💰 Dub: 1M downloads in 10 months, building OnlyFans for investing

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This founder was trading stocks in second grade, quit high school to launch and sell a startup, clocked time at Apple, enrolled at Harvard, then walked away again to build a copy-trading app at the peak of the GameStop frenzy.

Meet Steven Wang, the founder of Dub, the app that's been called "OnlyFans for investing."

In just 10 months after launch, Dub hit 1 MILLION downloads, making it one of the fastest-growing consumer fintech apps in history. But here's the kicker - it took Steven and his team three years just to get permission to exist.

Let’s dive into this insane consumer fintech story and their million download growth playbook 👇. 

Steven Wang's origin story reads like a Silicon Valley fever dream, except it started in Detroit with a kid who just really, really liked making money.

While most second-graders were learning multiplication tables, Steven was learning about capital allocation. By high school, he was already thinking bigger than homework assignments.

Junior year of high school, Steven made a decision that would make most parents (especially Asian parents) have a heart attack: he DROPPED OUT to start a VR company called Realism, which raised a small pre-seed and was a part of an accelerator at MIT Media Lab. 

While it didn't work out from a business standpoint, he still got to learn a ton about running a startup and personally walked away with $200K at barely 18 years old. 

Not bad for a high school dropout.

With money in the bank and no clear direction, Steven did what any rational teenager would do: he moved to SF and got a job at Apple as an engineering product manager. However, he realized that big companies weren't for him.

But wait… there’s more.

He decided to go back to school. He applied to Harvard and got in. However, he started school in Fall 2020 right when COVID hit. 

The school experience was terrible - everyone was locked up in dorm rooms. With nothing else to do, Steven went back to what he knew best: trading.

And that's when he witnessed something that would change everything.

While Steven was stuck in his Harvard dorm room, the financial world was going ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

GameStop was mooning. Roaring Kitty was becoming a folk hero. Elon Musk was moving crypto markets with Dogecoin tweets. Cathie Wood and Bill Ackman were becoming household names.

Steven observed a fundamental shift happening in real-time. The new way that people were investing was no longer about analyzing numbers, looking at PE ratios, or studying charts like when he started in second grade.

It’s becoming all FOMO, following people, following ideas. The influencer economy has come to investing.

Steven had his eureka moment: Can we productize this? Can I make it as simple as a tap of a button to follow what someone else is doing?

The idea was elegant in its simplicity. If people were already following influencers for investment advice, why not let them literally copy their trades automatically?

But as Steven started thinking through the product, he realized he needed to solve a chicken-and-egg problem: you need to be able to copy people, but how do we get the people to copy?

That's when the "OnlyFans for investing" model was born.

Just like OnlyFans allows content creators to monetize their audience directly, Dub allows trading creators to monetize their followers.

For Creators:

For Followers:

Under the hood, when a creator trades, the platform merges the creator's order with all their copiers' orders into one block order. This block order is executed in the market, and the results are prorated back into everyone's accounts to ensure all users get the same price and execution.

But there was one tiny problem with this brilliant plan: it had never been done before in the US, especially by a brokerage.

Here's where most startup founders would pivot to something easier. 

Steven decided to do the hardest thing possible: work with regulators to create a new copy-trading focused brokerage platform.

It meant that the team had to build another Robinhood from the ground up. It was much more complex than Steven could have originally imagined.

Besides building a mega-difficult platform, the regulatory approval process was painfully slow. They are inventing a new way of trading stocks, so they had to work with regulators very closely to get every part of the app reviewed. Each iteration took months. Multiple iterations later... 24 months gone. 

The timing couldn't have been worse. Steven was trying to get their broker dealer license right after the meme stock fallout, when regulators were especially cautious. Robinhood got fined hundreds of millions of dollars during that frenzy.

But the patience paid off. When Dub finally launched in February 2024, they were the ONLY (still are) brokerage in the United States to offer copy trading.

While Steven was grinding through regulatory approval, competitors like Autopilot were taking a different approach - building technology overlays on top of existing brokerages, like a Robinhood or Schwarz wrapper. 

On the surface, this seems smarter. Why spend three years getting regulatory approval when you can launch in six months by partnering (officially & unofficially LOL) with an existing brokerage? 

Here's why:

💰 Revenue Model Flexibility: As a real brokerage, Dub can monetize in multiple ways - trading fees, subscription revenue from creators, interest on cash balances, payment for order flow, and more. Other wrapper apps are limited to the monthly subscription fee and whatever revenue sharing they can negotiate with their brokerage partner.

👥 Customer Relationship: Dub owns the entire customer relationship and all the data. When you're a technology overlay, you're essentially renting access to someone else's customers. 

🏰 Regulatory Moat: There are only a couple of hundred brokerages approved in the entire United States. Getting this license creates a massive competitive moat that's extremely time-consuming and expensive to replicate.

🎛️ Product Control and Trust: Most importantly, as a licensed brokerage, Dub guarantees same price and fair execution by merging creator and follower orders into a single block trade. It also offers full transparency into creators, reducing the risk of bad actors—two things wrapper platforms can't match.

Overall, Dub owns significantly more monetization levers and controls its own destiny, while other copy trading wrapper products may be faster to market but remain at the mercy of the platforms they rely on.

When Dub finally launched, Steven and his team decided to go old-school with its user acquisition effort: manual, high-touch onboarding.

The first hundreds to thousands of customers were purely manual. 

Everyone in the company was forced to write down a list of 10-20 friends and family members who could be interested in using Dub. They manually recruited and onboarded every one of them.

This process was extremely helpful for learning about how to optimize their UX, specifically their onboarding flow. For a brokerage, onboarding is particularly challenging. You're asking for social security numbers and all kinds of personal information because they have to comply with regulations.

But watching people's faces during onboarding gave them insights that no analytics tool could provide. 

After surviving the 3-year regulatory grind and validating onboarding flows through live sessions with the first 100 customers, Dub was finally ready to scale. 

And when they hit the gas, they didn’t just grow—they exploded. Here’s how:

A) Earned Media and Viral PR

Steven’s CNBC interview was the ignition spark. That clip, with the headline-ready story of a young Harvard dropout reinventing investing, was chopped up, memed, and posted everywhere from TikTok to Instagram. Each time he appeared on TV, Dub saw thousands of downloads in a single day.

But the real power came after. Word of mouth started to compound. 

New users began sharing the app. Finance influencers took notice and wanted to become creators on the platform. Suddenly, the “OnlyFans for Investing” line wasn’t just clever branding, it was spreading like wildfire.

B) Founder-Led Paid Ads. Run Like a Lab

Most founders delegate paid acquisition. Not Steven.

He ran all the early Meta ads. 50 to 100 creative variations were launched each week. 

He treated it like a science experiment: hypothesis → test → iterate → double down on what works.

This grit paid off. Performance marketing became one of Dub’s top growth channels. 

Even though UGC marketing can pay off big time (a strategy mastered by competitor Autopilot), they are tougher to scale. Performance marketing, like Meta ads, scales much more easily. Once CAC stabilized, it became a predictable growth engine for Dub.

D) The Creator Flywheel

At the heart of Dub’s product is a simple value prop: let smart people manage your money.

As of today, Dub has 200+ active creators managing portfolios on the app. Over 62% outperform the market, and top performers (like Brett Simba, who’s up over 260%) build loyal followings quickly. The better your results, the more users copy you. The more copiers, the more you earn.

This creates a powerful loop:

The genius part of this model is the alignment of incentives. Since creators are paid based on the number of people who copy their trades, they are naturally incentivized to promote the platform to make more money.

Dub takes a percentage cut of the subscription fees, creating a three-way win: creators get paid, followers get access to successful trading strategies, and Dub gets sustainable revenue at a low CAC.

While expanding the top of the funnel is important, Steven and his team spent significant time optimizing Dub’s paywall to drive monetization.

Dub iterated its paywall dozens of times, and the results were worth it. Conversion improved by 50–60%, all thanks to a few key insights.

They built the infrastructure to move fast. Using Superwall, the team could run rapid A/B tests without shipping new builds, crucial for testing what to give away for free, how long the trial should last, and where the paywall should live.

Two big UX heuristics emerged:

Since launching in February 2024, Dub has become one of the fastest-growing consumer fintech apps ever, hitting 1 million downloads in just 10 months. It recently closed a $30M Series A led by Neo and Notable Capital, bringing total funding to $47M.

1/ Sometimes the hardest path creates the biggest moat: While Steven could have built a simpler technology overlay like Autopilot, choosing to become a real brokerage created a defensible competitive advantage that's nearly impossible to replicate.

2/ Viral moments matter—if you can amplify them: Steven’s CNBC appearance drove thousands of downloads in a day. But the real growth came after, when others clipped it, memed it, and turned it into shareable content across TikTok and Twitter. Dub embraced the meme.

3/ Manual doesn't scale, but it teaches you what will: The hundreds of manual onboarding sessions gave the team insights that no amount of user analytics could provide. Understanding user psychology at this granular level was crucial for optimizing their conversion funnel.

4/ Marketplace design is everything: Dub's success comes down to thoughtful design that aligns incentives and provides value to both creators and followers.

5/ Patience pays off in regulated industries: In a world of overnight successes and six-month unicorns, Steven's three-year build period seems like an eternity. But that patience created something genuinely differentiated in a crowded market.

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See you next Tuesday 😉,

Leo

p.s. If you are a consumer brand, make sure to check out Highbeam and put your cash to work!

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