He Built a $1.2B App that Lets You Insider Trade (Legally)

We're like, if we can't beat them, we might as well join them. >> That was Brian. He made $200,000 in one day by building an app that copies Nancy Pelosy's stock trades. He took advantage of a simple legal loophole. >> We just [music] passed 18.5 million in ARR. >> But that's not even the most interesting part. The difference between a $200,000 day and a $20,000 day for Brian wasn't just viral marketing. It was how they engineered their onboarding to make customers feel like they were winning before they even signed up. >> If the screen is more than 100 mental calories, it's [music] too much. In this video, Brian walks us through his entire onboarding flow, including how to engineer magic moments, the controversial hiring practice that he swears by, and why he doesn't even care about subscription retention anymore because [music] he tracks something even more important. But first, how did a political meme turn into something that generates over$18 million a year in revenue? >> Brian, first off, can you explain what this is? The need money for insider trading started on Twitter and we just saw 3 years ago that there are these politicians trading in the stock market right after legis legislation was passed and the stocks would jump 20 30 40%. And my co-friend and I were like there's so much corruption. How do we how do we end it? And so we originally tried to talk to politicians by banning them from trading. And then we realized that that just wasn't going to happen because it was so slow. We're like if we can't beat them, we might as well join them. Let's build an application that connects your Robin Hood, your brokerage, and it buys the stocks of the different politicians. >> And for anyone who doesn't know, can you explain kind of the loophole that makes this possible? >> Yeah. So, in 2008, uh there's a stock act passed, um which mandated that politicians file every time they buy a stock. I think what happened before 2008, a lot of politicians, I think under the Obama administration were like, [music] there's so many people doing insider trading, um but we don't know about it. one way to stop it and actually get a pass is if we expose it, maybe something will be able to happen. And so after 2008, every stock trade that a politician had to make became public. Um, and so we analyze that data. We're like, "Wow, they now it's public, but they're still doing it or allegedly they're still doing it." And that allows us to get that information and follow them automatically. >> What has your revenue growth been like? >> Uh, it's been crazy. Um, it's been around 150% year-over-year. In 2023 and 2024, it's been more like 300 400%. Right now, we uh just passed [music] 18.5 million in ARR and then we had our best month in January um of like 2.8 million. >> How much of that comes from the policy >> tracker? It used to be like 90%. Um now we've diversified into a lot of different uh strategies and different portfolios. I think it's probably around 30 to 40%. Uh today before autopilot, we didn't really focus on onboarding. About 80 90% of my time was building the application. When we pivoted to autopilot, we switched that entirely. We were like, we don't want people to get into the app without experiencing what we call the magic moment. Um, and so we said we have to force the magic moment on people and we'd rather people not use the app than not experience the magic moment. >> Can you define the magic moment >> for a consumer? There's two phrases I like. If you have to catch two rabbits, you catch none. Um, or if like if I have like balls of paper and I like throw them at you and you're going to try to catch all of them, you'll probably catch none. But if you try to catch one, you probably will catch one. And so you really the the success lies in really being focused and determining what is that one thing that you want people to know or to do or to experience. And so for us [music] it was a a trade in the Robin Hood account. >> Is there first thing a time horizon where you're like okay I want to deliver this value within [music] 30 seconds of logging into my app. Like what is that? >> Yeah that that's a good question. If the person can't complete onboarding while going to the bathroom it's too long. So, a lot of times when we'll do onboarding, this is a very weird thing, but I'll lit literally go on Instagram, scroll, then I'll go to the chest flight app, time myself for about a minute and a half. I'm not actually going to the bathroom, but I'll time myself for a minute and a half, and then I try to get like distracted, but also complete onboarding. When I think about like the product onboarding, which I think is where 80% of the focus should go if you don't have product market fit [music] yet, it should really be like how do you onboard people and force them into the magic moment. The the time it takes it should be under 2 minutes to experience the magic moment. And once they experience the magic moment, that's when you've truly flipped their mind set outside of like this competing with Instagram where they're like really focused on your application. Um, and so yeah, our goal is how do how can we get them to the magic moment as quick as possible but also uh do things that frame their mind correctly to experience the magic moment. [music] So the the thing that I was talking about um that we do on onboarding when we charge people, we're charging people $100 [music] per year. And for a lot of people who invest like if they're going to invest 500 bucks, $100 is a lot of money to spend if they're only going to invest $500. And so we started seeing a lot of people come in who didn't have that much money and we started getting like negative reviews on the app store. People like, "Oh, it's way too expensive." This, that, the other. On onboarding, what we wanted to do was filter people out. But we ran an AB test. We wanted to see what effects would actually happen. Um, and so we actually put a screen that was a very, I would say, kind of a manipulative screen, which was, will you make more than $100,000 this year? Yes or no? And if you said no, we said we blocked you from using the app, but we allow you to go back and change your answer if you want to and say yes. [music] Um, and so what we actually found out is the people who could not afford it originally with with our AB test, a lot of them said no, then they said yes, and then they went through and paid at a 70% higher rate. We didn't really expect it, but when we reflect on it, it kind of makes sense because now Autopilot seems like a club for people who make a lot of money and they're getting access to something special. And when you feel like you're getting access to something you shouldn't have access to, you also don't complain as much. You're like, "Yeah, I'm not supposed to be here and but I want to be here." Um, and so that's a very interesting screen. We still have it today. [music] Um, and a lot of people might think if you block people from using your app in uh in this way, you're going to have less conversions and increase our conversions and increase the number of people getting through. >> Can we onboard me? >> Let's do it. [laughter] >> Ryan's about to teach us how he thinks about customer onboarding by onboarding me to his own app while we're kitted out in [music] his merch. [laughter] >> And what was the first like principle of this? So when when we're like changing up onboarding or thinking about onboarding, we try to get in a very distracted frame of mind just to make sure that even if you're distracted, you [music] can still get through it. Okay. And so there's enough dopamine hits, there's enough prov like provocative marketing messages where you're just like it stops you. [music] It makes you think. >> Cool. So we're going to do this in a very haphazard way. [laughter] I'm kidding. Explore popular portfolios. Enter phone number. We're going to blur that part out. [laughter] Oh wow. Okay. Pick a portfolio. Okay. Select Pelosi tracker. talk me through some of these like decisions that you're making. This feels pretty seamless so far. >> You'll see on this page right here, you only see the option for public. [music] So, one thing not a lot of people know this, but with iOS apps, you're able to see up to 50 apps, which apps they have installed. So, it's kind of interesting. So, we know that you have public installed and not Robin Hood. If you had Robin Hood installed, we would actually just [music] show you Robin Hood right here and not public. And the goal is to not like imagine you just see like a list of all these brokerages, [music] then you have to read all of them. But if we're like, "They don't even have any of these approaches. Why are we showing them that list?" We'll just show them the ones that they have. But if you're like, "Wait, I actually do have something." You could just like show more and it'll show you all of them. >> Oh wow. >> But that but that screen has a lot of mental calories and it might overwhelm you. So if you're in a distracted state, you might be like, "Ah, whatever. I'm going to go back." So that will just allow you to select public. >> Wow. And so the goal of that is to reduce the cognitive load on the >> Yeah. >> customer. Is that how you think about mental calories? Is like how [music] >> Exactly. Yeah. because we have a lot of screens that are cognitive load and we like this might be a more high cognitive load screen. Um, and so if we could reduce cog cognitive load elsewhere, we could increase it in some other places. [music] >> If you're going through and you're auditing your onboarding, whether it's for an app or for really like a SAS product, anything are you asking yourself at each turn, okay, how many mental calories does this step have? And is it is there a way to reduce it or is it necessary because it's giving context or how are you thinking through that? So you're able to what we've seen is like you're able to increase the mental calories of a screen if the person gets anxiety from that action, right? Because now you're outside of the this you're outside of the ADD Instagram uh like vibe. So right now when you're like you just you you basically you saw invest like a politician, you you just saw like this provocative Pelosi AI World War II portfolio, you're now like not even thinking about in Instagram is not in the back of your mind anymore. That's really hard to get to. Most apps when you go to them and download them, they're just so boring that you're still thinking about Instagram and going back to Instagram. And so already at this point, we've I think successfully gotten you outside of that frame of mind. >> I got here pretty seamlessly to where I'm like, I'm just excited about this initial screen and then now I'm about to have to make a big decision. Like, how do you get me into this? Yes. I drained my entire bank account [laughter] here. This close to making a good episode. Okay. Select an account. choose minimum 500. Okay. And is why is the minimum 500? >> Uh two reasons. One, because we're going to be charging people 100 bucks. And if you put let's say 100 bucks in [music] and then we charge you 100 bucks. It's like you have to make double your money in a year to just return [music] the cost. And so we're like, what's a good minimum that we could have where it's not super egregious and [music] you can only land that 500 bucks. Yeah. Once you swipe up, it's going to make all of these stock trades immediately. But to pause there, you're actually buying those stocks and so I'm already hooked at this point. >> So we've actually like they're buying the stocks right now. So on your phone, you're going to see all these push notifications for stocks being bought. And so we just showed you the magic moment without you paying [music] yet. And the the psychological factor is you now have these stocks in your account. When do you sell them is a question you're going to ask, >> right? >> Well, now you don't have if you pay for it, you don't have to think about when to sell them. >> What happens if I don't pay for it? Then you have to think no we will not trade for you again. So if you if you go to free >> so now I'm [music] just like >> you just have all these stocks. >> Wow. >> So you could see why people are like really want to pay because it will now tell them uh when to sell and [music] when to buy. >> And if you were to reverse this like I would have gotten to this screen I would have been like okay and I don't really want to pay $100 year and I wouldn't have seen >> Yeah. If we put it before Exactly. People would have been like uh I don't know if I want this. I don't know if [music] does it work? Does it actually trade? they haven't felt that the the specialness yet. Um, and so a lot of people So, we've done that AB test [music] and it was about 70% worse. >> If you were gonna walk any startup founder through how to like audit your onboarding and AB test at every turn like you guys do, what would you say? >> Identify what that magic moment is. [music] Really try to figure out how do you make that as special as possible. Just like optimize that as much as possible, maximize it. have like have people go through it and if they don't say, "Wow, this is incredible." Don't try to prompt them. If they don't say, "Wow, this is incredible," or have like an emotional response, [music] it's not strong enough. And you just got to keep doubling down on it. Um, and that's mainly for consumer products. B2B products might be a little different. The second thing I would do is [music] learn is try to identify where's the resistance point mentally to get to that magic moment. I would say for us, it's connecting a financial institution. you're asking for a username and [music] password. And then you have to look at how do you reduce the anxiety of doing that action. And that could be with like, you know, brand names. It could be with social proof where you could be like, we have 3 million downloads. We have, you know, $1.2 billion of assets connected. [music] Then people feel safer as opposed to like not seeing those numbers. You're like, is this just a random app somewhere? And then three, just don't shoot yourself in the foot. I think there's a lot of people who just [music] have so much information that's just unnecessary. And if you're ever wondering about is it unnecessary, just AB test it. The data will show you if it's unnecessary and most most things are unnecessary. [music] The the other thing that I would say is when giving options to people in an onboarding flow, you want to limit it as much as possible. Um, so you'll notice we have hundreds of portfolios on autopilot. [music] When you went through onboarding, you only saw four. Um, and there's like a see more and a lot of people, you know, it's been a a big thing for us is like, do we want to show all of the portfolios or is that too overwhelming? And so we've done an AB test and once we show you all the portfolios, you're 70% more likely to not make a decision. Um, as opposed [music] to if you see four, which is kind of common sense, but that data point I think a lot of startup founders won't necessarily appreciate. There is a saying like three not two in like selling shoes. Let's say you go into a shoe store, say, "Hey, could I see that pair of shoes?" shoes, they'll bring you that pair of shoes. They say, "Oh, could I see that pair of shoes?" They'll bring you that pair of shoes. So now you have two. And then you ask for another pair of shoes and they'll say, "Okay, which one do you want us to put back?" And so then you're like, "Oh, so now you have to make the decision to put one back." So you put it back. Now you always have two. And so that shoe seller um when you're when you're faced with two options, you're going to buy them as opposed to if you have like three, four, five, six pairs of shoes in front of you, you might be a little more overwhelmed. Um and so for us, we just looked, could we as much as possible make every question binary, just a yes or a no? Um, if we can't, could we make the options as minimal as possible? >> By the way, Brian's a member of Hampton, the company behind this show. So, if you're a founder doing over 3 million in annual revenue, you should check us out at the link in the description. Can you talk through your hiring process? >> So, very early on, it took a lot of time and we were hiring in Orange County and it was like me and my co-founders uh finding people. [music] Um, and we've had like different versions of hiring with different questions that we asked and eventually we were we were hiring people and firing people at rates that are very high. I think we would uh for every four people we would hire, we'd fire three people. Um and that was really tough. It gets expensive because we'd also pay them severance. Um >> within what time window would you fire them? >> Uh about 3 months. Um some people like 2 weeks. It's just very clear. It's like this we should have done better in the interview process, but at around 15 employees, we actually hired a full-time recruiter, which a lot of our venture capitalists and a lot of people like, you guys are crazy. Why? Like I'm like, we're just hiring so much and firing so fast. we need to get this right. So, we hired a full-time recruiter. Um, he actually used to work at Tik Tok. Uh, he was a recruiter for Tik Tok. And they also had very, very high standards. I think Tik Tok was actually 669. Um, which is like they're working on weekends, working 9-hour days. And I was like, "All right, he probably knows how to find people who are willing to give it their all and are really talented." And so, he's really helped us refine uh the hiring process. And I think now with him, we're at about a 50% success rate, which is still pretty bad. So for every two people we hire, we fire one. Um, but since we've moved to New York, we actually haven't hired anyone we've hired in New York. And so I think it's a testament to the just the talent that is that is here. >> Is [music] that explicit in the hiring process for you guys is how kind of like how much turnover there is. >> Yeah. So we after we after we present an offer right after I do what's called uh a call to persuade them not to join. Um, and so I say, "Hey, it's going to be really tough. We [music] historically fire a lot of people. Um, we think you're incredible, but just recognize this is like the culture that we have and what you're coming into. [music] Um, and it's going to be very difficult and for some people that scarce people and some people get really excited about that. You could kind of tell the people that get excited about that are the ones who end up working. The people who are more hesitant generally don't end up working because they are hesitant for a good reason where they're like, "Oh, I don't know if I want to put that much effort into it or I don't know if I will fit in there." And generally they don't. What do you tell them about the culture? >> Um, so I actually tell them two things. One, I tell them that we're actually specifically not 669. [music] Um, intentionally I think working at maximum 60 hours per week like like working working is probably the most optimal for people, but in where we differ is in that 60 [music] hours, you're expected to be very very productive. Um, and your efficiency [music] matters a lot. Um, and the way you debug things, the way you come to decisions fast matters a lot. And I think what we also tell them is the reason why you're able to be very efficient [music] in those 60 hours is because of all of the thinking you do outside of work. When you're going to bed, you're thinking about solving a problem. When you're [music] in the shower, when you're watching, if you're on the marketing team and you see like a commercial, you're you like take a picture of it because you're like, "Oh, that was good copy." You're just very curious about the world. You if you're listening to a podcast, you're like, "Oh, how is this done?" And so I think even though we we try to get people to work 50 to 60 hours, which I think a lot of people would say is not that much for [music] a startup, we actually expect that there's a lot of curiosity beyond that. Um [music] and that's where I think people struggle to fit into the environment. And so we actually do in the interview process, we really um try to measure for curiosity just [music] in life in general. >> How >> we'll ask them what's a belief that they hold that's that other people around them disagree with. Um, [music] and you could tell like how they answer that question. Usually the most curious people are going to have like [music] one, two, maybe three. And they might they might hesitate cuz it could be like a political thing that they don't want to share. Um, but it could be like just a worldview or it could be something on like marketing or something on engineering. Um, but usually the most curious people will have like, man, I have like this [music] this this and they'll like keep talking about that question. I'm like, okay, that person's very curious. Um, and then also when you ask questions, >> [music] >> um, generally they'll have multiple answers that are well thought out. Obsessive people obsess over whatever they're working on. So just try to look at historical examples of of obsession. Um, that could be in sports generally. We actually there's a lot of people have played like college sports here at like D1 universities. That's actually a great sign that they're going to fit in for two reasons. One, they could be pushed really hard without taking it personally. And [music] then two, they've already proven that they could obsess over something that they're doing. Um, so that's another thing we ask a lot about about sports. If they play sports and it's not at a competitive level, I used to think that that was a signal, but it's actually not. Um, so we really try to figure out what have they just done at a very high level more than most people. And if they've like, you know, if they play guitar very well and I'm like, "Oh, cool. Like, do you have any YouTube videos?" I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I do." Um, they'll like send me I'm like, "Wow, they're actually really good. That that's an obsessed person." So, you're looking a lot at things outside of work as well. >> Rarely do I ask people um what they've done at the companies they've worked for. And I think because most companies are not great places to work. Um if they've worked for a startup, that's kind of interesting. I we kind of will ask, but if they're working for like Amazon or if they're working for Walmart, uh Labs or if they're working for something, it's like those companies just have so much bureaucracy, it's hard to actually obsess over anything that you work for at those big companies. Did you have a hesitancy at first around like this super high turnover approach? Like you guys fire a lot of people. >> I think I've always dreamed that uh that autopilot would be the place where we had the best talent and I think every company says that. Um but I do think it matters where is your bar. Um, and I think as we've grown, like our bar has only increased. [music] And so, although it makes me very sad to get rid of people, it's actually very difficult emotionally. I think there's some people who could just get rid of people and not feel anything. It actually like like I know it does suck for the other person. That's why we try to make it right with um 3 months of severance. So, if we hired someone for 2 weeks, we actually give 3 months of severance, which is very rare. We actually got this from the Netflix co-founder. Um he said if you're able to give a lot of severance [music] it makes the reason you do it you do it for them but you also do it for the culture because it makes it easier to get rid of people. If you have to get rid of people with no severance [music] that's very tough because you're like man this person has a whole life but if you actually give people you know 3 4 months [music] they could like use that to find another opportunity and not affect their life too much. And so although it's difficult um and I we don't like doing it, we do think it's necessary to just maintain the high standards that we have here. >> We were leaving and then Brian dropped wisdom. So now he's gonna reiterate what he just said today. >> So the one thing when we first started autopilot is we only had the ability to subscribe to one of our like one portfolio or one autopilot subscription which was 100 bucks a year and that was actually going great. We had around 70% retention uh for subscription retention after 12 months. We were meeting with our venture capitalist. His name is Jeff for he founded StubHub. He kind of looked at me very like sternly. He's like, "So, you're telling me users can only decay. You can only lose customers. You can't make more from the customers that you already have." And I was like, "Yes." He's like, "At StubM um 80% of our revenue came from 20% of the customers, the super users. If users can't pay up to 6 6x [music] their initial subscription or more, you're not maximizing your your super user base." And so, after I heard that, I was like, "Man, that's so right. we need to have more subscriptions and the ability to pay up to 600 bucks in our application or more. [music] We implemented that and now today our 12-month revenue retention is 110%. Which is way better than it would be if we didn't do that. It would have been around 60 to 70%. Um, and that's one way that we've able to scale that, [music] increase the LTB of our customer base. So, we have different um different subscriptions. You could pay $100 here, uh, $200 there, $300 [music] there. So, I think right now you could actually pay up to like $5,000 per year if you buy all of the subscriptions, but it's a marketplace, so you could just um depending on what portfolios you could buy baskets of portfolios to get. If you're going to add up all the different things you could [music] pay for um they should equal at least 6x your initial subscription. There's two ways you could think about it. one, you could have like a really high one where it's just like this is going to cost you 600 bucks or you could think about it in [music] terms of units where each additional unit is an additional 100 bucks and then the super users are just going to buy six of the units. Yeah, some products might be different and you just got to think creatively about how you want to like get to that number. >> And last thing I forgot to mention, we are making this video for you. Let us know what else you want to see here. What are some problems that you're having in your business that you think that we should cover here? Um, and if you are a founder, check us out at joinhampton.com.

I made this video for my founder community called Hampton. Founders doing $20m/year (Brian's a member) Check it: https://joinhampton.com/yt5 Brian Schardt is the co-founder of Autopilot (Pelosi Tracker) - The business does $18.5M in revenue today, with over $1.2B assets under management. Hampton my private community of 1,000+ founders and CEOs running companies from $3 million to $500 million. Many of our members created the products and companies you use every day. Members are placed in curated groups of 8 peers at similar stages who meet IRL in their city. Plus...our world famous Slack channel. Our dear friend Brian, who you just watched, is one of our members (so you know the type of people who join). Its highly vetted...apply here: https://joinhampton.com/yt5