Special: How we would grow Tickup

🤝 A special collaboration: Science Says x Zero to Marketing

Welcome to this special edition of Science Says!

If you like the “👀 Real-life example” sections of the insights, you’ll love this.

I teamed up with Andrea Bosoni from Zero to Marketing to write today’s newsletter together. 

Every month, Andrea picks a startup and explains how he would improve their marketing. He’s an excellent marketer who often uses Science Says insights, and I’ve been enjoying his work for years (I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter), 

So, I thought, why don’t we write a piece together analyzing a startup’s marketing, mixing his expertise with the latest insights from Science Says?

Zoom forward several weeks, and here we are 🙂

P.S.: Andrea and I have another connection that you might not have guessed. We are both originally from Milan, Italy 🇮🇹 (though you wouldn’t know it from my name, as I’m half Scottish too 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿)

How we’d grow Tickup

Tickup is an app whose tagline is “Tinder for stocks.” Without any further context, we’d imagine it as an app where you swipe and discover stocks that might be a perfect match.

And in fact, that’s pretty much what it is. The app curates the most important information you need to know about stocks and integrates some useful features like recent discussions from Reddit, custom visuals, data, and summaries. After you’ve discovered a stock you like, you can use AI to dig deeper into it.

We’d rewrite it to immediately communicate the most important benefits above the fold to hook new visitors and make them curious.

In fact, research shows that to be most persuasive, you should use 3 positive claims at once. That’s enough to suggest a pattern but not enough to make people skeptical [see Science Says insight].

For example, they could be:

• Discover the best new hot stocks

• Easily see the metrics that matter

• Get key insights with just a tap

Considering their positioning as an app for beginners, Reddit would definitely be an interesting channel to explore. Besides huge subreddits like r/wallstreetbets with close to 20M members there are also niche, smaller ones where Tickup founders could be active and get noticed.

To find these subreddits, search for relevant keywords and append “Reddit.” For example we searched “how to find undervalued stocks+reddit” and r/valueinvesting stood out. A quick analysis showed 300k members, many new posts per day and strong engagement on most of them so it looks like a perfect fit.

Next they should come up with content ideas. One could be posting a new, underrated stock discovered with the app and opening a discussion around it asking people what they think.

A common misunderstanding about Reddit is that you need to add a link to your content. In reality this only makes you look like you’re trying to sell something (and redditors hate that). Instead, simply mention the product name when it’s relevant. People aren’t stupid, and if they’re interested enough, they’ll search for it on Google (as we’ll see later that’s precisely what they’re doing on social media).

So they could just say before or after the analysis that they used the Tickup app to find the stock without adding any other details to spark readers’ curiosity.

Tickup created a competition to generate buzz around the app. They called it Picksix. Basically you create a virtual portfolio with 6 stocks and compete with other users to see who gets the highest return after a certain period.

There’s a referral program connected to this. Every time you refer 3 people you unlock an additional portfolio to increase your chances of winning. It’s a good idea but it could be made more effective with a few tweaks.

Research shows that using an altruistic CTA for referral programs increases the likelihood of referrals by 60% and total referrals by 86% compared to the most commonly used CTAs [see Science Says insight].

For example, they could frame it as gifting a portfolio to a friend (which would also give the user an additional portfolio). This way it wouldn’t be perceived as purely self-serving.

They created a dedicated AI chatbot that helps users better understand stocks whenever they want to dig deeper.

This is a great idea and aligns well with their positioning of making it easy to identify your next stock but research shows that they can make improvements [See Wharton & Science Says Blueprint for Effective AI Chatbots]

For example, people are more likely to follow financial advice and share sensitive details with bots that present themselves as clearly AI rather than human-like. A name such as “TickupAI” helps signal privacy, competence and trustworthiness in a way that “Claire” does not.

Another simple tweak they can make to increase usage is by adding a label that the AI is “Constantly learning”. People will see it as more valuable and trust it more because it keeps improving.

One of Tickup’s goals should be to collect email addresses from visitors who fit their ideal customer profile but for one reason or another haven’t downloaded the app yet.

They’ve started creating content on their website but a few things are off:

- On the homepage there’s no mention of their newsletter
- The signup form is hidden under their blog articles and doesn’t give a good reason why someone should leave their email
- Having only one article doesn’t create trust and gives the impression the blog is abandoned

Even if the content seems solid we’re not going to leave our emails with no idea of if, what, and when we’ll be getting something in return.

An idea to get more traffic might be to programmatically create pages that aggregate stocks by combining different parameters.

This could create a critical mass of low-volume but high-intent traffic from people searching for those specific queries.

The pages should deliver enough value to keep readers scrolling and towards the end ask them to download the app to finish reading for free.

The majority of visitors they send to the app store will inevitably read what other users say before clicking download.

They don’t have reviews in the app store yet which is why they should urgently try to get their first positive one by reaching out to early adopters. Research shows the first review (positive or negative) creates a chain reaction of similar reviews that can boost an app for years or doom it to a cycle of negative ones [see Science Says insight].

The best possible scenario is to get reviews that are relevant and reinforce the app’s positioning.

Tickup is doing really good things on Instagram and TikTok. We agree that these are probably the best platforms to reach their ideal customers.

Their strategy consists of leveraging two different profiles: one for the product and one for a founder. The founder’s profile is performing especially well with 150k+ followers and lots of engagement on short-form videos.

His content is simple but very compelling. He created a format around researching a stock a day until he can quit his job which is something a lot of aspiring traders can relate to.

This is super important because when most of their target audience sees this type of video in their feed and stops scrolling it tells the algorithm to show it to even more people who are like them.

In parts of the videos he uses the Tickup app to do the research but never does a hard sell. This makes the content feel very organic and sparks curiosity to check out the app.

That’s it for today.

We hope you enjoyed this special issue. If you liked this case study, Andrea does these monthly in his newsletter Zero to Marketing. And if you really liked it and found it helpful, let me know, perhaps I can send you more case studies of how we’d apply Science Says insights to real-life companies!

Thomas and Andrea