Sponsored By
Lead Sponsor:
Training The Street
If you’ve been here since my early TikTok days, you know I started by helping people break into finance. So it’s full circle to team up with Training The Street. Their training used to be gatekept by the JPMs and Goldmans of the world, but now it’s available to everyone.
Use code “HABITS20” for for 20% off! And more importantly, share it with a friend, sibling, or anyone hungry to break into banking.
Investment Banking Bundle is the move: 16 modules, 52+ hours of content, and 5 years of access.
(Candidly, the best part are the free models that come with it)
My next favorite is their interview prep and live AI-driven experience. It’s sorta bullsh*t they didn’t have this back in 2016, because I legit failed at 25+ super days and would’ve killed for a resource like this.
Shameful Plug…
Find Your Financial Advisor with Habits!
Did you know the average Habits user is 30.5 years old? And 1 in 17 of them are subscribed to this very blog. So it wouldn’t shock me if there are hundreds (maybe even thousands) of you sitting on the sidelines right now. And that’s totally fine.
But it’s exactly why I’m offering top hop on ZOOM with anyone who’s (1) debating if a financial advisor makes sense, or (2) just wants to understand their options.
Alternatively, download our app today and compare best-in-class professionals with any budget.
Main Story:
Now I Understand Why GTM Matters…
So someone once said to me “first time founders care about product, but second time founders care about distribution.” And I get why…
Originally, I envisioned go-to-market (GTM) strategies as the things that look good on slides. They sound sexy in pitch meetings. And get romanticized as these beautiful engines with perfect messaging.
our gtm slide that we include in investor and sales decks
Well that’s bullshit and I was wrong. It’s gritty as f**k.
Let me tell you what our GTM has actually looked like at Habits: us constantly debating if we should be cold calling, auto-email blasting, encouraging people to download our app or meeting 1:1 with our team.
(hint: notice what I offered just above? Meeting 1:1 is time consuming, but it’s super effective to ensure a great user experience)
Here’s what most people don’t realize…we’re trying to do something no one else has done.
The “Playbook”
Every one of our competitors runs the same tired playbook:
Slap together a shiny financial calculator.
Gate it behind a “just give us your email” form.
Pay NerdWallet or Investopedia an arm and a leg for some affiliate love.
Sell your contact info to the highest bidders.
You take a simple quiz to see if you can afford a $400k house, and next thing you know you’re getting 17 emails, 5 calls, 3 mailers, and a psychic dream visit from a financial advisor named Greg.
It’s data harvesting 101. No different than Zillow, cars.com, or any other website of that nature.
At Habits, we’re building something that (to be blunt) isn’t scalable by traditional standards. We’re building an organic, slow-cooked marketplace. A place where people who genuinely want financial advice can find someone they trust, without being hounded like they clicked the wrong banner ad.
And that makes GTM hard as hell.
I’m sticking to my gut: we’re better off obsessing over the unscalable stuff, dialing in our customer experience, nailing our messaging for a niche crewv before we blow time, energy, and cash chasing scale with paid ads and mass appeal bullshit.
Our GTM Problems
Because while we have a firehose of financial advisors and their firms wanting to join the platform (seriously, every time we show the metrics below they go nuts), the other side of the funnel is trickier.
it’s a challenge, but leading with authenticity is what has gotten us here
We’re not trying to convince people they need an advisor. We’re here for people who already know they need one (or at least want to explore their options) and we help them figure it out. With zero pressure. Whether they use Habits or not.
And THAT makes everything downstream of user acquisition a bit... messy.
Like:
What happens if someone downloads our app but never talks to an advisor?
What if they book a call with us and ghost?
What if they go through onboarding, meet 3 advisors, and go radio silent?
How do we re-engage — without sounding like everyone else?
(Our Temporary Solution)
As of late, I’ve been running around Hubspot, trying to segment, tag, automate, and build playbooks for what happens after people show interest.
Do we text them? Do we send a meme? Do we call them, or is that too aggressive?
Right now? We cold call people. Text. Email. And do all of this manually, or at least with minimal generic templates. Because I’d rather talk to five real humans a day than spam 500 with a bullsh*t email sequence written by ChatGPT pretending to be a real person.
And while this may not scale forever, I believe in doing things that don’t scale, especially early on. It’s how you learn. It’s how you build trust. It’s how you earn the right to automate later.
Every week we gather as a team to tweak, debate, trial, argue, review, and ultimately experiment new ideas. And looking back, that’s sorta what we’ve done all the way to this point. So it doesn’t feel different, but take my word for it when I say it’s a lot easier said than done.
Key Takeaway
No matter what it all comes down to “How do we make people feel seen, heard and supported…even if they’re not ready to take action yet?” That’s the GTM strategy we’re building.
Not the kind that tries to sell you a Roth IRA while you’re in the Starbucks drive-thru. But the kind that says: “Hey, we’ve got your back. Here are your options. Take your time.”
We’ll keep doing the work no one sees, having the conversations that don’t scale, and listening more than we talk.
Because financial advice should be a friendship, not a funnel.
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