1,000 users
to 30,000.
Strong product, weak distribution. I moved the cross-sell to peak intent: the final step of onboarding, after a user had already committed.
Credit card holders, post-launch. From a base of ~1,000 users to 30,000 in the new cross-sell flow. A distribution problem, solved.
Gemini’s crypto rewards credit card was a strong product on paper: real cashback, clear retention value, a natural fit for the existing user base. It was also invisible. Roughly 1,000 users had it.
The card lived outside the core trading experience. The cross-sell, when it ran, fired in the middle of a session, when the user’s mind was on a trade and the card looked like a distraction. This was not a product problem. It was a distribution and timing problem.
It was failing on its moment.”
The thesis: a user who had just completed identity verification and funded their account had crossed the highest-friction barrier on the platform. They had demonstrated commitment. They had also just experienced the full weight of setup work, and were maximally receptive to additional value.
Move the cross-sell from mid-session to the final step of onboarding. Find peak intent. Test relentlessly into placement, framing, and conversion mechanics until we found the variant that compounded.
I owned the cross-sell strategy and stayed hands-on with the experience. We ran A/B/n across three axes: placement (mid-session vs. end-of-onboarding), framing (rewards-first vs. utility-first vs. portfolio-first), and conversion mechanics (single-tap apply vs. educational lead-in).
The winning variant: end-of-onboarding placement, rewards-first framing, single-tap apply with a lightweight rewards calculator inline. Anything that read like an interruption lost. Anything that read like a finishing gift won.
Card holders grew from ~1,000 to ~30,000, a 30× lift. The qualitative win was bigger than the quantitative one: card holders became more engaged platform users overall, lifting MTU and contributing to the broader north-star.
Strategically, this rewrote the role of onboarding. It stopped being a one-time setup task and became a multi-product adoption moment. That framing now anchors how we think about every new product Gemini launches into the existing user base.