Guiding the first investment, not explaining it

INCO is a collective-investment platform — CRI, CRA and real-estate funds — a category most people have never touched. The quarter called for more engagement from the existing base, and the funnel was blunt about where it broke: only about 8% of signups became investors, and fewer than half of those made a second investment.

The easy read was “people don’t understand how to use the platform,” and the easy fixes were the obvious two: explain more, or hand out more extrinsic incentives — bonuses to manufacture motivation. This case is about why both answers were wrong.

It started before the guide existed. I ran a workshop with partners, engineering and design to review INCO’s loyalty initiatives — the main one a program that paid bonuses to the most engaged users. I brought desk research, benchmarking and a hard look at how those solutions were actually performing.

We shut the program down — the cost-benefit didn’t hold. But it left a better question in its place: if we’re not going to reward engagement, how do we awaken it from within? The bet became intrinsic motivation, and that became the “Objectives & Motivations” discovery.

To avoid designing in the dark, I ran a discovery: benchmarking, desk research, business and product data, and 19 interviews across very different investor profiles. I closed it with a lean-inception and design-sprint workshop, where the concept came out aligned across the group.

The central insight changed the project’s direction. INCO isn’t where someone keeps their life goals — it composes larger ones. The goals that make sense inside the platform are about using and performing on it, and the real value was never one investment; it was building a diversified portfolio within a strategy.

So yes, the gap was about understanding — but closing it by explaining would miss the pain. It made far more sense to guide people’s actions at the level the platform actually operates.

Instead of teaching people about collective investment, we chose to conduct their actions on the platform — friendly, and lightly gamified. Every more-obvious alternative was a version of “explain” or “reward” — a new loyalty program, a tutorial onboarding, intro walkthroughs — and each one lost on cost-benefit.

The refined MVP went into a controlled A/B test on Mixpanel and Firebase. The guide was assigned at random by the team, never chosen by the user, and it ran six months with exposure ramped to de-risk — 20% of the base for two months, then 50% for four.

Two per-user measures, both anchored to each investor’s own signup date — whether they joined at the start of the test or five months in:

The MVP proved the underlying hypothesis: directing people changes behavior in a way that matters. So I extended the guide well past the first steps — into the high-engagement moments too: more investments, returns received, activating features, inviting others.

The most important structural decision of v2 was the shape of the journey. The first steps stay a single linear path — it protects the critical activation funnel and keeps cognitive load low for the Beginner. After that, the structure goes non-linear: the Confident investor completes tasks in parallel, in their own order — the autonomy the discovery had pointed at all along.

It also stopped being a fixed screen and became an extensible engagement system — tasks, badges and new objectives can be added without redesigning the structure. And the richer gamification quietly fixed the empty feeling of reaching the MVP’s third level.

The guide extended the design system I’d already built for INCO — same voice, same materials — rather than opening a parallel look. It stays friendly but sober, the INCO baseline, so the guide felt native from the moment it shipped.

The interactive layer was mostly new: task cards with collapsed and expanded states, progress rings, unlock celebrations and an in-app badge library — all built as Figma components with variants, so a change to a card variant propagated across every screen it lived in.

The badge icons started from an existing icon pack and were extended with a few AI-generated variants that respected the same base language. That badge layer — earned selos you could watch fill up — is what carried the gamification.