Learnings From Troop: Closed Alpha 001
Last month, Troop opened doors to our first wave of Alpha Test participants, welcoming 30 of our closest friends and family to test out prototypes of the web app we’re building.
Methodology:
Participants were invited to 1) connect their brokerage accounts through a guided onboarding flow, 2) view their personal portfolio holdings, and 3) vote on some shareholder resolutions.
Following their session, we asked participants to share feedback through a survey that was broken out based on the criteria below.
What were some of the key product features we tested?
1) BYOB (Bring Your Own Brokerage)
Troop is not in the business of becoming a broker dealer. From Chase and Robinhood, to Public and E*TRADE, there’s a swath of competitive players in this space. Rather than bringing you another brokerage to deal with, along with more 1099-B headaches during tax season, we’re much more interested in being broker-agnostic.
By working with Plaid’s broker dealer integration, we’re allowing anyone with any broker (yes, even you Fidelity users) to connect their brokerage account in order to use your shares to participate in the Troop ecosystem. By uniting shareholders regardless of brokerages, we’re hoping to empower retail investors to vote everywhere.
Troop takes privacy seriously meaning we will be prioritizing anonymity. Individual users’ holdings and values of their portfolios will not be available to other users or third-parties, and will be encrypted to Troop employees. Don’t worry, Karen in Accounting will not be able to see your holdings!
2) Votes
Another key element driving the functionality of Troop’s web app will be through “Votes.” For many reasons attributed to poor UX/UI, convoluted legal mumbo jumbo, and archaic delivery methods (who else tosses their proxy statements in the trash?), shareholder participation hasn’t had the chance it deserves to become a viable tool in activism for corporate accountability.
With this reasoning, we’re taking the most impactful existing shareholder resolutions, with explainers directly from real proxy statements for the biggest companies, and putting them at your fingertips to vote with your shares at the tap of a button.
One important piece to note is that voting through the Troop app does not cast your votes at company AGMs for you, though finding ways to bridge the gap between voting on Troop and actual proxy voting is already top of mind. In the meantime, our Voting mechanism serves as an essential step in harnessing the power of our collective influence by taking these hot topics out of the closed veil of proxy statements, and allowing shareholders to discuss, share, and track voting consensus in real time.
3) From “Me” to “We”
For too long, investing has been seen as a means for individuals to “beat” the market. With such a single player mentality, it’s the same reason that most shareholders underestimate the value of their individual voting power.
That’s why key features for the Troop platform will expand beyond highlighting an individual’s voting power for the companies in their portfolio to 1) connect individuals with fellow shareholder community members that own shares of mutual companies, and 2) quantify the collective voting power the Troop community wields for each company.
Shareholder activism is possible through so many means outside of just the proxy vote, from building coalitions and ramping up public pressure to building material risk cases in order to force companies into settlement. By aggregating the power of retail investors into one single activist block, we’re able to much more effectively build consensus and work towards a market that’s more prosperous for all, through the hive mind. BTS and Beyoncé fans really were onto something 🫰
By the Numbers:
Finally, we’d love to share some of the numbers we’re currently seeing on the platform that bring cause for excitement so early in our journey.
Some Learnings:
Here are also some takeaways that stood out to the Troop team:
Folks are really excited about collective ownership and making an informed impact.
“Would be great to see the weight a vote has compared to the full pool of shares to understand the impact of the vote (i.e. 300 shares = 1% of shares).”
“Articles related to the question, voting date, number of shares related to each vote and how that plays in relative to all shares of the company (not just troopers)”
- As a result, we’re exploring different ways to slice and visualize collective ownership and impact in the Troop Portfolio.
- Our educational content, which has been a centerpiece to our incredible newsletter (*humble brag*), will continue to play a role in all aspects of the Troop ecosystem.
- Most importantly we’re building out summaries of Filer and Board arguments for each resolution, so you can skip the proxy statement textbooks!
Transparency on Troop’s privacy policies and handling of sensitive data was top of mind as well.
“When joining the app and allowing link with Plaid, it was unclear what data would be used and shared with who.
- While your individual holdings are already hidden from other users in the Troop app, we understand that data handling says a lot about who we are as a company.
- We’re working up some frameworks with our legal team to handle data policies at scale, which we’ll communicate in a way that is transparent and easy to understand.
- No Terms of Service traps here!
Looking ahead:
This closed alpha test really marked the first step of an incredible journey to realize the full potential power of everyday retail investors. Without giving too much away, looking ahead we’re already planning to implement commenting, voter milestones, personalization and tagging, as well as whatever else we can dream up together.
Please comment or reach out if you have any questions, ideas, or feedback.
