Interest in investing has grown over the last few years, particularly among the Millenial and Gen Z demographic. There is a democratization of financial information, the rise of Robinhood and other retail investing platforms have reduced friction points (e.g., trading fees, fractional investing, open APIs, etc.) and sparked a new generation of retail investment products. More importantly, as of 2020, millennials own just 3% of all retail equity and almost half didn’t own stock in 2019.
In a deep-dive of 200+ Reddit and Facebook groups related to investing, the membership ranged from 14M subscribers in Reddit’s personal finance channel to 600 members in a Finance/Investing 101 group, with groups ranging from 500-1000 members segmented even further on location, career, and age. More specifically, as Millennials and Gen Zers begin to move away from Facebook groups, many have sought out larger mass communities like that on r/WallStreetBets (3.5M users) or r/stocks (1.3M users) to create dialogue, find communities within communities, or even band together to make significant market moves ($GME).
Meet Finary, building a social network around investing for Gen Z
Finary.io is creating a group messaging platform as their initial wedge into the retail investing market given an increasing need to provide a community within a largely growing retail investing community. Group messaging itself has seen a rise in popularity over the past few years. According to a YouGov poll, 67% of the millenials use group chat daily, becoming a fundamental form of a small-group community alongside real-time communication.
Working with Fin-Fluencers
Additionally, the DIY or learn-it-yourself mindset among Millenials and Gen Zers has further driven the growth of the creator economy as well as the rapidly growing segment of “finfluencers.” These creators focused on investing and stock tips have built followers of 500k+ across Instagram, Tiktok, Patreon, etc. Finary.io plans to use its relationship with highly-followed social media creators and bring them onto the platform in order to help them engage with their audiences more regularly and easily (in addition to building out monetization features for them).
I’m excited to lead Finary’s $3.2 million seed round with participation from Dash Fund and a collection of angels including Lenny Rachitsky, James Beshara, Daniel Pourasghar, Pragma CEO Eden Chen, and Tik Tok personal finance creator Austin Hankwitz.
If you're excited too, please join me in congratulating the Finary team, or join us - we are hiring! And if you want to hear straight from the source, I recorded a short conversation with with CEO Roger Cawdette, below (or link here):