complex tools to manage money, and didn’t need credit.

Yet, this assumption overlooked a critical opportunity: kids and teens represented a unique long-term market. Banking relationships often last an average of 17 years, making the early acquisition of younger customers a powerful strategy for securing lifelong loyalty. However, without products tailored to younger users, families were left managing cash allowances, a solution that failed to keep up with the shift toward online banking and digital payments.

Greenlight’s founders recognized the gap for what it was: an opportunity to modernize how families handled money while addressing a deeper issue—the lack of financial literacy in most households.

• 83% of parents believed teaching kids about money was their responsibility, but only 16% had regular conversations about finances.

• Meanwhile, 73% of teens wanted to learn about personal finance but lacked access to tools designed for them.

Greenlight’s solution was simple but powerful: a debit card for kids, managed by parents. But it wasn’t just a card—it was a full financial ecosystem designed to make “money talk” hands-on and fun.

Overcoming Early Hurdles

Parents were naturally hesitant to give kids access to financial tools. To address these concerns, Greenlight focused on features that gave parents full control while making the platform fun and engaging for the kids.

• Parental Oversight: Parents could approve or block transactions in real-time, set store-specific spending limits, and automate allowances.

• Kid-Friendly Autonomy: Kids received their own debit card, teaching them responsibility and encouraging financial decision-making within boundaries.

• Gamified Learning: Features like savings goals, chore-based earnings, and real-time tracking made financial literacy engaging for kids.

  

In 2017, Greenlight raised $7.5 million in seed funding, led by TTV Capital. This funding allowed the company to scale, refine its platform, and capitalize on the growing demand for financial education tools. Greenlight didn’t just meet the demand—it created it.

Right place, right time

With the rise of digital payments and a noticeable decline in cash usage, especially during and post the pandemic, there’s been a growing interest in kids’ cards. Between 2020 and 2021, Google searches for “kids debit card” surged 227%, driven by the rise of digital payments and a growing interest in financial literacy.

Greenlight positioned itself at the forefront of this trend, branding itself not just as a tool, but as a family-oriented platform that helped parents bond with their kids over money.

Subscribe now

The model: Subscription, Not Spending 🔔

Most fintech companies rely on interchange fees—a percentage of every transaction—as their primary revenue source. But Greenlight took a different approach by adopting a subscription-based model. Families pay a recurring monthly fee for access to Greenlight’s features, which unlocked key advantages:

• Aligned Incentives: Unlike interchange-driven models, Greenlight didn’t need to encourage kids to spend to generate revenue. Instead, its subscription model allowed the company to focus on teaching good financial habits, aligning its goals with those of parents.

• Predictable Revenue: Recurring subscriptions provided a steady revenue stream, enabling Greenlight to reinvest in features like savings, investing, and parental controls.

• Building Trust: The subscription model positioned Greenlight as a financial education partner rather than a fintech product benefiting from spending, making it easier to win parents’ trust.

By eliminating reliance on transaction volume, Greenlight was free to double down on its core mission of financial literacy.

On the other side of the world, the India-based app FamPay relied on interchange fees—earning from transactions. Low teen spending volumes amongst teens, especially in geographies like India meant not enough transactions happened to sustain the business. Worse, UPI is free, so there was no reason for teens to use a prepaid card. Without strong monetization, FamPay and its competitors couldn’t scale profitably.

Educational Marketing: Driving Acquisition & Activation 📲

Greenlight had to tackle a core challenge faced by fintech startups: trust. Digital financial services, especially for kids, were still a new and unfamiliar concept for many parents. To overcome this, it focused on an educational marketing strategy that targeted parents through content, and social proof, positioning itself as a thought leader in financial literacy.

Features like savings trackers, goal-setting, and investing explained financial concepts in simple, digestible ways for kids, creating stickiness in the app.

The $7 Million Super Bowl Ad

In 2022, Greenlight made waves by investing $7 million in a 30-second Super Bowl ad starring Modern Family actor Ty Burrell. The ad humorously portrayed Burrell making reckless financial decisions, emphasizing the need for financial literacy.

This move wasn’t just about visibility—it was about credibility. With 113 million viewers tuning in, the campaign introduced Greenlight to millions of families, making it a household name in the kid-focused fintech space.

Competitors like Step, which partnered with TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, also leveraged celebrity endorsements, but Greenlight differentiated itself by focusing on parents as decision-makers through humour and reliability.

Beyond the Card: Growing Through Saving, Investing, and Gamification 💰

Greenlight didn’t stop at giving kids a debit card—it built an ecosystem to create engagement loops, double down on retention and worth—of-mouth, and extend lifetime value (LTV).

Savings & Investing as a Growth Engine

Launched in 2021, the feature allowed kids to:

• Invest in Stocks and ETFs: Greenlight made complex financial concepts simple, approachable, and exciting by helping kids invest in brands they loved (think Disney, Netflix, or Tesla) with parental approval. Families stayed longer to see their investments progress.

  👍 P.S. Stories of kids investing their first $10 in Tesla or reaching savings milestones were a hit on parenting forums and social media. :)

• Stock Investing for Teens: Teens invested in fractional shares of companies like Apple or Tesla, learning wealth-building while collaborating with parents.

• Learn Through Action: The platform included simple explanations of key investing concepts like risk, diversification, and returns, empowering kids to understand the why behind their investment choices.

• Parent-Child Collaboration: Parents retained control over investments, approving trades and guiding their kids’ financial decisions.

Engagement Through Gamification

Greenlight understood that to make financial literacy stick, it had to be fun. Once families joined, the tool kept them engaged through interactive features that turned money management into a game:

• Savings Goals: Kids could set personal goals (e.g., saving for a bike), while parents “boosted” milestones.

• Chore Management: Parents assigned chores and automated allowances, turning money management into a family activity.

Referrals for a Dual-Loop for Growth 🔂

At the heart of Greenlight’s growth was its ability to engage two distinct but interconnected user groups: parents and kids. This dual-engagement strategy created a cost-efficient customer referral loop:

• Kids as Advocates: Kids loved having their “own” debit cards, which gave them a sense of independence and responsibility. This naturally led to peer-to-peer virality, with kids sharing their Greenlight experience with friends and classmates.

• Parents as Advocates: Parents, proud of teaching their children money management and incentivized through rewards, shared Greenlight with friends, relatives, and other families—both in person and on social media. Parenting communities, which thrive on sharing advice, became a natural channel for referrals.

Referred families tended to be more loyal, reducing churn and ensuring high engagement.

Retention Through Lifecycle Engagement 👨‍👩‍👧

One of Greenlight’s smartest moves was creating a product that evolved with families. Instead of being a one-off app for kids, Greenlight became a financial ecosystem that addressed different needs as children grew:

• Younger Kids: Features like savings goals, chore-based allowances, and budgeting tools hooked younger children and their parents.

• Teens: As kids grew older, Greenlight introduced them to investing, stock trading, and more advanced financial concepts, ensuring the product remained relevant.

• Parents: With the Family Cash Card and household-wide tools, Greenlight positioned itself as a platform for the entire family, not just the kids.

By aligning features with different stages of a family’s financial journey, Greenlight extended its stickiness and reduced churn. Families didn’t outgrow the platform—instead, they deepened their engagement over time.

Partnerships with Financial Institutions 🤝

Greenlight’s ability to solve a common-sense problem—teaching kids about digital banking—didn’t just appeal to families. It also created opportunities for financial institutions to engage younger audiences. Starting in 2023, Greenlight began striking partnerships with banks and credit unions, giving them a turnkey way to offer financial literacy tools to families.

This strategy provided mutual benefits:

• For Banks: Greenlight helped banks acquire younger customers and build loyalty with families—a demographic that traditional financial institutions struggled to reach.

• For Greenlight: Embedded partnerships allowed Greenlight to generate more revenue streams without relying solely on the direct-to-consumer acquisition, significantly broadening its reach.

Its partnership with the U.S. Bank marked a turning point. U.S. Bank became the first to embed Greenlight’s tools—like kids’ debit accounts and parental controls—directly into its mobile banking app. This embedded model allowed Greenlight to scale its impact while providing banks with a turnkey solution for engaging younger customers.

Today, Greenlight is working with about 50 financial institutions, including major players like JPMorgan Chase, United Community Bank, and PSECU.

Why Teen Banking Thrives in the U.S. but Faces Challenges in Developing Economies like India 💭

On paper, teen banking apps seem like a universal win. Yet, while apps like Greenlight, and Step scaled rapidly in the U.S., similar apps struggle to sustain themselves in India. The difference comes down to cultural attitudes, financial infrastructure, and business viability.

Banking for Minors: A Different Reality in India

Both the U.S. and India allow minors to have bank accounts with parental oversight. But while American teens actively manage joint accounts and custodial savings, Indian minor accounts are mostly parent-controlled savings vehicles rather than everyday spending tools.

Even though 75% of Indian families discuss finances together, financial independence comes much later. In India, money is still a family-managed resource, not an individual one. Instead of giving kids independent spending power, parents handle purchases directly - tuition, shopping, and entertainment. Teen spending behaviour in India simply isn’t high enough, making the idea of a standalone teen banking product less compelling.

UPI Killed the Need for Teen Debit Cards in India

The biggest structural difference between these markets is how people pay.

• U.S., UK: A card-based economy, where teens need debit cards to shop online or pay in stores. Greenlight’s core offering- a debit card with parental controls and financial literacy tools—fit naturally.

• India: The rise of UPI made teen debit cards irrelevant. Parents don’t need a separate financial product for their kids—they just transfer money via UPI. Instant, free, and universally accepted, UPI replaced both cash and card-based transactions, leaving FamPay, Junio and more struggling for relevance.

Greenlight didn’t just build a product—it fit into existing behaviours while its Indian counterparts tried to change them. UPI and family-managed bank accounts continue to dominate how Indian teens handle money.

The Bigger Picture 🛣️

Greenlight’s story isn’t just about its sleek app or colourful debit cards. It’s about how the company has mastered trust, retention, and scalable growth in the competitive fintech space, all while establishing itself as a lifelong financial partner for families.

As this fintech ecosystem becomes more competitive, with players like Step and Revolut Junior expanding their offerings, Greenlight is not standing still. The company is deepening its engagement and lifecycle relevance with features that align with the evolving needs of families.

Subscribe now

From helping kids learn the basics of saving and budgeting to guiding teens into investing, Greenlight is now expanding its ecosystem to meet the needs of older teens and young adults with:

• Credit-Building Tools: Providing secured credit cards or credit-building features to help teens establish responsible credit habits under parental guidance.

• College Savings Solutions: Introducing tools that simplify planning and saving for higher education, addressing a key concern for families with teens.

• Advanced Financial Planning: Expanding into budgeting and wealth-building tools tailored for young adults as they step into financial independence.

By building a comprehensive financial ecosystem (just as Apple cultivated an ecosystem that seamlessly connects devices and services), Greenlight ensures that families remain engaged and supported throughout their entire financial lifecycle. It positions itself not just as a product but as a trusted partner that grows alongside its users.

Thanks for reading! 😄

One Step Ahead is a publication by Plotline. With this series, we plan to give you a behind-the-scenes breakdown of the product and growth strategies that have propelled consumer apps to where they are today.

Determined to experience these challenges firsthand, Tushar and his roommate, Mathew Cherian, decided to live on ₹100 a day—the average daily income in India—for three weeks, later reducing it to ₹32, the official poverty line.

With limited funds, Tushar tracked every meal’s calories and nutritional content on an Excel sheet. But tracking Indian meals was far from simple- there was no reliable database for local dishes. This lack of information sparked an idea that would change everything.

Over time, they built an Excel sheet with their experiment data that quickly gained traction among friends and family with how precise the data was.

At the time, India had 60 million diabetics and over 150 million hypertensive people, and most of the problems stemmed from a lack of awareness of what people were eating and how much energy they burned daily. Realizing the untapped potential, Tushar and Mathew wanted to build a public tool to help people manage their diets, a move that would later become HealthifyMe’s foundation.

“As we built that website, people started loving it and wanted more. Our goal was to first create a nutrition tracker for India. Maybe if we could help people track their calorie count, we could help people improve.”

— Tushar Vashisht, Founder, HealthifyMe.

By 2012, the duo had built a basic website, locked in $0.2M in angel funding and set the stage for something much bigger.

A Tale of 2 Pivots

In the early years, HealthifyMe was focused on building a B2B health-tech platform for hospitals and medical institutions. The idea was to enable doctors to recommend personalized meal tracking for patients.

However, selling to hospitals meant long sales cycles, slow decision-making, and limited tech adoption. Indian doctors at the time were sceptical about calorie tracking, and the company could only secure partnerships with 8 hospitals.

Moving from a B2B to B2C Business

By late 2013, they faced a harsh truth: the B2B model was unsustainable.

The team decided to take the tracker to consumers directly (B2C) by building a mobile app that would allow users to track their food and fitness independently.

The response was overwhelming—within months, they crossed 50,000 downloads.

They further scaled the app by introducing the #Swasthbharat campaign, greenlighted by India’s then health minister, offering products and services of partner brands worth ₹1,000 to users who committed to health goals, boosting acquisition to 500,000 users.

Alongside B2C, HealthifyMe developed a B2B2C platform, enabling corporations to offer its services as part of workplace wellness programs. While the corporate model still generates less than 20% of revenue, it provides access to a broader user base and built long-term brand equity.

Building a Sustainable Business Model

Despite having a loyal user base, there was no revenue model in place yet, and the company ran out of funds. Employees were unpaid for 3 months, yet the team stayed committed, sure they had struck gold.

Looking at the broader health apps space, MyFitnessPal was a massive outcome for its founders when Under Armour bought it for $475M. But the app was later sold to a PE firm at a loss of $345M, showing how tough the space was even for a leader.

With funds dwindling and survival at stake, Tushar and his team had no choice but to shift from a “product-first” mindset to a “business-first” approach.

After dozens of revenue experiments, the team hit upon a winning formula: freemium subscriptions with expert coaching services.

• Free Tier: Basic food and exercise tracking.

• Paid Subscriptions: Personalized plans from certified nutritionists and fitness coaches.

Onboarding Certified Coaches on the lookout to grow their clientelle

Nutritionists, fitness trainers, and wellness coaches were initially hesitant to join HealthifyMe due to the nascent state of digital health coaching in India. However, HealthifyMe’s unique approach, transparent policies, and career growth opportunities attracted top coaching talent.

1. Access to a Growing Client Base: Coaches saw the potential for a steady stream of clients through HealthifyMe’s rapidly growing user base. Unlike freelance consulting, HealthifyMe guaranteed client engagement through its app.

2. Flexible Work Environment: The platform offered remote working, flexible schedules, and client management tools, making it easier for certified professionals to balance work and personal life.

The model clicked.

By 2016, they raised $6M in Series A funding from investors after achieving ₹20 lakh in monthly revenue. However, even with paying users, gross margins stalled at 26%, leaving profitability elusive.

“Who would fund a 26 per cent gross margin business, which is not very scalable, lacks a technology-led model, and was still service-oriented.”

— Tushar Vashisht, Founder, HealthifyMe, explaining why it was still hard to get wider backing and bigger commitment.

AI, AI, AI

Inspired by Iron Man’s JARVIS, the team dedicated a huge chunk of the fresh funding towards developing Ria, an AI-powered health assistant that launched in 2017- long before ChatGPT’s rise.

Trained on HealthifyMe’s 150 million tracked meals (20 billion+ macro/micronutrients) and 10 million message exchanges (1 billion+ word) between coaches and clients, Ria provided instant, accurate answers to user queries. It helped users set goals, track calories, and adjust diets in real-time.

This data-driven, personalized guidance was the company’s silver bullet. And it was available in 10+ languages. Ria-powered coaching became HealthifyMe’s defining product, creating an AI-driven moat competitors couldn’t replicate.

Impact of Ria:

• 80% Coach Bandwidth Freed Up: Ria took over routine tasks like FAQs, daily check-ins, and standard meal recommendations, allowing human coaches to focus on complex cases.

• 50% Subscription Allocation: By 2019, nearly half of HealthifyMe’s subscribers were choosing a “Ria-only” subscription, significantly reducing operating costs and boosting gross margins to over 70%.

HealthifyMe had graduated from a services to a product-first, services-second company, all while Ria improved the app’s net promoter score (NPS) from around 50 to above 70 in a year.

In 2023, HealthifyMe launched another AI-powered tool Snap, an AI-powered food recognition tool trained specifically on Indian dishes. Snap could accurately identify meals from puris to dosas through photos, logging not just calories but macros instantly. The tool also gives suggestions on how to make the meal more balanced, further enhancing the app’s appeal and functionality in it’s main geography- India.

Creating an Integrated Ecosystem

The team understood that to scale meaningfully, it couldn’t just be a nutrition tracker. The company expanded into a full health-tech ecosystem covering fitness, mental health, and chronic disease management.

Product Diversification

• HealthifyPro

  • Introduced hardware like CGMs (Continuous Glucose Monitors) and Smart Scales, offering real-time metabolic insights to expand Total Addressable Market (TAM), and boost revenue.

  • Added blood-test-based metabolic panels, enabling comprehensive health reports from over 80 diagnostic tests.

• Smart Plans & Meal Tracking: Tailored diet plans powered by user data and Ria’s intelligent coaching system. The personalized experience led to 15x engagement rates compared to industry standards.

• Mental Health Programs: Recognizing the mind-body connection, HealthifyMe expanded beyond fitness and nutrition by launching mental wellness services integrated directly into the app. This strategic move allowed the company to tap into a fast-growing wellness market often underserved by traditional fitness apps.

• Healthify Studio: During the COVID-19 pandemic, a live online workout platform was launched to replicate in-person fitness sessions (Cult.fit’s recorded sessions were launched during the same time). With interactive live classes and personalized fitness plans, Healthify Studio became one of the company’s most successful growth levers.

Pandemic-driven fitness consciousness led to subscription spikes and increased retention, helping HealthifyMe cross 35 million users globally.

As a part of the plan to create an ecosystem for consumers looking for healthy living, the company is also experimenting with healthy food, which includes staples, snacks, and supplements.

Subscribe now

Endorsements & Partnerships

HealthifyMe’s growth wasn’t just product-driven—it was partner-powered.

• Celebrity Campaigns: Brand ambassadors like Farah Akhtar, and Sara Ali Khan help boost visibility through outdoor, print and tv ads, and improve user acquisition.

• “Fitpicks” with Swiggy: Users can choose to order healthy meals from curated restaurants within Swiggy.

• Milkbasket: Grocery orders through Milkbasket made healthy eating more convenient.

• Fitternity: Provided access to 12,000+ gyms and fitness studios encouraged active lifestyles.

  

Looking Ahead: Healthifying a Billion People

After dominating the Indian Health-tech market and establishing a strong foothold in the South East Asia and, HealthifyMe is now setting its sights on high-value global markets. With a significant portion of its revenue still coming from India, the company identified an untapped opportunity in regions with higher disposable incomes and premium health-conscious consumers.

Backed by the latest $45M funding round in 2023, HealthifyMe is advancing its industry-leading AI capabilities while expanding into the US and Europe—the world’s most lucrative health and fitness markets. The team has already completed successful alpha tests in the US and is gearing up for a major launch in the coming months.

The company’s strength lies in its ability to adapt- customizing its services for different languages, food cultures, and fitness habits. This cultural sensitivity will enable HealthifyMe to become a truly global player in the health-tech space.

“After delivering outcomes at scale in India with our unique blend of AI and human coaching, we’re thrilled to bring this approach to the US, the world’s largest health and fitness market.”

— Tushar Vashisht, Founder, HealthifyMe.

The goal remains to “healthify a billion people”. And to be profitable doing it - HealthifyMe is on track to become EBITDA-positive by the end of FY25.

Thanks for reading! 😄

One Step Ahead is a publication by Plotline. With this series, we plan to give you a behind-the-scenes breakdown of the product and growth strategies that have propelled consumer apps to where they are today.

Enter Getaround, a company that didn’t just disrupt the rental industry- it reimagined how we think about cars altogether. But this wasn’t just about filling a market gap.

Solving for trust, navigating insurance complexities, and creating the tech infrastructure to make car-sharing effortless were all part of rewriting the rules of car-sharing.

Let’s dive into how Getaround became a trailblazer in shared mobility.

🧩 From Gap to Growth

With most cars sitting idle 95% of the time—30 billion hours wasted daily—Getaround saw an opportunity to turn these idle vehicles into income generators.

Instead of building and managing an expensive fleet, Getaround introduced a peer-to-peer model, enabling private car owners to rent out their vehicles. The result? A scalable, hyperlocal, and cost-effective service that addresses the shortcomings of traditional rentals.

• For car owners: Extra income from idle vehicles

• For renters: Access to cars for anything from quick errands to luxury trials

Users can filter their searches by vehicle type, size, transmission type, and special features (e.g., pet-friendly or equipped with bike racks) to find the perfect match for their needs.

Sustainability at the Core

From the start, Getaround positioned itself as more than a tech company—its “access over ownership” philosophy became a driving force for change in urban mobility. This approach aligns with broader efforts to reduce carbon footprints and ease urban congestion. Here’s how:

• Maximizing vehicle utilization: By optimizing the use of existing cars, Getaround reduces the need for new ones, cutting down on manufacturing emissions (Studies show that shared mobility can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 40%).

• Reducing urban congestion: Shared cars mean fewer vehicles clogging city streets.

• Green mobility: Getaround is expanding its electric vehicle (EV) fleet, positioning itself as a leader in sustainable transportation.

Zeroing in on Urban Markets

It strategically focused on urban markets, where the demand for cars is high, but the challenges of ownership—such as purchasing, maintenance, and insurance—make it a hassle.

By offering a flexible, on-demand alternative, Getaround became an attractive option for city dwellers seeking to access vehicles for quick errands, weekend getaways, or even luxury experiences without the long-term financial commitment and the environmental footprint of unnecessary car ownership.

This model not only made car-sharing more affordable, but it also allowed users to save an average of $1,800 per year compared to owning a car.

👥 Winning Early Adopters

Getaround’s breakthrough moment came in 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it won the Startup Battlefield competition. This early visibility didn’t just attract press—it sparked interest from early adopters who appreciated:

• Lower costs compared to traditional car rentals

• Access to unique vehicles (Rent a Tesla for an hour, anyone?)

• A sense of contributing to a more sustainable economy

This grassroots appeal quickly caught the eye of investors, helping Getaround raise a $10M Series A by 2012 and expand into new cities like Portland, Chicago, and Austin. The funds also fueled their referral program- when a referred friend lists their first car, the referrer earns a $200 bonus. Additionally, the referrer receives 25% of the referred host's earnings for the first 60 days after listing a vehicle.

This program sparked viral growth, accelerating the platform’s scale and attracting even more users who saw the value in a more efficient, flexible, and eco-friendly alternative to car ownership.

Subscribe now

📜 Building a Regulatory Moat

Traditional insurance models weren’t designed for peer-to-peer car sharing, and disrupting this industry required overcoming significant regulatory hurdles. To address the liability concerns, Getaround's co-founder, Jessica Scorpio, led an initiative to pass legislation clarifying insurance requirements for car-sharing services.

This effort resulted in California's AB 1871 law, which defined how insurance should be structured for peer-to-peer car-sharing platforms. It mandated that car-sharing companies maintain specific levels of coverage during rentals, creating a safer environment for both car owners and renters.

This legislation also gave Getaround the credibility to secure partnerships with major insurers like Berkshire Hathaway, further legitimizing the platform and ensuring coverage for both parties.

More recently, Getaround has continued to innovate by integrating technology into its insurance model. Collaborations with companies like Axle now allow renters to use their car insurance while renting vehicles through Getaround, offering greater flexibility and potentially reducing costs by up to 15%.

👩‍💻 Tech That Builds Trust

Earlier car-sharing platforms faltered because they didn’t address the core frictions: trust and convenience.

A. Getaround Connect tackled this by allowing renters to unlock cars directly via their phones—eliminating the awkwardness of key exchanges or delays.

B. In partnership with TransUnion, Getaround developed TrustScore AI, which uses AI to analyze user behaviour, assess risk, and enhance pricing accuracy. By matching renters with trustworthy owners, it has reduced claims costs by up to 50%, making the business model more sustainable.

Getaround also integrates several additional features to build trust:

• Verified profiles to ensure reliability for the renters as well as the owners.

• Real-time damage checks before and after trips to provide transparency and protect both parties.

• Automated dispute resolution tools to streamline conflict resolution, reducing the need for lengthy interactions.

  Enjoying reading this? Share it with someone who would too! :)

  Share

🤝 Partnerships to Scale

Strategic collaborations have played a crucial role in Getaround's rapid expansion and increased credibility- helped solidify Getaround's position in both the gig economy and the broader car-sharing market, making their platform more accessible and appealing to users.

A. Uber: Democratizing the Gig Economy

First launched in SF in May 2017, Getaround’s rideshare-ready rentals provide Uber drivers with an affordable, convenient option to access “ride-share” ready cars on-demand that can be used for driving with Uber at just $5/hour.

Seamlessly integrating car-sharing with the ride-hailing ecosystem, Getaround not only provided a cost-effective solution but also addressed the growing demand for flexible mobility options.

We’ve seen rapid and consistent car-sharing adoption in each of these cities — that, in conjunction with Uber’s successes in those markets, and we knew these would be great expansion markets as we continue iterating and planning for future growth. - Greg Shay, Director of business development, Getaround

B. Toyota: A Technological Leap

Initiated in 2016, Getaround’s partnership with Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, began with its participation in Getaround’s $45 million Series C funding round. The collaboration aimed to combine their technological strengths to deliver a seamless and innovative car-sharing experience, benefiting both renters and car owners.

• It combined Getaround’s connected car technology with Toyota's Mobility Service Platform and Bluetooth-enabled Smart Key Box, allowing renters to locate, access, and drive vehicles without a physical key.

• New Toyota leaseholders could offset their monthly payments through rental income on Getaround, making ownership financially viable and encouraging participation in the car-sharing ecosystem.

Beyond technology, the partnership was rooted in a shared vision to promote sustainable urban living by tackling vehicle underutilization, traffic congestion, and CO2 emissions through expanded car-sharing in dense urban areas.

This collaboration also reflects a broader industry shift: as car ownership declines among younger generations, automakers are pivoting to mobility services to engage with consumers.

Subscribe now

🛣️ The Road Ahead

In 2019, Getaround acquired Drivy, Europe’s leading car-sharing platform, significantly expanding its global footprint. By 2023, acquisitions like HyreCar’s assets enhanced its position in the gig economy, enabling operations in over 1,000 cities across eight countries, including the U.S., France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Norway, and the UK.

That same year, Getaround went public, trading under GETR on the NYSE—solidifying its position as an industry leader and showcasing the scalability of the peer-to-peer model.

With the rise of electric vehicles (EVs) and a growing global focus on sustainable transportation, Getaround is well-positioned to capitalize on the shift toward greener mobility. The company’s expanding fleet of EVs, along with its efforts to integrate more smart technology into its platform, positions Getaround for success in the future of car-sharing within an eco-conscious world.

The future of mobility is not only connected—it’s shared.

Thanks for reading! 😄

One Step Ahead is a publication by Plotline. With this series, we plan to give you a behind-the-scenes breakdown of the product and growth strategies that have propelled consumer apps to where they are today.

Founded in 2015 by 3 brothers, accepted into YC in 2016, and sold for $1B+ in 2021- their growth has been nothing short of meteoric. Let’s dig in.

Subscribe now

🎯 The Genesis

The Mokhtarzada brothers had been starting “companies” together ever since they were kids. Lemonade stands, lawn mowing services, snow shoveling.

And then came Truebill.

I looked at my credit card statement one day and saw a charge of $40 for in-flight wi-fi. I thought, “That's odd. I didn't fly this month.” I started digging in and realized I had paid $40 a month for 14 months before I caught it. My brother had the same experience with home security. So we set out to solve a pain point. - Yahya Mokhtarzada, CRO

Truebill started with a fundamental recognition - managing money is hard, and most people need help doing it effectively.

Especially when it comes to recurring but unwanted subscriptions.

To start using the app, a user connects their bank account. Then, Truebill analyses transactions and categorises them. A user can swipe through potential subscriptions to cancel upcoming bill charges as well as cancel auto spending month over month. The application additionally pulls out spending trends and helps users create a budget.

💡 Differentiating in the crowded fintech space

At the time, Crunchbase had over 1000 startups listed under the personal finance space, but very few were focused particularly on subscription savings.

The biggest competitor was Mint (acquired by Intuit in 2009), a budgeting app. While not specifically built for subscription management, it could categorize your expenses, and you could find unwanted expenses yourself.

However, several Mint users would complain about faulty categorization. For a budgeting app that helps you understand your spending breakdown, this is pretty damning.

Rocket Money differentiated itself through several key product decisions:

PMF was extremely strong. One user reported saving:

• $660 annually on DirectTV

• $120 annually on SiriusXM

• $840 annually on car insurance

They gradually added features like Automated budgeting, Smart savings, Credit monitoring, Bill negotiation, and Net worth tracking.

Subscribe now

🧪 Offline Marketing Mix

From the outset, the team recognized that traditional marketing channels could complement their digital acquisition efforts, but only if executed strategically. They didn't just throw money at billboards and TV - they brought the same data-driven rigour that defined their product development.

The team prioritized optimizing and scaling core channels before exploring new ones, strongly believing that there is always untapped potential for scale in existing channels.

1️⃣ The Scientific Method of Channel Testing

Rather than following industry "best practices," they started fresh with each channel, focusing on ease of scalability, measurement ease, and minimum required spends for quality learning.

You can’t just throw a bunch of money at a channel and hope for the best. You need to test, measure, and learn. - Ty Conner, Senior Director of Growth Marketing Offline at Rocket Money

Their philosophy was simple but powerful - even a marketing test that lost money or had a 0% ROAS was successful if it provided clear, actionable data and learnings.

2️⃣ The Out-of-Home Innovation

Instead of splashing their logo on Times Square, they zeroed in on "high dwell-time" locations - places where people had time to think about their finances:

• Subway station platforms over fleeting highway billboards

• Coffee shop partnerships in financial districts

But the real innovation was in measurement. They developed a system of 20+ geographic holdout tests and surveys that could isolate the impact of OOH advertising with precision.

What started as cautious experimentation evolved into a sophisticated multi-channel strategy. Each channel reinforced the others:

• Streaming and linear TV ads built brand awareness

• OOH placements served as consistent reminders

• Digital retargeting closed the loop

This methodical approach to marketing helped them stand out in an increasingly crowded fintech landscape to the top of the app store charts and contributed to their eventual acquisition by Rocket Companies.

💰 Monetization with a User-First Philosophy

Rocket Money’s monetization strategy breaks away from traditional revenue-maximizing tactics, opting instead for a user-first philosophy that prioritizes trust, empowerment, and tangible value, helping them acquire and retain users.

1️⃣ Pay-As-You-Wish Premium: Freedom to Choose

The premium model is unconventional—users decide how much they want to pay (between $6 and $12) for advanced features. This approach is rooted in behavioural economics and psychology.

• Empowers choice: Users feel in control, reducing resistance to upgrades.

• Builds trust: Reciprocity encourages users to pay fairly when they see value.

• Pricing insights: User data helps optimize pricing while retaining goodwill

2️⃣ Bill Negotiation Service: Pay Only for Value

Rocket Money’s success-based model ensures users only pay a percentage of the savings it negotiates on their behalf.

• Risk-free value: Users pay nothing upfront, making it an easy decision to try the service.

• Immediate benefits: Savings on recurring expenses like internet or phone bills showcase the app's tangible impact.

• Stronger engagement: Real financial wins encourage users to stay engaged with the app for continued savings.

By giving users control and ensuring they pay only for real benefits, the platform aligns its revenue model with the needs and success of its users, creating a win-win dynamic that fosters loyalty and growth.

Subscribe now

🚀 Acquisition by Rocket Companies: Enter Rocket Money

In late 2021, Rocket Companies announced the acquisition of Truebill for $1.275B.

What was the strategic rationale behind the acquisition?

1. Diversification of revenue

   1. Adds consistent monthly recurring revenue to complement Rocket’s transaction-based mortgage business

   2. Helps reduce Rocket's dependence on cyclical mortgage revenue

2. Armed to compete in the Fintech SuperApp wars

   1. Part of Rocket's vision to create a centralized destination for consumers' entire financial lives

   2. Aids transformation from a digital lender to a comprehensive fintech platform

As part of the transition, Truebill rebranded to Rocket Money. This was in line with how the company had evolved over the last few years. From managing subscription bills to becoming a full-stack financial management platform.

🔮 Future Outlook

Rocket Money continues to innovate with:

• Integration of AI tools for enhanced customer experience

• Focus on homeownership-related financial services

• Strategic evaluation of M&A opportunities to accelerate growth

Under the leadership of CEO Varun Krishna (former executive at Intuit and PayPal), the company maintains its focus on becoming the comprehensive platform for all money management needs

Today, Rocket Money has helped over 5 million members save more than 1 billion dollars through smart money management features.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading! 😄

One Step Ahead is a publication by Plotline. With this series, we plan to give you a behind-the-scenes breakdown of the product and growth strategies that have propelled consumer apps to where they are today.

At the time of their $58M Series B in 2021, Titan was close to managing $1B in assets across their members, and was valued at a staggering ~$450M.💰

A behemoth in asset management today, Titan started off with extremely humble beginnings.

Subscribe now

Entering the market with “Flagship” ⛳️

Titan rode two undercurrents to enter the market:

1. A nearly wholesale shift away from “defined benefit” plans like pensions towards diversified, personalized investment strategies

2. Rise of next-gen financially-savvy consumers, who are drawn to mobile-first, open-access investment platforms

Before Titan, access to direct portfolio managers would require a $1M minimum in assets.

And so the team launched “Flagship”, an actively managed equity strategy of large cap US stocks, built and managed by Titan’s in-house investment team. The goal with this strategy was to beat the market benchmark over a long-term time horizon.

“While technology has penetrated several sectors of consumer finance, a trusted investment management platform for coming generations has yet to emerge,” - Joe Percoco, founder and co-CEO of Titan.

Differentiating in a crowded space with managed investments and zero fees 💰

Titan didn’t stop with equities. They planned on democratizing access to a whole slew of asset classes not typically available to retail investors.

Products like hedge funds and venture capital have high minimums and high fees that make them inaccessible to most investors. Additionally, most retail investors lack the know-how to choose the right investments.

Titan innovated on two fronts to solve a real need felt by a large proportion of investors:

1. It makes a number of alternative asset classes like real estate, private credit, venture capital, etc available to retail investors at an affordable price.

2. It bridges the knowledge gap with its research team working behind the scenes to help deliver market insights through in-app videos, deep dives, and other tools.

Subscribe now

Strategy and tactics behind a Titan-ic valuation of $450M 📈

Titan has grown to over 50k high LTV users on the back of great product innovations, quality content and free tools for top-of-funnel acquisition.

Smart Cash: Moves your money automatically

Titan has grown on a near-zero marketing budget due to its continuous innovation on delivering products that solve real pain points.

“Smart Cash” was born from Clayton’s personal pain of fighting inflation. It helps an investors cash earn the most it can instead of sitting in a savings account earning next to nothing.

It scans rates across cash equivalents, factors in the user’s individual tax details and calculates the anticipated highest yield not only before, but after, taxes. When a better option is found, Smart Cash automatically moves the user’s money.

Bringing truth to a fragmented content landscape

In Titan’s early days, they found that media (news outlets, financial media, Bloomberg, CBC) was underused in the active investments segment. If a user managed to find content on a topic, different resources pointed in different directions and there was no clear source of truth.

Noticing this whitespace, Titan jumped into the content landscape to bring together fragmented topics, with a goal of educating the user and building trust in the brand.

They routinely put out in-app videos 📺, email newsletters, explanatory articles, and image carousels. This content was heavily forwarded by their users to other prospective users.

Hackathon idea “Ask Titan Anything” takes off

Great ideas can come from anywhere. Especially hackathons.

Titan’s “Ask Me Anything” gives real-time Q&A and research commentary about positions in the market and investment decisions. Investors submit questions to the team’s analysts, and the Q&A is publicly distributed. A user can ask questions like:

• “What's driving the rise in coal-related stocks?”

• “Atlassian (TEAM) was at record highs a little over 2 years ago but is down 40% since then. It seems like a promising stock, what is your outlook?”

• “Any thoughts on Google after its most recent earnings?”

Titan stands out by allowing direct access to investment analysts, providing insights on specific stocks, and openly sharing research on topics like semiconductor disruptions, crypto fluctuations, growth stock valuations, and big tech earnings.

Free tools for top-of-funnel acquisition

The team has built tools like “free wealth and investment calculators” to attract top-of-funnel users. These tools attract users who have the intent to solve problems that Titan can help with.

By educating users 📚 about possible returns on their investments using an actively managed portfolio, these tools build motivation in users which nudges them to explore Titan’s offerings and possible returns.

Subscribe now

Next up, become the complete wealth membership experience ➡️

While Titan started by providing investment opportunities to retail investors, they were only solving a small piece of the bigger puzzle. Outside of Titan, a user’s wealth was fragmented across multiple apps 🙁 with no guidance or unified philosophy on how to grow it well.

With their latest launch, Titan now offers a diversified set of active and passive investments across asset classes, on-demand advice from an experienced wealth team, and a brand new ecosystem of what they call “Access”.

“Access” is a personal concierge that gets the user into coveted hotspots in dining, nightlife, fitness, and more.

Sold-out concert? Not a problem. Titan can get you in. These are experiences people rave about.

Early-to-mid career professionals are set to inherit trillions of dollars 💰 in assets in the coming decade, and Titan is set up perfectly as the go-to investment management platform to capture on this shift.

Thanks for reading! 😄

One Step Ahead is a publication by Plotline. With this series, we plan to give you a behind-the-scenes breakdown of the product and growth strategies that have propelled consumer apps to where they are today.

Their big hit came when they covered All The Single Ladies by Beyonce. It gained millions of views, got them media interviews, and continued success led them to tour frequently. But as many in the music industry know, viewership and following doesn't always translate to stable income 😞.

Their income started dwindling when streaming services like Spotify came along. Jack’s frustration with the economics of the music business drove him to think about a way for artists to make art sustainably without having to rely on advertisements, record studios, labels and the like supporting them.

Meanwhile, Jack’s eventual partner-in-crime 🕵️‍♀️, Sam Yam, had spent his post-college years working in startups, notably working beside YC’s Sam Altman at Loopt - a location-based social networking mobile application.

When Jack reached out to Sam in March 2013, with an idea to help artists monetise their art, the duo got cracking and 3 months later, launched Patreon. Today, Patreon is valued at ~$4 Billion and supports 200,000+ musicians, artists, and content creators.

So, what is Patreon exactly?

The platform is a modern take on the age-old concept of patronage. Historically, artists such as musicians and painters relied on wealthy donors' patronage to finance their work.

Patreon takes that concept and enables a larger audience to finance creators they follow at affordable monthly rates.

Creators can establish membership tiers - the number of tiers and the subscription rate at each tier is left up to the creator. Casual fans can pay a low rate – even $1 per month – while dedicated followers can subscribe upwards of even $20 per month. Higher tiers grant access to exclusive content not available at the lower levels.

Subscribe now

For creators, Patreon helps manage their projects. Simple page design tools let the creator add artwork to a public-facing page to attract patrons. It provides tracking tools for delivering rewards for each membership level, chat and email tools for communicating with patrons, etc. Creators can also set up surveys for patrons to assess their satisfaction and track income to the project.

Patreon’s product strategy 🧬

In its early years, Patreon acted as a social marketplace connecting creators and patrons. Creator profiles featured content and asked patrons to become paying members.

However, Patreon faced challenges in trying to take advantage of the platform’s cross-side network effects. Early versions recommended new creators to patrons based on creators they already supported. This was considered highly damaging by creators on the platform — as Patreon was introducing its fans to potential competitors.

The team came to the realization that competing on discoverability would not be how Patreon would win. Platforms like YouTube 📺 do a much better job when it came to creators getting discovered.

Patreon accordingly shifted its product strategy to essentially become a CRM for its creators, no longer acting as a marketplace connecting fans and creators but as a SaaS platform with a suite of tools 🛠 for creators.

They take care of everything from minimizing declines on a credit card, to automated email flows to patrons, to CMS systems where you can gate particular types of content for specific tiers of patrons — $10 patrons, $50 patrons, etc. — to understanding the analytics of your patron base.

Subscribe now

Patreon’s viral growth model 🔁

How did Patreon manage to become the behemoth it is today?

Creators follow other creators. This was the basis of Patreon’s Growth loop. Here’s how it works:

A creator announces their Patreon page via social, YouTube, etc, and a portion of their audience who are also creators find out about Patreon, going on to sign up themselves.

Patreon also sees extremely high retention once a creator’s income crosses ~$500 per month because:

1. This amount represents a significant and stable income source for creators who previously had to rely on unstable ad revenue

2. It is extremely hard to move hundreds of credit cards from one spot to another with consumers. Without access to payment data, switching costs are high for creators once they have built their paying fan base on Patreon

Aligning pricing with product strategy 🤑

It charges creators between a 5-12% platform fee on what the creator earns through Patreon.

This aligns Patreon’s incentives directly with their customers (the creators). The more revenue creators generate from fans, the more financially independent they become, and the more Patreon receives as commission.

This also means that Patreon doesn’t need to prioritise solving for the long-tail of creators who are just starting out without fan bases - they would contribute to minimal revenue. As we saw earlier, these creators need fans to discover their work, which doesn't align with Patreon’s current product strategy.

Subscribe now

Acquisitions-a-plenty 🤝

Patreon has made strategic acquisitions with two goals in mind:

1. Doubling down on its offerings to creators; and

2. Moving upmarket to capture bigger and more established creators

Acquiring Kit - Enabling creators to send merchandise

Designing and shipping merch 📦 packages for patrons has been a common pain for creators for the longest time. For example, an illustrator will design a cool new t-shirt 👕 and automatically send it as a perk for patrons in their top benefit tier.

Acquiring Kit, a startup building a merchandise logistics backend so creators don’t have to fiddle with spreadsheets and stuff envelopes themselves, went a long way in addressing these concerns.

Patreon now allows creators to design merch products. They take care of everything from production to global shipping and customer support, freeing up time for those creators to instead spend on content creation.

Acquiring Memberful - Moving upmarket to the most successful creators

Memberful is a service for independent creators who prefer to have complete control 👩‍💻 over their membership program. It is the white-label, do-it-yourself alternative to the core Patreon platform.

Most notably, Memberful creators retain full control of their brand and maintain a direct connection with their audience. This is extremely important for larger, very-well known creators who don’t want to dilute their brand by sending fans to a page hosted on Patreon’s domain.

For Patreon, the acquisition helps them move up-market, recruiting creators having more established audiences on other platforms.

A masterclass in creating a moat - Membership across the web

With platforms like YouTube experimenting with ways for fans to directly pay creators, Patreon needs to ensure they go above and beyond.

They understood that creators need to interact with their fans across the web 🕸, such as on WordPress sites, Discord communities, etc. The patron business model requires an ability to track which fans are paying patrons and match patrons to benefit tiers - no matter the platform on which the patron interacts with the creator.

For example, the WordPress plugin enables gating content on your website and making it available to Patrons on specific membership tiers.

The API links a creator’s patron data to a whole roster of third-party platforms. Creators can also add a “Sign in with Patreon” login function to their own websites for patrons to access walled content or forums.

These integrations and the level of guidance Patreon provides to its creators are core differentiators in defending against YouTube and Facebook, as it enables creators to give patrons a special experience no matter where they interact with them online.

Next in line ➡️

After tripling its valuation to $4 billion 🤯 last year, Patreon’s goal in 2022 is to make the best membership platform for its creators, with tools for sharing exclusive content and connecting with their community.

Patreon is already working on a number of exciting things this year, including a host-video-on-Patreon itself (so exclusive video content can live on-platform), an improved posting experience with more formatting options, different ways of organizing content on a Patreon page, better analytics, a cleaner app design, simpler playback experiences for multimedia and more.

There are also talks of an IPO sometime in the near future. That will be quite something to watch out for 👀.

Life was also pretty good for the events industry, valued at $1.1T globally in 2019. Companies lined up every year to engage in speaking events, launch new products at conferences, and these events served as a hotbed for networking opportunities.

Enter 2020. With travel and movement restrictions worldwide, most event venues were forced to close. Rather than halting an industry entirely dependent on face-to-face interactions, organizations are now embracing virtual events.

According to research reports, the virtual events market is expected to be valued at over $400B by 2027 while growing at a CAGR of 23.2%.

This story is about the virtual events platform leading this transition, Airmeet, with a lofty goal of democratizing access to live events.

Build, Validate, Repeat 👷‍♂️

In August of 2019, the three co-founders Lalit Mangal, Manoj, and Vinay, worked together from different cities in India.

They had prior history with one another at their previous real-estate startup CommonFloor (also co-founded by Lalit in 2008), which ended up selling to Quickr for a neat $200M in an all-stock deal 😎.

Looking for the next big thing, the 3 intrinsically knew that remote was the future of work and got cracking to understand the remote working space.

First on the agenda was to get in touch with people in this field, but events, conferences and meet-ups in this space were hardly organised. They came to the broader realization that all niche topics would have difficulty finding a community. It is communities and events hosted around them that make niche ideas mainstream 🛫.

This led to exploring the “virtual events” space. The benefits of a virtual event were quite clear:

1. Flexible. Not restricted by physical capacity.

2. Cost-effective. For not just the organizers but also the attendees (savings on venue, travel, hotel, food, and other overheads). Virtual events typically cost less than 1/10th that of in-person events. By lowering the cost barrier 📉, Airmeet is making traditionally expensive events accessible to the upstarts.

3. Effortless Analytics: Quickly analyze metrics 🔎 like the interaction level of participants, which speaker garnered a larger audience, etc giving a better sense of the Return on the Event.

The next step was getting validation. In typical lean fashion, they created a low-fidelity mockup and showed it to some potential customers to get feedback.

Getting the green light 🟢, they built a very small 5-6 member team to start development on the prototype. Within a month, they hosted their first fireside chat. What really gave them confidence was when people came out on Twitter calling Airmeet “the future of conferences”. It was time to kick things into high gear.

Picking your Customer Segment 🧐

When the pandemic hit, Airmeet started seeing a lot of inbound across event types, organization sizes, etc. They couldn’t build everything for everyone. The key here was to focus on a specific customer segment and delight them

So how did Airmeet go about deciding who to prioritize? They chose to focus on what they internally call “Digitally native customers”. These are customers who are extremely excited about the virtual format, because of the possibility of hosting a global audience 🤩.

Identifying these customers was something as simple as the organisers saying, “We’re glad to see people join us from across the globe”, in stark contrast to those who say “I’m sorry we couldn’t meet in person” to their attendees.

How did this work out for them?

1. Their active customers host 2 events every month (for context, events aren’t typically hosted this frequently, 2/month is high)

2. 70% of repeat customers refer potential customers to Airmeet 🤯

Pick the right customer, and you can delight them and convert them into an advocate. - Lalit Mangal, Co-founder and CEO at Airmeet

Subscribe now

Social lounge: A 10X webinar experience 💯

Wait, hold up. This just sounds like people gathering on a video call. Can’t we just use Zoom for these virtual events? 🤔

Well, technically, you can. But there’s one major problem with video hosting platforms. Attendees on these platforms have minimal ways of interacting with each other. The networking aspect of in-person events is completely absent.

Airmeet solves this for community managers & event organizers and provides an experience 10X better than webinars. Airmeet’s “Social Lounge” feature delivers rich networking for an engaging and immersive experience.

The social lounge is where the audience interacts during breaks, before, and after the event. Instead of a bland “Waiting Room”, the Social Lounge helps you spend this time getting to know other attendees and build connections. It looks like a top-down view of a banquet hall. Attendees can choose a table to sit at and even move around tables.

In this way, it simulates interactions between participants and speakers in an offline conference.

Fuelled by an incredible product, Airmeet has grown ARR 24X to $5M in just over 12 months. Here are the key levers powering its GTM engine.

Demand-to-supply viral loop 🔁

Airmeet has an interesting viral loop which is now generating more than 25% of their new users. This loop is a classic case of demand (attendees to events) driving supply (event hosts). Here’s how it plays out.

A portion of attendees to these events who love the Airmeet experience and have the need to host their own events sign up on Airmeet, continuing the cycle.

This loop is amplified by Airmeet’s free tier. They’ve made it easy for anyone to get started and host an event. Hosts using the free tier effectively “pay” Airmeet by exposing new potential hosts to Airmeet’s platform.

Evangelising + adopting community-led growth 👨‍👩‍👦

It’s 2022. Everyone is running paid ads and average keyword costs are going through the roof. SEO is not a trade secret anymore. Gmail is becoming smarter and now does a pretty good job at classifying promotional mail. CAC is up across the board for both B2B and B2C companies by roughly 60% compared to five years ago 📈.

Companies are now looking at new avenues to drive the next phase of growth for their business.

Enter community-led growth. For anyone new to the term, here’s the 80/20: The process of finding, adopting, onboarding, and championing software doesn’t happen in a bubble between you and your user. We are constantly getting input from friends, colleagues, and strangers on the internet, and this holds true for buying software too.

Airmeet is in a unique space wherein its platform itself enables other companies to harness the power of a community. It follows quite naturally that they themselves have championed community-led growth and utilize it as a significant growth driver. Here’s how:

1. Product evangelism 😇. Most ardent supporters in their community drive testimonials, case studies and reviews on sites like G2.

2. Demand & Growth 📈. Crowdsource content marketing initiatives, i.e use their community for ideas on content and then distribute that content - ebooks, whitepapers - back to the community.

3. Education 📚. Hosting a series of experts to talk about topics related to community-building and event-hosting frameworks.

4. Customer support 📞. 24X7 support lounge hosted on Airmeet, extensive Knowledge Base documentation to answer queries without the involvement of customer success executives.

5. Product evolution 🧬. Looking to their community for feedback on new features, testing concept ideas, finding early adopters, getting recommendations on product integrations, etc.

6. Partnerships & Referrals 🤝. Community members becoming more active in promoting Airmeet, becoming referral and affiliate partners.

Mastering Monetization 🤑

Most SaaS companies even today have a “set it and forget it” strategy when it comes to monetization.

Airmeet has dug deep into understanding its users to set a monetization strategy that converts customers like clockwork 🕰. Apart from their freemium offering which enhances their viral loop as we covered earlier, here are two more ways they’ve gone beyond the norm:

Pay-per-use 💰

Airmeet finds itself in a space where a number of potential customers haven’t warmed up to the concept of virtual events yet. Also, by nature of being a virtual event platform, the frequency of usage will be low, as most companies don’t need to host events very frequently.

Subscriptions introduce high friction for users in this segment. They tackle this by offering a one-time event hosting option, apart from their regular subscription tiers.

Once they’ve hosted an event and seen Airmeet’s experience, they are likely to come back in the future whenever the need arises again. This offering plays a crucial role in accelerating the market’s awareness of the benefits of virtual event platforms.

Flexibility in seating capacity 👌

Event organizers are typically concerned about paying for the right number of attendee seats. Planning for seating capacity becomes anxiety-inducing. What happens if more people show up than you planned?

Organizers pick a plan with a specific seating capacity (100/500/etc per event) when choosing a subscription. But Airmeet enables flexibility in managing seating capacity afterwards, giving peace of mind to organizers. Yet another example of deeply understanding the needs of your users.

Next in line…➡️

The virtual events space is seeing phenomenal growth with thousands of organizers getting on board this shift in the events industry. To meet this demand, Airmeet raised their $35M Series B round at a $150M valuation in Feb’22.

They also appointed Mark Kilens as the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer, who brings with him a stellar record from companies like Drift, where he served as VP of Content and Community. Prior to Drift, he served as VP of Marketing at HubSpot where he founded HubSpot Academy, helping HubSpot surpass $600M in revenue 🤯.

They’ve set grand goals to hit $20M ARR in the next 12-18 months, and we’ll be following their story pretty closely. 🚀

Subscribe now

Goibibo: Catching the travel bug ✈️

After spending 18 months at Google as Country Head for India, Ashish decided to make a foray into the startup landscape.

Ashish founded Ibibo in 2007 as an incubator in Gurgaon with financial support from South African internet giant Naspers. Several ventures would emerge from it, including an online gaming platform and a payment solutions provider. We’re most interested however, in the online travel aggregator born out of this incubator in 2009 - Goibibo.com.

The online travel space was becoming massively competitive with the rise of MakeMyTrip, Yatra and a plethora of such travel aggregators, and at the time, Goibibo was just an 8-member team.

How do you differentiate in such a competitive space?

Ashish saw the opportunity provided by a specific vertical - hotels - and decided to solve for hotels exceptionally well, making it their prime focus.

Why focus on hotels, though?

1. Higher margins compared to airlines 🤑. High supplier fragmentation in the hotel industry gave any intermediary more bargaining power. Compare this to airlines, where the large airlines have obliterated the economics of online ticketing marketplaces.

2. Scope of gamification in hotel supplier base to build a moat. Again, due to high fragmentation, it becomes easier to onboard hotels and make them play by your rules. We'll shortly get to how Goibibo played this to their advantage while acquiring supply.

Goibibo also decided to pursue a different customer acquisition strategy.

"When you're the 50th person in the space, you can't compete on playbooks built by your competitors." - Ashish Kashyap.

While other players focused on heavy advertising, Ashish decided that his company would grow on the back of a solid product foundation.

Here's how they used the strength of social networks and gamification to drive millions of downloads:

Referral program + Wallet GoCash 💵. Nearly every B2C app implements a referral program, but only a handful manage to make it their top acquisition channel. Here's what worked for Goibibo:

• Reduce friction in sending invites. GoIbibo would sync with users' contact books to ensure the cognitive load to send out invites is almost zero.

• Ensure rewards drive further usage. Ashish understood well how "platform currency" works. On referring others, you were rewarded with GoCash, which could be spent on your next booking.

Strengthened network effects with GoContacts📱. Travel is generally a solo or a small group affair. The Goibibo team wanted to leverage the power of a social network. GoContacts managed to do this by syncing with your phone book. Whenever your friends travelled using Goibibo, you would get rewarded with GoCash that could be spent on your next travel. It was so successful that within ten days of launch, 3.4 mn users had come aboard the platform.

Gamification on the supplier side 🎮. Goibibo developed an application for hotel owners called Ingoibibo. It allowed owners to manage inventory, receive yield and pricing data, and see their performance compared to competitors. Providing hotel owners with real-time information about other hotels in their vicinity drove a positive paranoia amongst the hotels.

This led Goibibo to quickly become the most prominent mobile traveller app.

Then in October 2016, Goibibo merged with MakeMyTrip. The combined entity was worth $1.8B, with Goibibo valued at ~$720Mn. This was the biggest merger in India's online travel space.

Ashish left the combined entity almost a year later and, shortly after, founded INDmoney.

INDmoney: India's Super Money App 💰

Once more, feeling the need to scratch a personal itch, this time around an individual's financial life and management, Ashish started INDmoney in 2019. According to him, the problems faced by consumers regarding money management were:

1. Consumers who want to improve their financial life can't manage everything in one place. It was a very fragmented experience.

2. Consumers are lazy (tell me about it 😭)

3. The traditional finance ecosystem is non-transparent

   

He set out to give users a 360degree view of their assets and liabilities. This was different from other PFM apps at the time that focused solely on the user's cashflows. Ashish's choice was built on one fundamental insight - people are keener to see their net worth rather than cashflows.

Adding an intelligent AI layer that helped people plan their goals or make decisions - buying a home, retiring early, paying off a car loan early - would be the cherry on the cake 🎂.

Today INDmoney boasts >5M+ users and $2B of GMV on the platform in the last year. How did they get here?

Using US stocks as a hook 🪝to drive adoption

• Typically, fintech platforms have used payments as a hook to acquire new customers. Given the fierce competition in the payments space, Ashish chose to focus on US stocks and net worth tracking.

• Indians wanted to invest in Google and FB; however, all traditional methods were expensive and lined with hurdles.

• INDmoney made opening a US stock account frictionless and cheap.

  

Instant gratification to the consumer in minutes 🕚

For X effort put in by consumers, INDmoney gave them 10X value - VERY QUICKLY.

• As soon as a person permitted INDmoney to view their email, they could pull credit card payments and credit score, track your mutual funds, and show you your net worth (assets - liabilities).

• The emphasis here is on showing that value instantly, as soon as the user has signed up.

  • The net worth is another excellent hook to keep people coming back to see how it has changed over time.

Using platform currency of stocks in their referral program

• INDmoney had solid word-of-mouth, and Ashish's experience at Goibibo made him quite confident that a referral program could work here as well.

• INDmoney gave rewards in stock options of blue-chip companies like Netflix and Apple whenever a person completed an excellent financial action or referred their friends. This platform currency of stock options got the user started on their investment journey, made them "invested" in the platform itself, and kept them coming back.

  

"More important than the price itself is the journey leading up to the price" - Team Plotline 🤓

• INDmoney has already shown you value by tracking your net worth, automatically pulling in credit card debts, telling you your credit score and much more. When you decide to set up your Goals, it takes you through another journey asking for inputs such as what goals you want to save for, how much you'll save every month, etc.

• After clicking on the final CTA to get AI-based recommendations, you face a paywall. You're slightly disappointed, but the motivation from the value received earlier + the time you've spent setting up your goal, nudges you to pay for the Premium plan, which is priced at only INR 99/- per month.

  

INDmoney raised an $86M Series D funding round in Mar '22, taking its total funding to $143M so far and valuation to north of $650M.

They recently enabled an insurance offering and have grand plans going ahead. Their eventual goal - become the ONE APP for ALL YOUR MONEY. 🤯

We are huge fans of INDmoney's phenomenal growth. We'll be rooting from the sidelines for this rocketship. 🚀