Unlike other neo-brokers that have no interest in educating, supporting or even retaining their customers, Tradeoff was founded to engage, support and build the confidence of new traders and investors through the onboarding and education architecture that works so well for online gaming.
While online gaming revenue has doubled of the last 10 years less than 1 in 5 millennials have any form of investment account. The available education material is so dull and confusing even highly motivated millennials who want to learn often give up.
So, we built the platform to address this skill and knowledge gap
We are building a gamified platform to onboard and educate our users in the stock market in the same way as the world’s most successful esports onboard and educate their players. No hours of dull, jargon-filled reading or boring YouTube videos. Within 1 minute of signup a new user would be actively buying and selling fantasy stock in real market conditions, first against bots and then, when ready, against other players..
We build a desktop, HTML, MVP game to test our thesis: First, that millennial gamers want to learn about investing and trading, they are just looking for a way to learn that is fun and exciting. Second, that the skills that make them successful gamers, notably the ability to recognise patterns and control risk, are similar to those they need to be successful traders
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We shared our thesis and MVP with 3 Esports influencers to get their feedback. Their response “ We love this and we know our audience will love this….. can we invest in you guys?”
With their investment and expertise onboard we completed the beta build of our Native mobile apps and asked our new partners to test.
MiniLadd and Wildcat challenged each other to a game, they played, streamed and….. well they broke the internet. We had so much traffic to join our site that our servers melted.
We realised just how excited the gamer audience was with our thesis and that our beta would thus need to be able to stable under much higher volume loads that we had expected. We spent April and March preparing our software for volume.
Here is a short YouTube video of one of our events: MiniLadd v Wildcat in a $50 TradeOff!
With only two videos posted from Craig "MiniLadd" Thompson, and Tyler "Wildcat" Wine, TradeOff has grown to 100,000 players in since March.
To bolster our founding team we wanted a leader with proven chops in the gaming world. Sarne Lightman has a huge resume with some of the biggest brands in gaming and joined us to take ownership of the full customer experience and revenue. Sarne helped lead The Stars Group to a multi Billion-dollar enterprise and sees the same opportunity ahead of TradeOff. Being a trader will soon be COOL!
With our product<>audience fit confirmed and our founding team completed, we are now refining our product roadmap, focusing on onboarding and customer experience, building out our development teams and expanding our gaming/esports influencer-investor team.
Our next major feature release will be our new fractional share reward mechanism allowing players to earn and win real fractional shares of stocks.
Our game-tech is built upon our own bespoke full-stack brokerage platform allowing our users, when ready, to start investing and trading shares & options through our modern and easy to use UI with all the tools, indicators and strategies they have mastered through our gamified onboarding.
For investors, this means incredible value growth as we transition to a full-service brokerage platform that acquires customers at a scale and cost that leaves competitors in our wake.