Just in the tube, enjoying the daily commute, when I noticed the following
I never thought etoro as much as competition but their add made me realise that I have never seen any marketing regarding Freetrade
I also get the occasional add in YouTube about Trading 212.
Have you guys got any thoughts about the Freetrade marketing plan or currently seemingly lack of?
Fintech start ups tend to use organic and viral growth first and much later use paid for advertising. It works well
The Freepass is part of the strategy, in the same way Golden tickets were for Monzo
Monzo is about to launch a TV ad Thursday but are a much more establised company with 2 million customers
They’re at a very different stage of their growth than Freetrade at the moment, partly because they launched before us. Like them, we’re starting out by using methods to promote Freetrade that don’t cost us (much) money and then we may start doing paid marketing later.
Viktor will share more details about how we do our marketing at the moment here later 
I work in the brokerage space and they (IG, eToro, T212, Plus500) are feeling huge pressure since new regulations came in mid-last year. I think we should expect to see a lot more of this from the big guys - the race to the bottom has become a sprint.
As a B2C marketer in financial services, I am very happy to see Freetrade are not burning their reserves on outreach! As mentioned above, a truly great product can sell itself quite comfortably in the early stages and remove the staggering cost of acquiring new users. Meanwhile crowdfunding alone is a very powerful marketing tool - both for taking on passionate early adopters and getting (often somewhat inflated) PR when targets are smashed.
Thanks for your input guys, all great arguments! Have to admit that I didn’t think the situation from that point of view.
Marketing != advertising. I think you mean the latter!
Not much to add to the excellent points of @Rat_au_van and @Stewart earlier! 
Different companies have different user acquisition and retention models. CFD firms, such as the above, operate, from a marketer’s standpoint, a quick churn and burn model.
As Adam put it:
See the disclaimer on any CFD site:
When a company stands to gain thousands of pounds during a short customer lifecycle, it makes sense to invest a lot into advertising, which is a higher CAC (customer acquisition cost) channel.
Meanwhile, we are a tech startup operating a freemium model. We optimise for our customers to enjoy and benefit from the product, and stay with us for decades. The most scalable, efficient channels for us are organic, the same channels most successful tech companies such as Airbnb, Lyft, Pinterest, etc pursued during their early stages.
Again, different companies have different models. Booking.com is famous for its enormous spending on (performance and display) advertising, and how deeply they optimised it. Grammarly is another fantastic company with a large and deeply sophisticated advertising effort. In later stages, when you try to reach the mass market, it also makes sense to advertise - Monzo is a great example.
To put that into context, Google is a pretty efficient form of advertising when you think potential customers are already actively looking for your product compared to traditional ad formats.
Yet this keyword search suggests advertisers (most likely those very CFD brokers always appearing at the top) have to pay about £10 per click for those ads.
With standard ecommerce conversion rates around 1-4%, it could (and probably would) cost Freetrade more than £1000 to get just one user. How many of those are actually going to place consistent instant orders/open an ISA/hold enough cash in their account for FT to earn interest?
