But in-game assets have traditionally been very illiquid. Millions of gamers spend hours every day accumulating everything from swords to custom skins. Though unlike in the real world, where work often can be traded for value, gamers are usually unable to monetize this work.
But converting the assets to NFTs finally brings liquidity, likely growing the market even more, as millions of gamers can start to monetize the hours they spend.
And with the growth of NFT renting, there’s even more liquidity.
More broadly, new products and services are constantly making previously-illiquid markets more liquid – like Hipcamp which brought liquidity to millions of landowners who were land rich but cash poor, by letting them rent their land out to campers.","head":"NFT Rental","body_links":"In-game spending is a massive market, estimated at $65B.
But in-game assets have traditionally been very illiquid. Millions of gamers spend hours every day accumulating everything from swords to custom skins. Though unlike in the real world, where work often can be traded for value, gamers are usually unable to monetize this work.
But converting the assets to NFTs finally brings liquidity, likely growing the market even more, as millions of gamers can start to monetize the hours they spend.
And with the growth of NFT renting, there’s even more liquidity.
More broadly, new products and services are constantly making previously-illiquid markets more liquid – like Hipcamp which brought liquidity to millions of landowners who were land rich but cash poor, by letting them rent their land out to campers.","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"The most expensive painting ever sold was priced at nearly half a billion dollars, yet it’s free to look at for anyone with an internet connection. This is because there is, and will only ever be, one true version and because scarcity drives value. To date though, there hasn’t been a tool to create scarcity for digital products. Blockchain allows this and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are the new asset class everyone is now talking about, exemplified by the explosive growth of NBA Top Shot and the recent $69M purchase of a piece of virtual art at a Christie\'s auction. Since digital assets can be freely copied and viewed, everyone has access to them, but NFTs represent a secure, verifiable way to give exactly one person ownership.
Sorare is a company that produces licensed NFT-based sports cards for fantasy sports. This combines the addictive nature of fantasy sports with the speculative excitement of buying, selling, and trading scarce digital assets.
Because NFT transactions are recorded on a blockchain, they can be viewed and tracked by anyone. This creates a market for data aggregators adjacent to every major NFT. Soraredata.com is growing as fast as sorare.com, albeit from a smaller base, and alongside the widely-talked-about NBA Top Shot is the domain topshotdata.com, which has already been registered and is awaiting a landing page. There\'s a precedent for this working: CoinMarketCap.com, a site that tracks cryptocurrency valuations, is one of the 400 most-visited sites in the world. Data sites use the picks-and-shovels-in-a-gold-rush model: while any given NFT might be under or overpriced, the aggregate behavior of all of the NFT buyers and sellers creates business opportunities.","head":"Physical IRL collectibles meet digital collectibles","body_links":"The most expensive painting ever sold was priced at nearly half a billion dollars, yet it’s free to look at for anyone with an internet connection. This is because there is, and will only ever be, one true version and because scarcity drives value. To date though, there hasn’t been a tool to create scarcity for digital products. Blockchain allows this and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are the new asset class everyone is now talking about, exemplified by the explosive growth of NBA Top Shot and the recent $69M purchase of a piece of virtual art at a Christie\'s auction. Since digital assets can be freely copied and viewed, everyone has access to them, but NFTs represent a secure, verifiable way to give exactly one person ownership.
Sorare is a company that produces licensed NFT-based sports cards for fantasy sports. This combines the addictive nature of fantasy sports with the speculative excitement of buying, selling, and trading scarce digital assets.
Because NFT transactions are recorded on a blockchain, they can be viewed and tracked by anyone. This creates a market for data aggregators adjacent to every major NFT. Soraredata.com is growing as fast as sorare.com, albeit from a smaller base, and alongside the widely-talked-about NBA Top Shot is the domain topshotdata.com, which has already been registered and is awaiting a landing page. There\'s a precedent for this working: CoinMarketCap.com, a site that tracks cryptocurrency valuations, is one of the 400 most-visited sites in the world. Data sites use the picks-and-shovels-in-a-gold-rush model: while any given NFT might be under or overpriced, the aggregate behavior of all of the NFT buyers and sellers creates business opportunities.","replaced_keywords":{"Sorare":"Sorare"}},{"body":"Horse racing, once a massive business, was the only legal form of gambling in the US outside of Las Vegas until 1978.
But the sport shrunk over time. Other forms of gambling later became legal and grew in popularity and the proliferation of cable TV plus the remote control meant horse racing’s slow pace cast it out of favor. As well, the lifespan of star racehorses compared to their human counterparts in other sports led to lower momentum around particular horses, and general concerns for animal cruelty made viewers less interested.
Zed Run is a rapidly growing company that brings horse racing back in digital form. Rather than focusing on gambling, Zed Run lets users breed digital racing horses. The horses have traits that affect their odds of winning races, and they can be bred to create new horses which inherit some of these traits in a partially randomized way, similar to real-life racehorse breeding. Zed Run charges a percentage of the \\"stud fee\\" for breeding, a mechanism that allows them to monetize a part of the game that both involves wagering on randomized outcomes and doesn\'t look like gambling.
The game hosts continuous races, where players pay to enter their digital horses and then collect prize money if the horses win. As the NFT space heats up, it’s reviving many forms of entertainment and collectibles that were previously declining in the face of more engaging digital options.
Zed Run exemplifies another modern business model: instead of selling a product directly, Zed Run operates a platform and takes a cut of other participants\' economic activity. The hard part about building platforms is that they\'re two-sided markets, so they\'re useless to each side until the other has critical mass. In digital goods, it\'s possible to fix this by creating the goods and then encouraging users to trade them. Since it\'s a platform for exchanging virtual goods rather than physical ones, the default gross margin approaches 100%, meaning that Zed Run can take the kind of cut that more traditional platforms spend years to achieve.","head":"What Horse Racing has to do with NFTs","body_links":"Horse racing, once a massive business, was the only legal form of gambling in the US outside of Las Vegas until 1978.
But the sport shrunk over time. Other forms of gambling later became legal and grew in popularity and the proliferation of cable TV plus the remote control meant horse racing’s slow pace cast it out of favor. As well, the lifespan of star racehorses compared to their human counterparts in other sports led to lower momentum around particular horses, and general concerns for animal cruelty made viewers less interested.
Zed Run is a rapidly growing company that brings horse racing back in digital form. Rather than focusing on gambling, Zed Run lets users breed digital racing horses. The horses have traits that affect their odds of winning races, and they can be bred to create new horses which inherit some of these traits in a partially randomized way, similar to real-life racehorse breeding. Zed Run charges a percentage of the \\"stud fee\\" for breeding, a mechanism that allows them to monetize a part of the game that both involves wagering on randomized outcomes and doesn\'t look like gambling.
The game hosts continuous races, where players pay to enter their digital horses and then collect prize money if the horses win. As the NFT space heats up, it’s reviving many forms of entertainment and collectibles that were previously declining in the face of more engaging digital options.
Zed Run exemplifies another modern business model: instead of selling a product directly, Zed Run operates a platform and takes a cut of other participants\' economic activity. The hard part about building platforms is that they\'re two-sided markets, so they\'re useless to each side until the other has critical mass. In digital goods, it\'s possible to fix this by creating the goods and then encouraging users to trade them. Since it\'s a platform for exchanging virtual goods rather than physical ones, the default gross margin approaches 100%, meaning that Zed Run can take the kind of cut that more traditional platforms spend years to achieve.","replaced_keywords":{"Zed Run":"Zed Run"}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}}],"meta_desc":"","cta_header":""},{"desc":"The top Crypto Trends of 2022 including everything from Fireblocks to Chainalysis","name":"Crypto","slug":"crypto-trends","title":"Crypto Trends","trends":["Fireblocks","Chainalysis","Compound Protocol","CBDC","Crypto ETF","Yield Farming","Anchor Protocol","Token Burn","Crypto Staking","Crypto Farming","Liquidity Mining","Unstoppable Domains","Mirror Protocol","Polygon Network","Bitsgap","Arbismart","QuickSwap","SushiSwap","Move To Earn","FTX","Pionex","Hodlnaut","MoonPay","Koinly","STEPN","Play To Earn"],"insights":[{"body":"The problem in investment research has switched from one of scarcity to one of abundance: there are more sites than ever with investment pitches, ranging from professionally-produced writeups at communities like SumZero to one-off recommendations on Twitter and Stocktwits. This has made filtering, rather than aggregating, the key value-add.
This effect has played out in countless other spaces, including everything from news to adult content. With adult content, so much noise is created by the abundance of free explicit content that consumers are now willing to open their wallets for a more authentic and curated experience. And in the media industry too: The abundance of free online data and analysis has often led to a decline in quality and authenticity, and as has been the case with porn, consumers are consequently willing to pay in order to separate the signal from the noise.
As the world saw the rise of trading apps like Robinhood, the subsequent rise in the noise of public advice was significant. It ushered in the growth of platforms like TipRanks, where users can follow others’ trades– and see the success of those trades mapped out on a global leaderboard.
Copy Trading, as it’s known, has been on the rise. One of the fastest-growing DeFi companies in this category is Mudrex: With over 100K users in over 100 countries, Mudrex’s 82% direct site traffic metric indicates a high rate of users returning to the site or even having it bookmarked––For a full report on the crypto industry, by Glimpse, respond “crypto” to this email.
A clever way some copy trading sites fully capture consumer surplus is by charging more for certain file format exports: Since Excel is ubiquitous and essential in the professional finance industry, this is a way to have a product priced so that hobbyist day traders will buy it—and then to charge finance industry customers a steeper price. Like gaming chairs, which are more comfortable than similarly-priced office chairs, but designed to be too gaudy for the office, some Trading sites using this strategy find a way to capture consumer surplus and charge its audience what they’re willing to pay.","head":"The Rise of Mudrex","body_links":"The problem in investment research has switched from one of scarcity to one of abundance: there are more sites than ever with investment pitches, ranging from professionally-produced writeups at communities like SumZero to one-off recommendations on Twitter and Stocktwits. This has made filtering, rather than aggregating, the key value-add.
This effect has played out in countless other spaces, including everything from news to adult content. With adult content, so much noise is created by the abundance of free explicit content that consumers are now willing to open their wallets for a more authentic and curated experience. And in the media industry too: The abundance of free online data and analysis has often led to a decline in quality and authenticity, and as has been the case with porn, consumers are consequently willing to pay in order to separate the signal from the noise.
As the world saw the rise of trading apps like Robinhood, the subsequent rise in the noise of public advice was significant. It ushered in the growth of platforms like TipRanks, where users can follow others’ trades– and see the success of those trades mapped out on a global leaderboard.
Copy Trading, as it’s known, has been on the rise. One of the fastest-growing DeFi companies in this category is Mudrex: With over 100K users in over 100 countries, Mudrex’s 82% direct site traffic metric indicates a high rate of users returning to the site or even having it bookmarked––For a full report on the crypto industry, by Glimpse, respond “crypto” to this email.
A clever way some copy trading sites fully capture consumer surplus is by charging more for certain file format exports: Since Excel is ubiquitous and essential in the professional finance industry, this is a way to have a product priced so that hobbyist day traders will buy it—and then to charge finance industry customers a steeper price. Like gaming chairs, which are more comfortable than similarly-priced office chairs, but designed to be too gaudy for the office, some Trading sites using this strategy find a way to capture consumer surplus and charge its audience what they’re willing to pay.","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"Moonpay is building Stripe for cryptocurrency: a simple way for merchants to let users either spend cryptocurrency or buy it, through just a few lines of code. Moonpay\'s fees are slightly higher than standard transaction processing fees, but in the case of crypto there\'s more risk from fraud and regulation. In fraud terms, since cryptocurrencies are easily transferable, they\'re a potential way for credit card thieves to extract money from stolen cards. On the regulatory side, Moonpay needs to comply with Know Your Customer frameworks and Anti-Money Laundering rules. First-time spenders need to verify their identity with government IDs, utility bills or other proofs-of-identity.
If Moonpay is trying to be Stripe, it raises a simple question: why isn\'t the Stripe of cryptocurrency. Stripe? Stripe actually offered support Bitcoin payments but ultimately dropped it. Their reasoning was that merchants who accepted Bitcoin were not used to the high volatility: a customer might spend $100 on a product, but the merchant could end up receiving $80 if the price of Bitcoin fluctuated during the transaction. Since payment processing is low-margin, and customer service is expensive, the small number of Bitcoin transactions didn\'t justify the complexity of explaining Bitcoin to customers. Moonpay\'s crypto-only approach obviates this problem; they focus on the narrow set of merchants and spenders who are already comfortable with crypto volatility. In the long run, Moonpay is banking on volatility falling as cryptocurrency adoption increases. And given the friction of setting up verification in order to be able to use any crypto payment option like this means consumers will want to stick with the first one they use. This dynamic gives the space a strong first mover advantage.","head":"Stripe for Crypto – The Rise of MoonPay","body_links":"Moonpay is building Stripe for cryptocurrency: a simple way for merchants to let users either spend cryptocurrency or buy it, through just a few lines of code. Moonpay\'s fees are slightly higher than standard transaction processing fees, but in the case of crypto there\'s more risk from fraud and regulation. In fraud terms, since cryptocurrencies are easily transferable, they\'re a potential way for credit card thieves to extract money from stolen cards. On the regulatory side, Moonpay needs to comply with Know Your Customer frameworks and Anti-Money Laundering rules. First-time spenders need to verify their identity with government IDs, utility bills or other proofs-of-identity.
If Moonpay is trying to be Stripe, it raises a simple question: why isn\'t the Stripe of cryptocurrency. Stripe? Stripe actually offered support Bitcoin payments but ultimately dropped it. Their reasoning was that merchants who accepted Bitcoin were not used to the high volatility: a customer might spend $100 on a product, but the merchant could end up receiving $80 if the price of Bitcoin fluctuated during the transaction. Since payment processing is low-margin, and customer service is expensive, the small number of Bitcoin transactions didn\'t justify the complexity of explaining Bitcoin to customers. Moonpay\'s crypto-only approach obviates this problem; they focus on the narrow set of merchants and spenders who are already comfortable with crypto volatility. In the long run, Moonpay is banking on volatility falling as cryptocurrency adoption increases. And given the friction of setting up verification in order to be able to use any crypto payment option like this means consumers will want to stick with the first one they use. This dynamic gives the space a strong first mover advantage.","replaced_keywords":{"MoonPay":"Moonpay"}},{"body":"Intuit and H&R Block run ads to make the public feel like taxes are not complicated, but behind the scenes, tax prep companies spend millions every year lobbying the government to make taxes more complicated so they can keep their business. In fact, in many other countries, taxes can be incredibly simple—in Sweden, for example, they can be paid by text message.
The complexity of taxes is partly a function of lobbying, partly a function of the cat-and-mouse game of closing loopholes, and, in the case of cryptocurrency, partly caused by new assets that are bought, sold, and traded in novel ways.
Koinly is a crypto-focused tax product that helps users navigate difficulties like tax lots, airdrops, DeFi interest payments, and trades across multiple exchanges. It sells its software both to individual users and to accountants who need crypto help. Koinly imports lists of transactions and outputs the taxable income that resulted from them, saving people the tedious and error-prone process of running the numbers themselves. One way the company maximizes margins is to charge based on the number of transactions. This number doesn\'t affect Koinly\'s own costs in any meaningful way, but it\'s a good way to identify customers who can afford the product—and probably can\'t afford to spend hours manually navigating their numbers.
Koinly’s relationship with the rest of the tax industry is both as a service and a source of leads: for complicated cases, they refer users to CPAs.
With the growth of alternative assets like cryptocurrency and NFTs, there’s room for a tax preparation service that can displace the legacy incumbents in this $100 billion industry, first by solving specialized problems and then extending their service to the entire tax prep process. Cryptocurrencies collectively have a two trillion dollar market value, and since the prices for most of them started close to zero, and are extremely volatile, many holders have large capital gains—which means a healthy budget for doing their taxes, and a lot of paperwork if they try to do taxes themselves.","head":"Taxes for Crypto","body_links":"Intuit and H&R Block run ads to make the public feel like taxes are not complicated, but behind the scenes, tax prep companies spend millions every year lobbying the government to make taxes more complicated so they can keep their business. In fact, in many other countries, taxes can be incredibly simple—in Sweden, for example, they can be paid by text message.
The complexity of taxes is partly a function of lobbying, partly a function of the cat-and-mouse game of closing loopholes, and, in the case of cryptocurrency, partly caused by new assets that are bought, sold, and traded in novel ways.
Koinly is a crypto-focused tax product that helps users navigate difficulties like tax lots, airdrops, DeFi interest payments, and trades across multiple exchanges. It sells its software both to individual users and to accountants who need crypto help. Koinly imports lists of transactions and outputs the taxable income that resulted from them, saving people the tedious and error-prone process of running the numbers themselves. One way the company maximizes margins is to charge based on the number of transactions. This number doesn\'t affect Koinly\'s own costs in any meaningful way, but it\'s a good way to identify customers who can afford the product—and probably can\'t afford to spend hours manually navigating their numbers.
Koinly’s relationship with the rest of the tax industry is both as a service and a source of leads: for complicated cases, they refer users to CPAs.
With the growth of alternative assets like cryptocurrency and NFTs, there’s room for a tax preparation service that can displace the legacy incumbents in this $100 billion industry, first by solving specialized problems and then extending their service to the entire tax prep process. Cryptocurrencies collectively have a two trillion dollar market value, and since the prices for most of them started close to zero, and are extremely volatile, many holders have large capital gains—which means a healthy budget for doing their taxes, and a lot of paperwork if they try to do taxes themselves.","replaced_keywords":{"Koinly":"Koinly"}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}}],"meta_desc":"","cta_header":""},{"desc":"The top Personal Finance Trends of 2022 including everything from HyperJar to ScalaPay","name":"Personal Finance","slug":"personal-finance-trends","title":"Personal Finance Trends","trends":["HyperJar","ScalaPay","Truebill","Cash Envelopes","Venmo Credit Card","Wisely Card","Avant Card","Pay Stub Generator"],"insights":[{"body":"Fundamental needs don\'t change much, but interfaces do. As writing moved from Microsoft Word to in-browser apps, the spell-check chrome extension Grammarly capitalized on this change of interface and built a $1B+ business.
Similarly, the fundamental problems of personal finance haven\'t changed: don\'t run out of money, do save for important purchases. But today, one of the most widely used interfaces for tending to different tasks is Google Sheets.
It turns out that Google Sheets is used for a wide variety of non-spreadsheet task: searching Google for use Google Sheets to returns comments on sites like Reddit and Twitter involving project management, budgeting, investing, and even shopping for groceries or watering plants.
With its adaptable featureset and universal accessibility, Google Sheets has become a sort of \\"digital duct tape\\" - a common phenomenon, as exemplified by email inboxes that serve as to-do lists and spreadsheets that function as databases.
Tiller, a personal finance tool, competes with companies like Mint by letting users simply connect their bank account to Google Sheets and do all their financial planning and organization using a familiar interface.
Then there\'s a clever SEO strategy used by software tool companies similar to Tiller. Google sometimes ranks pages on the Google.com domain especially high because of the reputation as a trusted domain. Software tool company Smartsheets takes advantage of this and has made various Google Sheets templates that rank high in Google search for terms like \\"google sheets budget template\\", but with many of the spreadsheet\'s cells filled with links back to their site.
Tiller\'s pricing model fits their product: they offer a free one-month trial, then a $79 annual subscription. The free trial is an opportunity for Tiller to raise the user\'s sunk cost by getting them to spend time customizing the product. Since a personal finance product saves the user money over time, Tiller has pricing power once they\'ve demonstrated that it works.","head":"New Banking Built on Old Tools","body_links":"Fundamental needs don\'t change much, but interfaces do. As writing moved from Microsoft Word to in-browser apps, the spell-check chrome extension Grammarly capitalized on this change of interface and built a $1B+ business.
Similarly, the fundamental problems of personal finance haven\'t changed: don\'t run out of money, do save for important purchases. But today, one of the most widely used interfaces for tending to different tasks is Google Sheets.
It turns out that Google Sheets is used for a wide variety of non-spreadsheet task: searching Google for use Google Sheets to returns comments on sites like Reddit and Twitter involving project management, budgeting, investing, and even shopping for groceries or watering plants.
With its adaptable featureset and universal accessibility, Google Sheets has become a sort of \\"digital duct tape\\" - a common phenomenon, as exemplified by email inboxes that serve as to-do lists and spreadsheets that function as databases.
Tiller, a personal finance tool, competes with companies like Mint by letting users simply connect their bank account to Google Sheets and do all their financial planning and organization using a familiar interface.
Then there\'s a clever SEO strategy used by software tool companies similar to Tiller. Google sometimes ranks pages on the Google.com domain especially high because of the reputation as a trusted domain. Software tool company Smartsheets takes advantage of this and has made various Google Sheets templates that rank high in Google search for terms like \\"google sheets budget template\\", but with many of the spreadsheet\'s cells filled with links back to their site.
Tiller\'s pricing model fits their product: they offer a free one-month trial, then a $79 annual subscription. The free trial is an opportunity for Tiller to raise the user\'s sunk cost by getting them to spend time customizing the product. Since a personal finance product saves the user money over time, Tiller has pricing power once they\'ve demonstrated that it works.","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"Truebill, a personal finance tool, has sidestepped the traditional strategies its competitors use when acquiring new users who are searching on Google. Instead of ranking for meta terms like \\"personal finance\\", they focus on ranking for specific problems people have like cancelling subscriptions.
Half of Truebill\'s traffic comes from search and, of that, over 80% comes from searches like \\"how to cancel Instacart\\" and \\"how to cancel Equinox\\". As many businesses migrate to a subscription-based model, consumer\'s bank statements are increasingly full of monthly payments. Truebill is a classic personal finance management tool, like Mint, but with a twist: for cable, phone, and security bills, they negotiate with the service provider to get a better rate, and then split the difference with users.
Some businesses strategically target users looking up, via search, how to cancel their service. This way they can control the pipeline and attempt to downgrade rather than outright cancel. For example, Hulu runs ads on the search term \\"how to cancel Hulu\\" in an attempt to own this cancelation journey and, ultimately, to get the user to stay. Conversely, brands like Spotify and BarkBox do not rank #1 for their respective \\"how to cancel\\" queries and are therefore missing out on a retention opportunity. By sliding into the search results for these queries, Truebill is able to sidestep a highly competitive and more expensive avenue for user acquisition used by its competitors.
These sorts of opportunities exist for nearly every industry.
Instead of ranking for \\"lead generation\\", tools that do exactly that will sometimes rank for name+company+email with a dynamic landing page for each of the leads in their database. And with the robocall blocking app RoboKiller, nearly 90% of the site\'s 1M monthly visits come from search, but searches for \\"RoboKiller\\" only account for 0.5%—in fact, the vast majority originate from people trying to identify the phone number that just called them. This works because the company has generated around 1 million landing pages for individual phone numbers—one for each number that people commonly search after getting a robocall.","head":"A New Way of Reaching Finance-Oriented Consumers","body_links":"Truebill, a personal finance tool, has sidestepped the traditional strategies its competitors use when acquiring new users who are searching on Google. Instead of ranking for meta terms like \\"personal finance\\", they focus on ranking for specific problems people have like cancelling subscriptions.
Half of Truebill\'s traffic comes from search and, of that, over 80% comes from searches like \\"how to cancel Instacart\\" and \\"how to cancel Equinox\\". As many businesses migrate to a subscription-based model, consumer\'s bank statements are increasingly full of monthly payments. Truebill is a classic personal finance management tool, like Mint, but with a twist: for cable, phone, and security bills, they negotiate with the service provider to get a better rate, and then split the difference with users.
Some businesses strategically target users looking up, via search, how to cancel their service. This way they can control the pipeline and attempt to downgrade rather than outright cancel. For example, Hulu runs ads on the search term \\"how to cancel Hulu\\" in an attempt to own this cancelation journey and, ultimately, to get the user to stay. Conversely, brands like Spotify and BarkBox do not rank #1 for their respective \\"how to cancel\\" queries and are therefore missing out on a retention opportunity. By sliding into the search results for these queries, Truebill is able to sidestep a highly competitive and more expensive avenue for user acquisition used by its competitors.
These sorts of opportunities exist for nearly every industry.
Instead of ranking for \\"lead generation\\", tools that do exactly that will sometimes rank for name+company+email with a dynamic landing page for each of the leads in their database. And with the robocall blocking app RoboKiller, nearly 90% of the site\'s 1M monthly visits come from search, but searches for \\"RoboKiller\\" only account for 0.5%—in fact, the vast majority originate from people trying to identify the phone number that just called them. This works because the company has generated around 1 million landing pages for individual phone numbers—one for each number that people commonly search after getting a robocall.","replaced_keywords":{"Truebill":"Truebill"}},{"body":"The credit builder card is a consumer finance hack: it\'s not really a credit card, and its target audience doesn\'t use credit cards. According to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, 20% of the adult population doesn\'t have any meaningful credit history. And everyone who gets a credit card needs a first credit card. Enter the Credit Builder Card. One company actually uses the \\"Credit Builder Card\\" branding for their product. This company offers secured cards requiring a $200 deposit, available without a credit check. The card has a $200 credit limit—so while it\'s technically a credit card, in practice it\'s a pre-loaded debit card that reports to credit bureaus like a credit card.
Like many entry-level financial products, the point is to cheaply acquire users in some underserved niche, and then hope that some of them will upgrade to more lucrative products. CreditBuilderCard.com is a white-label provider for these cards, and partners with companies that help consumers rebuild credit. Meanwhile, personal finance lead-gen sites like NerdWallet and Credit Karma aggressively market their cards to first-time credit card users.
The credit builder card is designed to help users raise their FICO score and qualify for traditional cards, which are much more lucrative for issuers and processors. This card illustrates how important credit access is, in two ways: first, that almost every adult needs a credit score—for a mortgage, an apartment lease, a car loan, even an employer background check. So a credit card that exists entirely to give the user a FICO score is actually a useful product.
It also shows how ubiquitous credit is. Most Americans use credit cards, and most cardholders already have multiple cards: TransUnion estimated in 2017 that the average cardholder had 2.7 credit cards. Marketing a credit card to someone who already has two or three is tough; it\'s established that they use the product (good), but the competition to market to them, and then get them to actually spend on the card, is fierce. At that point, the best way to sell someone an additional card might be to track down the people who haven\'t used one at all.","head":"The Rise of Credit Builder Cards","body_links":"The credit builder card is a consumer finance hack: it\'s not really a credit card, and its target audience doesn\'t use credit cards. According to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, 20% of the adult population doesn\'t have any meaningful credit history. And everyone who gets a credit card needs a first credit card. Enter the Credit Builder Card. One company actually uses the \\"Credit Builder Card\\" branding for their product. This company offers secured cards requiring a $200 deposit, available without a credit check. The card has a $200 credit limit—so while it\'s technically a credit card, in practice it\'s a pre-loaded debit card that reports to credit bureaus like a credit card.
Like many entry-level financial products, the point is to cheaply acquire users in some underserved niche, and then hope that some of them will upgrade to more lucrative products. CreditBuilderCard.com is a white-label provider for these cards, and partners with companies that help consumers rebuild credit. Meanwhile, personal finance lead-gen sites like NerdWallet and Credit Karma aggressively market their cards to first-time credit card users.
The credit builder card is designed to help users raise their FICO score and qualify for traditional cards, which are much more lucrative for issuers and processors. This card illustrates how important credit access is, in two ways: first, that almost every adult needs a credit score—for a mortgage, an apartment lease, a car loan, even an employer background check. So a credit card that exists entirely to give the user a FICO score is actually a useful product.
It also shows how ubiquitous credit is. Most Americans use credit cards, and most cardholders already have multiple cards: TransUnion estimated in 2017 that the average cardholder had 2.7 credit cards. Marketing a credit card to someone who already has two or three is tough; it\'s established that they use the product (good), but the competition to market to them, and then get them to actually spend on the card, is fierce. At that point, the best way to sell someone an additional card might be to track down the people who haven\'t used one at all.","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"Sometimes friction in a product is a feature, not a bug.
Payment technologies are designed around reducing the friction in payments—from credit cards to Paypal to contactless, each step makes both the spending decision and the payment process simpler. But for some people, this leads to spending more than they\'d like to. For many, counting down with debit cards leads to much better spending behavior than counting up with credit cards.
An increasingly popular solution to this problem is the \\"cash envelopes\\" strategy: setting a budget, then withdrawing enough cash to pay for it, and putting cash in an envelope that corresponds to the spending category. This is part of a broader category of friction-as-a-feature products, among products like screen time monitors that stop users when they’ve spent too long staring.
Meanwhile, Amazon listings for cash envelopes, budget binders, and related products are soaring. And like many self-improvement related searches, interest in cash envelopes peaks during New Years Resolution season, in early January.
The cash envelope approach is partly a mental hack as giving up physical cash feels like losing something, so consumers think twice about spending it. It\'s a response to the fact that credit cards and other payments are designed to feel almost like free money; some cash envelope users say that moving money from one envelope to another feels like borrowing, even though it just means spending money they\'ve already earned.
One surprising reason cash envelopes are more popular is that even though cash is getting less common, it\'s also becoming less of a bad deal. In the early 1980s, short-term certificates of deposit could yield up to 18%, meaning that holding cash instead of keeping money in a bank account was an expensive proposition. Now, with bank accounts generally offering under 1% returns, the cost of foregone interest is a rounding error—while the cost of overspending is all too real. Budgeting has been on a multi-decade upswing in the US, as the decline of defined-benefit pension plans and the rise of self-managed retirement plans puts more control in the hands of individual savers, but also forces them to make hard decisions if they\'re going to achieve financial freedom.","head":"Cash Envelopes","body_links":"Sometimes friction in a product is a feature, not a bug.
Payment technologies are designed around reducing the friction in payments—from credit cards to Paypal to contactless, each step makes both the spending decision and the payment process simpler. But for some people, this leads to spending more than they\'d like to. For many, counting down with debit cards leads to much better spending behavior than counting up with credit cards.
An increasingly popular solution to this problem is the \\"cash envelopes\\" strategy: setting a budget, then withdrawing enough cash to pay for it, and putting cash in an envelope that corresponds to the spending category. This is part of a broader category of friction-as-a-feature products, among products like screen time monitors that stop users when they’ve spent too long staring.
Meanwhile, Amazon listings for cash envelopes, budget binders, and related products are soaring. And like many self-improvement related searches, interest in cash envelopes peaks during New Years Resolution season, in early January.
The cash envelope approach is partly a mental hack as giving up physical cash feels like losing something, so consumers think twice about spending it. It\'s a response to the fact that credit cards and other payments are designed to feel almost like free money; some cash envelope users say that moving money from one envelope to another feels like borrowing, even though it just means spending money they\'ve already earned.
One surprising reason cash envelopes are more popular is that even though cash is getting less common, it\'s also becoming less of a bad deal. In the early 1980s, short-term certificates of deposit could yield up to 18%, meaning that holding cash instead of keeping money in a bank account was an expensive proposition. Now, with bank accounts generally offering under 1% returns, the cost of foregone interest is a rounding error—while the cost of overspending is all too real. Budgeting has been on a multi-decade upswing in the US, as the decline of defined-benefit pension plans and the rise of self-managed retirement plans puts more control in the hands of individual savers, but also forces them to make hard decisions if they\'re going to achieve financial freedom.","replaced_keywords":{"Cash Envelopes":"cash envelopes"}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}},{"body":"","head":"","body_links":"","replaced_keywords":{}}],"meta_desc":"","cta_header":""}],"resourceType":"category"}}}'