FamApp - GTM & Onboarding Strategy
Building trust with teens and parents in fintech
The Situation
A GTM and onboarding strategy exercise for FamApp - a teen fintech product navigating an unusual constraint: the person who uses the product and the person who approves it are two different people, with different motivations and different definitions of trust.
What I Found
Research with 25 non-users aged 16-20, extended to include parents. The dual-user dynamic was sharper than expected - not just different preferences, but structurally opposing ones. Teens above 17 actively rejected "youngster" branding and wanted adult-grade financial tools. The 14-17 group was peer-driven; 70% said friends influenced their app choice. Parents meanwhile trusted banks and educational institutions, not fintech apps - their top fears were fraud and overspending, not product quality. The onboarding was failing both: 80% of users felt permission requests were too aggressive upfront, yet the app had no visible trust signals for parents. The deeper problem wasn't UX - onboarding was the first trust handshake, and it was dropping both users simultaneously.
What I Proposed
Three distinct personas - Silent Decision Makers (parents), Validation Chasers (teens 14-17), Premium Pretenders (young adults 18-20) - each with a separate channel strategy and tone. Onboarding fixes were mapped to specific problems: progressive permission requests instead of upfront overload, a split KYC flow for under and over 18s, and a dual UI - playful for 14-17, sleek for 18-20. Channel strategy followed the same logic: WhatsApp and school partnerships for parents, peer influencers and gamified referrals for teens, finance micro-influencers for young adults. Each channel chosen to match where trust actually forms for that segment.
Reflection
I didn't find the real problem in the brief - I found it when I talked to users. And sometimes the user who shapes the decision isn't the one you started with.