Creating a monetization strategy for Trinkerr App

Akash Sharma
6 min readMay 24, 2022

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Millions of people trapped in quarantine signed up for trading applications and put their money into stocks or cryptocurrency as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

That change has been inextricably linked to social media, thanks to an army of millennials and Gen Zers driving it.

Consider how traders on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum are destroying hedge funds by driving up meme stock prices. Or consider the massive community of so-called ‘finfluencers’ on TikTok, where the investment hashtag has accumulated over 4.2 billion views.

Now, a number of well-known companies and startups are wagering that social trading will be the future of investing for millennials.

What is Trinkerr?

Trinkerr is India’s first social trading platform. The company’s platform offers a mix of vernacular content and technology and allows users to follow financial experts and track their performance, enabling retail investors to view, learn, follow and execute the strategies of their peers or more experienced traders.
It allows users to trade in a variety of financial instruments including stocks, commodities, currencies, and more. Users can also connect with other traders on the platform and share information, tips, and techniques. Trinkerr is a cutting-edge trading platform that is gradually gaining traction among Indian traders.

What is social trading?

Social trading

Social trading is a type of investment that allows users to watch how their peers and trading professionals act to duplicate or copy their trading techniques.

When compared to engaging traditional wealth managers, it requires relatively little financial market knowledge and saves money. It follows social media norms, primarily communication, information sharing, mutual assistance, and collaboration. Traders have the option of copying other people’s trades or investing proportionately in the same portfolio. Trading has become increasingly popular among millennials and Gen Z in 2021, and this trend is expected to continue. Social trading internet networks are getting a lot of popularity because of the amount of transparency that social trading platforms provide to investors. As a result, this trading method is being widely used because it combines financialization and profit generation.

Mission of Trinkerr

  1. to democratise financial markets and create wealth for the bottom of the pyramid.
  2. to bring the benefits of best of the class trading and risk management expertise to millions of retail investors for free.

Features of Trinkerr

  1. It lets users find relevant expert traders and also emulate their portfolios and earn similar returns.
  2. It has a feed on which users can get interesting posts on trades and the stock market and interact with experts
  3. Trinkerr verifies past returns of all the portfolios before showing them to the user to avoid any fraud or false reporting of performance
  4. Lets users see which stocks are there in any portfolio and in what proportion
  5. Once the user replicates a trader’s portfolio, the user gets real-time notifications whenever the trader executes a new trade in their portfolio. The user can choose to mirror the same trades immediately in their replica portfolio with a single click
  6. Orders are placed through the user’s brokerage account. The user doesn’t need to open any new account.
  7. Trinkerr supports 14 brokerage firms. Hence the user can continue to trade with their favourite broker.
  8. No lock-in period for any investment. No exit fees.

User-segments of Trinkerr

  1. Retail investors looking to emulate the strategies and investments of expert traders
  2. Expert traders who post information about the stock market, and their trades and let investors copy their investment strategies.

Pain points solved by Trinkerr

  1. New investors do not know where to invest in the equity market because they either lack knowledge or do not have enough time to research different stocks
  2. There are few people offering tips but they charge a lot of money. A new investor doesn’t want to spend much on tips. Moreover, they find it difficult to trust strangers with their money as frauds are also quite prevalent in this business.
  3. Mutual funds have high management and exit fees
  4. Many expert traders post their trades and performance on different social media platforms to lure investors to pay them for tips or courses but their trades are unverified and there is a lack of transparency regarding their actual portfolio performance.

Market sizing and business opportunity

The social trading platform market size is expected to grow from $2.22 Billion in 2021 to $3.77 Billion by 2028; it is estimated to rise at a CAGR of 7.8% between 2021 and 2028.

Monetization strategy

Trinkerr hasn’t started monetizing its platform yet

Currently, Trinkerr doesn’t charge any fee to its customers. Here are a few ways in which Trinkerr can monetize its platform:

  1. Transaction fees
    Charge users a small fee on every transaction (Buying/Selling)
    Metrics to track:
    a) Total number of transactions per day
    b) Number of transactions per user per month
    c) Average transaction value
  2. Subscription model
    Introduce a subscription model. The subscription would give investors information about the trades of Institutional investors, and famous high net worth individuals like Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, Radhakrishnan Damani. etc and block deals information on stocks in the investor’s portfolio or watchlist. A lot of this information is available publicly. Trinkerr can differentiate itself by providing quick extremely quick updates and giving the users the option to replicate these trades. The previous expert trader’s trade replication would continue to be free.
    Metrics to track:
    a) Free to paid conversion rate
    b) Churn rate
    c) Pricing page bounce rate
    d) Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
    e) Subscription renewal rate
  3. Donation
    Introduce an option for investors to donate to expert traders. This would be a great incentive for expert traders to post trades. The donation could be just to appreciate the expert for their performance if the investor is happy with the expert or the expert could offer services like one on one personalized services like personal financial advice or portfolio review.
    Trinkerr could take some commission from this fee and give the rest to the expert.
    Metrics to track:
    a) Average donation value
    b) Average amount donated per user per month
    c) Average amount of donation received per expert per month
  4. Marketplace for courses
    A lot of expert investors want to launch courses to teach investors about stock market investing and trading. Trinkerr could leverage its social network and launch a platform for its expert traders to conduct their courses.
    Trinkerr could take some % of the course fee as its commission and give the rest of the course fee to the expert.
    Metrics to track:
    a) Number of courses purchased per day
    b) Average course fee
    c) Number of courses created per month
    d) Average number of people enrolling per course
  5. API integration
    Charge one-time integration fees or fees based on usage by charging businesses for their APIs to integrate different brokers or buy a basket of stocks
  6. Advertisements
    Trinkerr could leverage its social feed feature to show relevant advertisements to its users and charge companies who want to advertise on its platform.
    Metrics to track:

    a) CTR (Click-through-rate)
    b) CPC (Cost-per-click)
    c) CPM (Cost-per-thousand impressions)
    d) CPC (Cost-per-conversion)
    e) NPS (Net Promoter score)
    f) CLV (Customer lifetime value)
    g) CAC (Customer acquisition cost)

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Akash Sharma

A product padawan documenting his journey towards becoming a Product Jedi master | https://www.linkedin.com/in/akash-sharma-1502/