The “investing social network” Public.com is on a mission to shake the Wall Street stereotype and democratize the community of people who invest in the stock market.
The app is looking to bridge the gap between the business world and pop culture and is designed for any and everyone with an interest in public companies to get into the investing game, even if they have limited funds to invest. People may be fans of Airbnb or Etsy and want to learn how they can bet on these companies they love.
“You are seeing that intersection of business and mainstream culture,” says Katie Perry, VP of Marketing at Public.com. “We love that people love talking about businesses, we love that they are into this. We are providing a platform where they can have these conversations in a way that is not like other forums. On other forums, you might just see people screenshotting charts and getting into the weeds of stock talk.”
To lower the barriers to entry, the app allows users to purchase fractional shares of public companies. “That essentially means you can buy a slice of a stock,” Perry explains. “For example, if Amazon is trading around $3,000 a share, in the past, you would need $3,000 to buy a share of Amazon. Now, with fractional shares, you can buy $5 worth of Amazon and own a piece of that share, which really makes the stock market more accessible and allows people to start small and learn as they build their confidence.”
The New York-based investing app has raised around $24 million in funding since the company was founded in 2017. Aiming to be the antithesis of big brokerage houses, the company’s brand story is about being entertaining and accessible.
For instance, Public.com celebrated Airbnb’s IPO by manufacturing a limited-edition cereal called IPOats. The gag paid tribute to the legend that the Airbnb co-founders raised money to start their unicorn by selling cereal boxes of the presidential candidates during the 2008 presidential election – Obama O’s or Cap’N McCain’s. Public.com’s Airbnb cereal box features a caricature of Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Fans were encouraged to tweet a link in order to win one of the 500 available boxes.
Public.com is also trying to build awareness through partnerships with influencers not typically associated with finance. The site is working skateboarding legend Tony Hawk; Haley Sacks, the founder of Mrs. Dow Jones, a 29 years-old who is trying to make finance cool to millennials and Gen Z; and Paul Rabil, founder of the Premier Lacrosse League. These influencers can help the brand appeal to a wider audience of people to consumers and broaden the investor class.
“It’s a place where people can share why they invested and go into the reasoning and how they make their decisions, and talk about business trends,” explains Perry. “So you have these educational conversations flowing right beside the investments in the app where people can connect and share ideas.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Perry, who has also held executive roles at Ursa Major Media, Comscore, Suzy and 360i to discuss Public.com’s approach to marketing, and the Airbnb campaign.
What is Public’s mission and how are you telling your story?
Our big mission as a company is to make the stock market inclusive, educational, and fun. Part of that is breaking out of the stereotypes of the stock market: You think about the guys on Wall Street in the blue jackets. You think about movies, like The Wolf of Wall Street, you think about finance memes. It’s a very closed off, homogenous culture.
A big part of what we want to do is broaden the tent, make it more inclusive, and make investing something that is more mainstream for more people. That’s where things like the IPO campaign flow from. We look to moments where business news breaks out of those little circles and really infiltrates conversations outside of Wall Street culture. For us, those are opportunities to really shine a light on what we are trying to do.
Who is your core audience and how are you reaching them?
We’re really trying to broaden the investor class in the U.S. If you think about it, there are obviously people who are more on the spectrum of a day trader: They’re short term investing, they’re watching the charts, they might use more complex instruments to trade. That’s one group that has historically been targeted and doubled-down on by a lot of investing apps. To us, we also welcome that kind of investor, but we believe that there is an entire band of people who would really take to investing, are interested in it, enjoy talking about business, but they feel like the existing communities are not for them.
For example, our community is 40% women. We have people in there from a diverse range of professional backgrounds and life experiences. You can find teachers on Public, you can find creatives, freelancers, small business owners, health care professionals, etc. We really believe that getting a more diverse mix of people in there is not only a good thing to do, but it’s also beneficial to our members. You are now getting more diversity of thought, where you can share ideas around the things that you know really well. For example, if I’m a marketer and I really understand Pinterest’s business model, I can speak to that, whereas, maybe someone I’m connected to works in healthcare and they can speak to BioTech stuff.
With the IPOs, one of the bigger groups or sub-communities within Public is this start-up tech tribe, people who are not only interested in what our product does, but also how it’s built, designed and how it functions. There is a large group of people in the community for whom that is their area of interest. With AirBnB, obviously one of the most accessible start-up success stories going public, we prepared this campaign to align with when they would file their S-1 with the SEC, which happened this Monday.
What was the idea behind the Airbnb campaign?
A while back, we started working on this idea for the campaign. There’s this cult story around Airbnb that a lot of people in the startup world know and reference. They needed some cash in their early days, they weren’t earning revenue from their core product, so they had to get really creative and scrappy. It was 2008, it was the presidential election, and they essentially culture-jacked that moment, and they produced these two cereal boxes, Obama O’s opposing Cap’n McCain, and sold them for $40 on an online store. They ended up making a profit of about $30,000 in two days.
As the legend goes, it captured the attention of investors who looked at them and said, “This founding team is doing something a little different,” and then they helped spur their next funding rounds and the rest is history. So we produced these cereal boxes, there are 500 of them that we are giving away. It’s basically an homage to their beginnings and a celebration of their journey from three people selling air mattresses (or the ability to sleep on air mattresses) to now going to be traded on the NASDAQ as a public company.
We launched a microsite that’s super simple. You hit a button to tweet to win, and we are continuously giving away the boxes. We also shipped some of the boxes to early investors in the company and other people connected to the journey. We produced physical cereal boxes, which was definitely a first for me, but we have an amazing design team that was able to bring it to life. The product plays into how the original cereal boxes looked, which has caricatures of McCain and Obama. So we made a caricature of Brian Chesky, the CEO on the box. We built in some fun Easter eggs too. There is a maze on the back that shows all of the hurdles they overcame. It’s a family-sized box. They just started shipping Monday, so people should be getting them either today or tomorrow.
Are you hoping this kind of effort can help promote social sharing?
One is obviously entering with the Twitter button built in, which just creates organic hype around our brand, it increases our exposure. The next wave is the physical boxes. We have a lot of high profile people in our community that we sent the boxes to. Some of our partners in the app that are creators in the financial space, we sent them a wave of boxes to see the physical product.
I think there is something really compelling about sending someone something that is actually physical versus just asking them to amplify a digital asset. They were all stoked to hear about it. Even for people who didn’t know the story, we explained it on the microsite and there’s a card on the box so they immediately get it. Having a physical tie-in performed very well. I think the lower hanging fruit, which we could have done, would have been to make a little graphic in social with the cereal box to commemorate, but we wanted to take it a step further and make it a real thing.
It is a fun and entertaining campaign, which is not always what you think of when you think of a brokerage house. Is this part of your brand foundation, being entertaining?
That’s core to our mission. We are building a different culture around the stock market, so that playbook that you’ve seen historically just does not work for us. If we really want to broaden the group of people investing, reach more people, and make it something that they feel like is for them and accessible, we have to go about it in a different way.
This is just one of many things that we’ve done. We have a little microsite called Public.com/drops and we continuously do things like this, outside of our core product to get our message across. It really is where business news meets mainstream and that’s a hook for a lot of people. Airbnb is a great example, this is a company that a lot of people have had first-hand experience with, either as a renter or a host, and when you can tie this stuff into things that are tangible for people, it just resonates more.
That’s core to our marketing strategy is how to find these moments. We’ve done other things, we did these Ticker Tees which was essentially the format of the T-shirt that’s really popular with the four words and the ampersand. We built a site and made it so that if you put your Public.com handle on the site, you could actually create your own Ticker Tee with the four stocks that you feel really strongly about. That also plays into the fact that we are more for longer term investors. If you put a company on a shirt, you are probably going to hold onto that company for a while. It’s reinforcing our differentiators but it’s also something fun and something that people can get behind even if they wouldn’t consider themselves part of “Wall Street culture.”
What do you think consumer behavior around investing will look like in 2021?
One of the interesting things this year, we obviously had a lot of tailwind. It was very fortunate to be in that small group of companies that actually had tailwind with the pandemic. Earlier in the year, the market was really volatile and took a couple of big drops in March and April. At that point, companies like us really had a lot of growth.
Some people who wanted to start investing saw this as a buying opportunity, so that’s not investing advice, it’s just what they did. One thing that we really play into in this era is business news. I read an article that said business news was the fastest growing news category at the beginning of the pandemic. Sports were at a screeching halt, nobody cared about the Kardashians, people wanted to learn more about businesses and looked at them as a form of entertainment to follow and learn, and also an opportunity for self-improvement.
Then, you add the fact that people have more time, they are in their homes, they’re looking for ways to self improve on social platforms, and our app plays into all of those things.
As we continue, these past few weeks, there has been a lot of news about companies that have popped out of Wall Street culture and into the mainstream, Airbnb is obviously one. Another one was the same day that Airbnb filed their S-1, it was announced that Tesla would join the S&P 500. The S&P 500 doesn’t change very often, Tesla is what you would call a “cult stock,” it has a following, their CEO is a celebrity.
On Public.com, it’s more about business trends. One conversation going on in the app right now is about Etsy: is Etsy going to have a big quarter, are people going to be looking for personalized holiday gifts this year? Things like that, you see a broader conversation, and when the conversation is broader, more people feel like they can be included and more people participate.
