From 0.2%
to 10% of MAUs.
I bet that recurring investing wasn’t a feature problem, it was a narrative problem. Education-first, incentive-second, ROI-positive by construction.
Of monthly transacting users on a recurring buy, 60 days post-launch. Up from 0.2% baseline. 50× lift.
Net new users on a recurring buy · base: 300,000 MTU
The North-Star at Gemini was Monthly Transacting Users, and the team had been pushing on the top of the funnel for a year. The numbers crept up. The shape of the line stayed the same.
I’d been watching a different number. Of all monthly transacting users, only 0.2% had a recurring buy active. The product existed: well-built, well-priced, and almost no one was using it. That was the gap.
It’s a habit, and habits don’t respond to ads.”
I made the call to treat Recurring Buy not as a feature but as a multi-week growth experience. Education first, incentive second.
The hypothesis, written down: replace the conversion-first surface with an education-first one, back it with an ROI-positive incentive, and we move from 0.2% to 10% of MAUs within two quarters. A 50× bet.
Education
Slider-driven simulator. Pick an amount, pick an asset, see what the same plan would have returned over 5 years on real historical prices. CTA pressure deliberately undersold.
Reward
If user hadn’t committed, they entered the reward track: payouts at 3-, 6-, and 12-month milestones. Capped at $150. Tuned with finance until provably ROI+.
The simulator was the soul of the thing. We tuned its physics and copy across 11 internal builds before it shipped. The slider had to feel like a tool you’d use to think, not a step in a funnel.
The reward design was the discipline of the thing. Every payout band was modeled against retention curves and per-user revenue share. We refused to ship anything that wasn’t ROI-positive on its own.