🍿 DON'T MISS OUT 🍿

Kimberly, our 2nd Annual Angel Meetup is THIS Thursday June 5th 6pm MT on Zoom. It's a great way to meet familiar faces from the platform and shape where we are going.

If you want to join, we've held some allocation in our round at the original deal terms just for folks who have made 3+ investments on Play Money.  Interested?  Request access here.

MONTHLY METRICS

Accredited members: 970 (+9%)
Unique investors: 264 (+9%)
Total Investments: 614 (+8%)
Total Dollars Invested: $2.3M (+9%)

Since launch we've been compounding consistently:

• 10% M/M growth.
• 27% of members investing
• 27% becoming repeat investors.

That has gotten us nicely to Minimal Default Alive as we've build a core product (web and mobile), automated our back office, and wired everything up for learning for us and for customers.

But what got us here isn't getting us to where we want to go next.

Our biggest value prop to potential partners is that we can turn their networks into repeat check writers. We've been doing it.

Now we need to do it more efficiently and predictably.

It's time to get more quantitative and automated on our experiments.

🍉 It's the Summer of Second Checks!

My approach to growth is: plug the holes at the bottom before pouring in more water at the top. 💦

By Q4 we want to: 

• Double the % of new organic members investing before week 6.
• Double the % of new organic members making a 2nd bet w/in the first 3 months.

Targeting anything more granular than this at our data volume and insight level will be noise -- especially factoring in deal variability (we have some experiments we want to run to try to hack this) and seasonality along with cycle time on investments.

To start, the ability to track and iterate easily is as important as the end goal.

MAY WRAP-UP

• Build the scaffolding for a proper marketing and conversion funnel.

Wasim pushed V0.5 of our Noom-like onboarding flow, with full analytics, live today for internal testing. It should be up for new signups on the site next week.  

It's been a fun process. 

The 2nd most valuable thing we've done (aside from monthly updates, which will always be #1) is talking to nearly every user on the platform after they made their 2nd investment.

It's allowed AI to be our partner on developing the first pass at onboarding:

• unpacking scores of customer conversations into some clear psychographics
• guiding us with some onboarding best-practices 

We know our first pass will be 100% wrong, but we can drive enough early traffic through it to make some fast adjustments, equip ourselves to reach folks not just via the app and email but also off-platform, and then learn and iterate quickly.

In case you're curious, here's what stuck out from the qualitative data:

🤝🏽 Trust > Education
90% of superusers came through a trusted referral or early 1:1 convo. They needed to know why Play Money—not just about deals and the 101 of angel.

💪 Confidence Comes After the Check
Even repeat investors can feel undereducated. Confidence-building touch points post investment matter.

💸 “Many Small Checks” Works
Our diversification thesis (more bets, smaller checks) is a 🤯 unlock for nearly all our repeat investors —the relationship between that unlock and confidence is not always consistent. (trust always comes first though)

JUNE LOOK AHEAD

• Do the work: Wire up new email, retargeting and landing pages to support conversion. Then Develop this new test and iterate cadence
• Keep plugging on biz dev

I'll share metrics and hypothesis (right and wrong) as we go.

I am still running the biz dev circuit. Given the role of trust, and how we've seen small actions build momentum and compound over time, it makes sense. I have DC, potentially Chicago, hopefully Seattle, San Diego, NYC, and  a couple of new funds on the schedule. 

The house party circuit (Angel as the new bookclub) also keeps coming up in people's comments. But, first focus is getting the funnel flowing - because a little bit of progress can easily fund some growth marketing help to expand our capacity and velocity.

------

Love and Chilaquiles

🥂 💍 Massive congrats to Wasim, who just go engaged!

🇲🇽 🫶🏽 My work-cation (aka: minimal viable vacay) in CDMX w/my #1 was the refresh I needed.

Thanks to everyone who did calls with me from my co-working alley in Condesa.

-- C2K

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