Fold | Onboarding Project

Hi there👋, my name is Karan.

I’ve picked Fold Money for my GrowthX project on Onboarding. I am very interested in how companies are using Account Aggregator framework to provide new and innovative solutions to their users. Fold is one such company in this space. At of the time of this project (March 2025), they are in a public beta phase.

In this project, I will cover Onboarding. I have covered Fold's Acquisition strategy, along with its elevator pitch, and an understanding of the market and its users over here. Do give it a read as well.

About Fold💰

Elevator Pitch:

Do you feel anxious about where your money goes each month?

Fold consolidates all your bank and financial accounts into one intuitive app. It provides real-time insights into your spending, savings, and investments. With automatic tracking and categorization, you gain a clear picture of your financial health, which you can use to take informed decisions and reduce financial anxiety. Empowering, isn't it?

Built on a secure, government-regulated Account Aggregator framework, Fold ensures your financial data is protected while seamlessly integrating with your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment platforms. Our users love Fold for its simplicity and effectiveness. It is transforming how they manage their money.

Take control of your finances and we promise to eliminate all your money-related stress. So you can make better decisions and lead a healthier financial life.

Value Proposition: Simplifies money management with the ease of tracking spends, investments, insurance, and payments.

Target Market: Urban professionals who have moderate to high to very high spends from multiple bank accounts and credit cards. They are seeking proactive ways to track their finances to gain financial control.

Ideal Customer Profile 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

Let's dive into Fold's ICP now.

To do this, I rolled out a survey on LinkedIn, Twitter and Fold's Discord server. Needless to say, I got maximum responses from people in the Discord server. I also spoke to a subset of users who filled out the form.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/NMerLorKMBMTCsR86

Applying heuristics, it is safe to say that users who are part of Fold's Discord server are will be highly engaged, and are best sample set to form Fold's ICP.

Defining ICP

ICP Prioritization

Since Fold is at PMF stage, we will focus on the two ICPs we have so far. As the product adoption grows to 100,000+ users, more ICPs could be developed and prioritised based on adoption rate, willingness to pay, frequency of use, market size and distribution potential.

Pain Point and Goal

Before going to the next section, it is important to summarise ICPs pain points and their goals:

Jobs to be Done 🕵️‍♂️🕵️‍♀️

Each customer hires a product for a specific 'job' that they want to get out of it.

The jobs-to-be-done framework - created by author Anthony W. Ulwick in his book Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice - is an approach to developing products based on understanding both the customer's specific goal, or “job,” and the thought processes that would lead that customer to “hire” a product to complete the job.

JTBD can be Financial, Functional, Personal or Social.

Based on user research, primary JTBD of Fold's ICP is Financial. I reason below:

Why This Choice?

• Fold is not a social product (yet). It’s an app to manage personal finances.
• While the functionality (eg: categorisation of spends) is important, users come for the financial clarity & peace of mind, not just the functionality itself.
• f users don’t emotionally resonate with the product’s benefit (reducing anxiety, improving decision-making), they won’t stick around.

What are Users goals? (Jobs To Be Done)

Each customer hires a product for a specific 'job' that they want to get out of it.

The jobs-to-be-done framework - created by author Anthony W. Ulwick in his book Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice - is an approach to developing products based on understanding both the customer's specific goal, or “job,” and the thought processes that would lead that customer to “hire” a product to complete the job.

JTBD can be Financial, Functional, Personal or Social.

Based on user research, primary JTBD of Fold's ICP is Financial. I reason below:

Why This Choice?

• Fold is not a social product (yet). It’s an app to manage personal finances.
• While the functionality (eg: categorisation of spends) is important, users come for the financial clarity & peace of mind, not just the functionality itself.
• If users don’t emotionally resonate with the product’s benefit (reducing anxiety, improving decision-making), they won’t stick around.

Are User goals validated?

Both Young and Experienced Professionals' need to gain a clear understanding of their finances without spending excessive time is being solved by Fold. The product aggregates all financial accounts in one place, providing real-time tracking and automated categorisation, insights* This helps users stay on top of their spending, savings, and investments effortlessly.

With secure account aggregation and intuitive categorization, Fold enables users to make informed financial decisions while reducing money-related stress.

*Fold currently only represents spends across various categories in an intuitive way. They are in plans to allow users to make budgets and then show insights based on that.

What the hell is a Teardown?

In this section, I'll be doing a product teardown of Fold's new user onboarding journey. I know there are jargons in here, so I'll simplify it for those who are new to this.

• Teardown: A product teardown is essentially a disassembly of a product. The goal here is to break down the product piece by piece to see how it works, ie, what's working well, what's not working well, and what can be improved.
• Fold: This is the app for which we are doing product teardown
• New User Journey: In this teardown, I am only focussing on the journey of how a new user is onboarded on Fold.

Teardown is done from a user's perspective. In the attached document, I have noted each interaction and user touchpoint, and assessed it based on user empathy. I also note where does the "aha" moment occur and evaluate Fold's onboarding on cognitive biases.

Note: Fold has a desktop view as well. Since it is in Alpha right now, the onboarding teardown is exclusively focussed on the Fold Money App, not the desktop view.

You can view detailed teardown of Fold's Onboarding in this Whimsical Board.

You can also view at a PDF here.

Activation metric

An activation metric is that key indicator that tells us whether a new user has experienced the core value within a certain time frame. It helps determine if a user is likely to become an engaged, long-term user or not.

As you can see here, there are two variables to it.

x - core value
y - time frame

Based on user research, activation metric of Fold is:

Fold Money's Activation Metric: Connecting 1 accounts (banks + credit cards) within first 14 days of app download.

Milestones to track your activation metrics:

As a product manager, you will need some specific signals before 14-day mark, to know if the user will eventually be activated and therefore be engaged or not. I am calling these signals as milestones.

Some of these milestone metrics in Fold's case are:

1. Link phone number and email within 3 days of app download
2. Complete first financial data sync within 5 days
3. Open the app for minimum 10 minutes at least 3 times in first 7 days
4. Manually changed or added a tag to a transaction within 10 days
5. % of total bank accounts connected with Fold in first 10 days
6. Customised home screen layout at least once in first 14 days
7. % of total credit cards connected with Fold within 10 days
8. % of total investment accounts connected with Fold within 10 days
9. Interacted with at least 2 insights/alerts within 14 days