How Ellevest Built a WealthTech Brand for Women in a Boy's Club Industry and raised a $53M Series B

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Ellevest is a wealthtech brand on a mission to get more money into the hands of women by making investing relevant, accessible and tailored to women’s unique financial needs

Who will love this

• Every woman who’s ever been told she’ll never be wealthy because she buys too many lattes

• Women raising funding rounds in an impossibly tough environment

• People who are bored to tears by typical financial services ads

Today

Hello!

Today’s brand is Ellevest.

Shoutout to MacK who suggested this brand! 🙏

The problem: The financial deck is stacked against women, wealth wise: we earn less, take more career breaks, have salaries that peak sooner than men’s and we live longer. Women are 2x as likely as men to live in poverty by the time they are 75, for crying out loud.

But before I send you into the depths of despair, I give you Ellevest’s thesis: Women need tailored financial advice.

Founded by finance veteran Sallie Krawcheck in 2014, Ellevest is the only wealth tech company that specifically targets women. Ellevest’s robo-adviser + financial literacy programs are a flat $12 / month. They also have a private wealth tier for assets over $1M. Ellevest’s highlight’s reel:

• 💸 Raised a $53M funding round where 90% of Ellevest’s Series B investors are  women and underrepresented investors

• 🤑 Hit $1.6 billion in assets under management AUM

• 📈 Grew from 0 to 120,000+ customers in just 10 years

My years of working in financial services are kicking in. When considering investing, do your own research and look at fees and returns. 

Disclaimer done. ✅ Let’s talk investing!

💃 💵 💃 💵

Three Brand Moves Ellevest Made to Build the Women’s Wealthtech company

1️⃣ Use brand mission to found and fund a company

Sallie Krawcheck founded Ellevest in 2014 with a singular mission: Get more money into the hands of women. Just reading it gives me a little thrill.

Here’s the thing: the fact that Ellevest exists is a wild success.

Women CEOs raise just 2% of venture dollars. That dwindles to 1% of fintech dollars. Here's what I love about Ellevest - and Sallie Krawcheck. By centering women and their mission, they managed to raise 90% of their series B from women and other underrepresented investors.

And here’s the lesson: Leading with a mission others can believe in is a time-tested strategy for scaling a company. In capital intensive industries, your ability to raise funds is critical for early success. Mission scales in ways that paid ads and hiring sales people doesn’t.

Even the story of Ellevest’s series B via SPAC is inspired by their mission 👇

But enough about investors: how do you shift perceptions when women have been told they’re not good at investing or managing money?

You make the case to women for putting more money in the hands of women. 👇

2️⃣ Using organic & paid social to unlocking a boy-s club topic and make money relevant to women’s lives

Ellevest’s paid & organic strategy is simple: show 👏 women👏 talking👏 about 👏 money. How do they do it? They talk about money in ways that are actually relevant to what women talk about. As the target audience, I get fired up watching these ads. And that’s a lot more than I can say for the majority of financial services.

Can you imagine Wells Fargo running ads about manifesting 🔮 , vision boards, and divorce oriented financial planning? And that’s on the power of knowing your audience.

One thing I do question: 🤔 is the brand’s motto “nothing bad happens when women have money.” <= From a framing and messaging perspective, I wouldn’t even want to introduce the thought that anything bad could happen when women have money. Some stronger options: 

• Women's wealth sparks progress

• Women's wealth sparks change

• Money is power: and women deserve more of both

Call me, Ellevest :)

Moving on: how Ellevest leverages press coverage to their advantage.

3️⃣ Making your own news

Founder as frontwoman

A well-known founder’s profile can a powerful tool for earning news coverage & attracting the right kind of partnerships. May we all have a well-networked founder in our brand!

Sallie Krawcheck has come up through a man’s world - a world where fewer than 5% of publically traded banks have a female CEO. I gotta believe she’s one of / the top contact for journalists looking for a hot take from a woman in finance.

How Ellevest have used it to build their brand:

• Sallie is regularly featured in the brand’s organic & paid ads 

• Krawcheck runs a strong LinkedIn playbook 

• Acting as spokesperson on any and all company news (more on that below)

Chef’s kiss 😘

But it can’t all be about the frontwoman: here’s how Ellevest created a mechanism to allow them to comment on the current state of the market 📈

Launch your own financial index

“Everything is copy,” Nora Ephron famously declared. Ellevest took that sentiment (or, more accurately - a whole slew of inputs including women’s employment, the pay gap, inflation, women’s representation in Congress and Fortune 500 C-suites, reproductive autonomy) and turned it into the Ellevest Women’s Financial Health Index. It’s the first and only holistic measure of women’s financial health in the United States.

On any given month, the index gauges how much the financial landscape is working for or against women on a scale between 1 and 10.

This is a super clever strategy because now Ellevest has something to talk about to the media (and members) every single month.

Newsjack cultural flashpoints

On the scale of milquetoast to mission-fanatical (example: Patagonia publically suing POTUS or Airbnb releasing an ad and statement in response to the 2018 travel ban), Ellevest is tame.

#MeToo. In 2018, Ellevest ran billboards in response to the #MeToo movement. We can’t critique effectiveness without real numbers, but it certainly was one of the boldest moves I’ve seen from them 🤷‍♀️

Reproductive rights. In the wake of the leaked Roe v. Wade news, Ellevest updated their employee benefits policy to include financial assistance for employees who needed to travel to access safe and legal abortion care. Then they released a very thoroughly researched toolkit on advocating for reproductive health care coverage at work.

Newsjacking can be a clever way to get into the news cycle - but it’s one you should approach thoughtfully. When you’re talking about your mission, remember the old adage about people in glass houses not throwing stones: we all remember the downfall of The Wing.

In summary

From Ellevest, we learn a few things. No strategy is one-size fits all, but here’s how I’d apply Ellevest’s lessons to grow a brand:

• 🖤 Compelling brand missions attract fellow missionaries. Ask: What do we stand for and who else would be willing to join us on that mission? Write your pitch decks with this in mind. It’s a total mindset shift.

• 🎨 Strong creative strategy can shift perceptions. Ask: What perceptions need to be changed about my industry or product in order for people to choose our brand? Example: women don’t talk about money. Now draft a content strategy that’s aimed at shifting those perceptions.

• 🗞️When you don’t like the headlines, make your own. Ask: What’s newsworthy in our industry, that isn’t getting covered enough? Now generate ideas for how to feed that information into the media and get people talking about you. What’s your Women’s Financial Index?

OK - in the words of Miranda Priestly, that’s all! ✌️

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✌️Thanks so much for reading - I’m so grateful for your attention!

Amanda