How Student Banking App Mos Acquires Customers
Case study analyzing the marketing channels Mos uses (and should use) to grow.
This is Product-Channel Fit, a weekly deep dive into how consumer startups acquire their best customers.
Mos calls itself “the money app for students”. They help college kids find scholarships, grants, and fight for lower tuition.
They’ve positioned themselves in the “Navigating-Bureaucracy-as-a-Service” space, partnering with students to help them access education without relying on borrowing.
Student debt will likely continue to be in the news for years and decades to come. 43 million American student loan borrowers owe a combined total of $1.6 billion in federal loan balance alone. There’s a great chance this will fuel consistent market demand for solutions that help address the problems borrowers and their families have with student debt.
That said, the issue’s prominence in recent years also presents a risk. Government interventions like loan forgiveness (as recently announced by the Biden administration) could present a company like Mos with an existential risk. In the longer term, colleges & universities could fail to adapt to the changing internet landscape, with free or much cheaper online options becoming more attractive than traditional schooling over time.
To fight this, Mos’s best opportunity is ingraining themselves as tightly as possible with people currently in college and leveraging those users to recruit the next generation of users.
Here’s how they could do this.
Using Schools as Referral Networks
Since the early days of Facebook, high school and college campuses have reached almost folkloric status as fertile ground for social app growth. Word of mouth can happen organically, and students famously have more time than money, so small incentives can work too.
Mos incentivizes sharing by offering $5 for both referrer and referee through their “Invite” program. Almost half of Mos’s traffic is labelled “Direct” by SimilarWeb, which likely indicates a high degree of person-to-person sharing alongside repeat usage.
Mos has a few other advantages that plug into referral programs very well. First, it’s a mobile app made for frequent use, which presents more opportunity to prompt sharing. The sign up and monetization cycle seem to be quick and low friction, making it easy for referrers to convince their friends to try it and for both parties to get paid. And the value proposition is universal amongst students, so the density of potential users is very high in school settings.
Programmatic SEO Built Around Locations, Schools and Scholarships
Financial aid is an absolute goldmine for building out a programmatic SEO & content marketing channel.
Mos has started working on some of these, but the efforts look like they’re trying to pick off search intent one by one, rather than in a comprehensive project.
The space has several key head terms with a dizzying array of potential modifiers, and all of them could have a dedicated page designed to capture search traffic and deliver value to the product.
The head term “Financial Aid” could be paired with states (i.e. ”Financial Aid in Colorado”), degree programs (i.e. “Financial Aid Paralegal Diploma”), or any college in America (i.e. “Financial Aid Columbia University”).
In fact, that very term has almost 600 searches a month and almost no competition.
There’s also several other head terms they could play with, including “Scholarships”, “Student Loans”, and tons more. With some clever content structuring and leveraging ChatGPT (or a small team of researchers), MOS could dominate this entire space.
Campus Affiliates & Influencers
Expanding Mos’s referral program to include campus influencers would work for the same reasons their referral program does, but with added compounding benefit by tapping into scale and longevity.
Users who share products through referral programs typically have an expiry date. Sharing typically peaks near the “Aha! moment” (when they capture the most of the product’s value) and slowly tails off to zero thereafter.
Incentivizing influencers with similar or slightly better payouts can create more consistent and longer value curves from the referring that they do. Remember the Red Bull folks who would give out drinks at campus parties? They benefited from the same principle (although in a more analog and delicious way).
