9 Comments

I really liked the concept of friction and how important it is in building great products and growth strategies companies use. Enjoyed the read Will. Keep at it.

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Glad its useful!

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Thanks for providing such an in-depth analysis of the Robinhood app and the eventful market activities that occurred earlier this week!

This might be a stupid question, but how would you conduct a product analysis if you're not a user of the app?

Keep up the amazing content, Will! (:

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Thanks Sabrina. Never a stupid question but that would be hard. It really helps to play around with the product from different POVs (ex. for Robinhood, as a new investor, as a day trader, as a sophisticated investor).

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Thanks for the analysis on the Robinhood situation Will. As a newbie in the product space, it was great to read an in-depth breakdown of how Robinhood's product strategy played a role in the events of last week. Have thoroughly enjoyed reading your pieces over the past couple of months.

Hope all is well with you!

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I think this could be a very good start for change. I don't remember any company that brought change without some blips. I wish users would target regulators more than Robinhood and ask them to change their policies. I still believe RH will lead inclusion of general public in the financial world.

Even the most irate user is saying that they would change the app but not saying that they would stop trading.

Nonetheless, it was a very good analysis on the UI.

Also one thing that you might also consider is that RH earns on a spread of txns data and when their users concentrate on few stocks they're not really producing a quality data.

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I agree, Robinhood has a great goal and is making progress on financial inclusion. Regulation obviously needs updates but this article is addressed at the builders who need to work in this complicated space.

On the last point, I think the data on the WSB stocks is actually more valuable than usual because it was momentum driven. They can determine when and if the momentum changes.

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Not your best work. The essay tries to reverse engineer product strategy of a company operating in a very complex space, by analyzing just its UI!!! Also, the conclusion seems like it was cooked up in less than 30 seconds.

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Appreciate the feedback, Kiran. Definitely not taking their product strategy from a quick look at the UI. I'm basing this off my experience on growth and consumer fintech teams, more in a thread I wrote here: https://twitter.com/will_lawrenceTO/status/1340020554527596550

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