Entrepreneur: Gabi Slemer
Biz: Finasana
Tilt: Easy-to-understand advice to reduce stress around financial investing
Primary Channel: Website and app
Other Channels: Instagram (562), Facebook (100)
Time to First Dollar: Six months
Rev Streams: Individual and business subscriptions
Our Favorite Actionable Advice:
- Hone your writing: It can be easier for creators to write lengthy explanations and prose. Work harder, though, to craft content that’s easier for your audience to consume.
- Don’t do overwrought development: Creators often overdo getting their content product ready for the marketplace. Don’t wait until it’s perfect; release it as quickly as feasibly possible, Gabi says.
- Talk to your subscribers: One-on-one calls and emails with customers led Gabi to create a new feature where subscribers could pose their personal questions to a financial expert.
The Story
Gabi Slemer worked on Wall Street for over seven years. During that time, she helped develop internal training systems for junior analysts and interns to learn the financial concepts necessary to do their jobs. However, she found how they explained the concepts assumed a financial literacy that the newcomers didn’t have.
“A lot of times, the way the financial world today approaches teaching finances is going right into the specifics, which is super complicated,” Gabi says.
She knew she could solve this problem, so Gabi quit her job and launched Finasana, a financial content platform designed to help people reduce money stressors. “We help people take a step back, learn the basics, and build a good foundation,” she says.
Finasana offers free, monthly ($12.99), and annual ($99) plans. (The free plan offers access to the first step in every lesson and all blog content.) Subscribers can access over 20 financial paths (topics) through the mobile app or website.
“Within each path, we break financial concepts down into relatable bite-sized steps. The steps are combined in videos, audio, hands-on activities, quizzes, articles, and actionable next steps. They all average around 4 minutes,” Gabi explains.
“The idea is that people can access it on the fly, on their way to the gym, or commuting, or waiting in line somewhere. So it is not something that they have to say, ‘OK, let me sit down and think about my money,’ but rather they can fit it into their day-to-day lives.”
Hone your writing
As she embarked on this venture, Gabi quickly discovered one of her biggest hurdles was being concise. ”I am going to butcher this quote, but (someone once said), ‘I wanted to sit down and write a short letter, but I didn’t have enough time, so I wrote a long one,’” she says. (Mark Twain was the one to make the quip.)
“I spent a lot of time in the beginning learning how to keep people’s attention spans and write something that people will not only want to read but get to the end of it. It’s a lot easier to just ramble on paper than it is to come up with really succinct thoughts that get your point across. In all content creation, I think that is a really important skill for people to hone,” she says.
It may be easier to ramble than to come up with succinct thoughts, but don't do it. Hone your writing and editing skills, says @GabiSlemer_ of #Finasana. #ContentEntrepreneur #Writing Click To TweetRelease your content product
Creators often overdo when it comes to putting a content product on the market. Instead, they should do what’s needed to get in front of users more quickly. “The earlier you can get people to use it, the better,” Gabi says. “We had a lot of testers as we were building out the product, but it was very controlled. We would have all kinds of people read it, people who were within the financial industry and also people who self admittedly didn’t know anything about finance. Getting those two reactions and bridging them together was really good.”
Getting her financial content platform in front of actual users led to results that differed from her expectations. “Knowing what I know now, I would have focused more on certain types of content instead of others,” she shares.
Feedback from people using the content product is a must. “When you are building out content, especially something like Finasana, the goal is to make it accessible and to make it easy to understand.
“However, there’s this curse of too much knowledge when you’re putting something together. While you may think it is easy to understand, actual users may be like, ‘I have no idea what you just said.’”
Too much knowledge about the subject can be a curse in a content business. Always create with your actual user in mind, says @GabiSlemer_. #ContentEntrepreneur #CreatorEconomy Click To TweetWith months of user data, Gabi has pivoted her content to better address subscriber requests to help them solve more specific financial problems. Some shared they were overwhelmed by the volume of the Finasana video library.
Talk to subscribers
Gabi wondered if others were stumped as well? “We polled all of the other customers who hadn’t reached out. It was a lot of one-on-one, reaching out to people, asking for calls or emails, and getting feedback. We wanted to know what was working, what wasn’t, and what they wish that we could do better,” Gabi says.
“What we found was everyone was saying, ‘I want to know how to fix my specific problem.’ This led us to creating the opportunity to ask financial questions and get answers directly on the financial content platform.” Now, the Ask Finasana feature lets subscribers talk to real-life financial experts who can give specific, actionable answers to their questions.
After talking to customers, @GabiSlemer_ added the Ask Finasana feature to her content platform. It lets subscribers ask their personal questions to real-life financial experts. #Feedback #ContentDevelopment #ContentEntrepreneur Click To TweetAbout the author
Kimmy Gustafson is a freelance writer with a passion for sharing stories of bravery. Her love for world traveling began when her family moved to Spain when she was 6 and since then, she has lived overseas extensively, visited six continents, and traveled to over 26 countries. She is fluent in Spanish and conversational in French. Currently, she is based on Maui and, when not writing or parenting, she can be found kiteboarding, hiking, or cooking.
