Welcome to the Category Surfers where we break down go-to-market strategies so you can build the best growth engine for your SaaS.

GTM Breakdown: PIN

PIN lets anyone launch their own investment club to invest in startups with your friends/community. The founder (ex-Asana) raised $5.6M from Initialized, GSR, and NEA.

Here is PIN’s GTM strategy and what you can copy from them:

What is it?

Investing in startups is hard. You need to find good deals, startups need to agree to take your small check, and you need to do all the legal work.

Pin (power in numbers) lets you pool money with a community or friends to launch an investment club — this makes it 10X easier to invest in startups.

Here is how an investment club is different than a VC fund:

What is their strategy?

Imagine your fav B2B influencer launching an investment club where you could spend time with other folks and vote on what to invest in.

Would you do it? I would.

My research shows that they are more focused on launching these smaller investment clubs (university or company alums).

Their demand gen strategy is around startup investing — they have a ton of content about that! What I feel like I missing are case studies.

I think the low-hanging fruit for them would be doing spotlights or interviews on how PIN helps someone support their community and make money.

How big is the market?

Startups as an asset class are about $300B market. But the overall investment club market has been on a decline in the past two decades.

But the category of equity management has grown 143% in the past 3 years. They’re doing more than equity management, but that’s a broad category I’d put them in.

PIN’s got heavy competition:

Will be interesting to see how PIN navigates its competition — but I’d think that most of the risk might come from users having an interest in launching an investment club.

That’s it!

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