Public.com - Shaping a Subscription OFFERING
Background
As part of Public’s overall strategy to align investor experiences to specific investor cohorts as well as it’s monetization strategy, we uncovered the potential to enhance our offerings through a paid subscription service. Incumbents such as Robinhood had already begun to offer paid subscription services, so our goal was to explore features that not only aligned to our mission and strategy, but potentially would differentiate us from the competition.
PROCESS
Working with our executives and cross functional partners, I helped define a work-stream meant to provide insight, evidence, and a path to test an MVP subscription offering. We formed a working group with a business lead, designer, researcher, and product partner and took the following steps:
Competitive audit - We assessed the existing types of features and price points offered from competitors. We noticed many existing features focused on transactional benefits, leaving an opportunity for enhancing education and investing resources.
Internal feature evaluation - We brainstormed and listed all the types of potential features we could execute in the given timeframe for releasing an subscription service. While we didn’t want to limit or define features ahead of talking with users, it was important we had a view on potential conceptual offerings for testing.
Membership data deep dive - We broke down existing segments of possible likely adopters of a subscription offering. While many of Public’s users are lower-dollar and less experienced investors, we considered leveraging subscriptions as a way to expand our offerings to more sophisticated, higher-net worth users.
Qualitative interviews - We developed conceptual subscription offerings and presented them to Public members. Those offerings included a range of features from transactional and service oriented, to enhanced data and analysis to cover the spread of user types on Public.
Synthesis - We broke down all of the insights, findings, and learnings and shared out with the cross functional and executive working teams, driving alignment. We found features that offered enhanced investing tools not already available elsewhere and additional community features were likely to resonate with the existing member base.
Workshop - Finally, we brought together the working group to ideate and define the MVP offerings for the subscription.
Results
The final initial subscription offering was branded as “Public Premium” and was designed to elevate the investor experience, specifically targeting the opportunity to expand engagement and monetization of higher valued investors.
To achieve this, we offered white glove customer support, access to enhanced reporting and advanced data and metrics. In addition to offering the service for a monthly fee, we included it for free to investors with a minimum amount of assets under management.
After launching and refining Public Premium with a beta group, the program was launched to general membership, enabling us to refine adoption and retention over the following quarters.
