Customer acquisition has never been harder and many of us product-oriented founders have struggled here - it’s rare to have a superpower around customer acquisition *and* product craft. If you’re thinking about this here are five ideas to chew on: a16z.com/2019/09/24/how…
Payroll - Being in the flow of payroll makes it seamless to support products like earned wage advance and robo-saving as well as makes extending loans less risky (less risk of default when payments are automatically deducted from the paycheck).
Employer to employee - This is a specific case of the more general B2B2C strategy where you can have employers offer your product as a benefit to their employees. These integrations work best when your product’s value proposition benefits both the consumer and the employer.
Unbundle a marketplace - Marketplaces such as AirBnB have become large scale distribution channels in their own right and are being unbundled by companies like Sonder. In fintech companies like Capital One seem to be taking this approach on marketplaces like Credit Karma.
Messaging apps - My partner @conniechan recently covered this in detail, suffice to say social is an underutilized lever in fintech, and messaging apps can be a great way to bootstrap engagement and discovery: a16z.com/2019/09/06/chi…
Direct mail - Yep, we're talking about mail. This channel has a number of enviable qualities - targeting data can be married with credit bureau data, the price of sending mail is always fixed (i.e. not an auction like Google), and consumers remain surprisingly responsive.
If you have a product that's getting traction with a novel customer acquisition approach I'd love to hear from you! And if you have ideas to share with the community please include them here.
