Overview
Covey (covey.io) is a fintech platform where hedge-fund and independent analysts publish their trades so everyday investors can follow and learn from them, with a token-based reward layer for sharing strong ideas. In 2022, the early-stage startup brought in Winston Francois for roughly six months to make the product easier to understand and sign up for, and to stand up an automated email engine. Co-founders Brooker Belcourt (CEO) and Sara Springmeyer (COO) led the relationship.
The mandate:
- Help first-time visitors quickly understand what Covey is and see themselves in it
- Increase the share of visitors who complete sign-up and onboarding
- Launch a lifecycle email program tied to Covey's token and trading mechanics
The challenge
- The landing-page hero, “Join our community of top analysts,” made experienced-but-not-elite users assume Covey was not for them, so exactly the right audience self-selected out.
- New users did not understand how Covey's tokens worked, a novel mechanic with no familiar reference point.
- The web3 and DAO framing risked adding confusion rather than clarity for a mainstream audience.
- Covey had no automated lifecycle email engine to activate and retain new sign-ups.
The approach
1. Research-led onboarding redesign
- Ran user interviews and synthesized the insights in Miro, then designed onboarding concepts in Figma.
- Built an interactive prototype and validated it through moderated user testing.
- Added a coachmark tutorial to explain how tokens work inside the flow, where users were still getting stuck.
2. Landing page and messaging clarity
- Reworked the hero and positioning to invite aspiring analysts, not just proven ones.
- Recommended a modular landing page with clear, always-visible sign-up CTAs, including a join CTA in the top nav plus repeated CTAs down the page.
- Paired the landing page with the sign-up flow in testing so results reflected the real end-to-end experience.
3. Lifecycle email program
- Designed, wrote, and built 11 responsive lifecycle emails covering welcome, token-earned, start-trading, and referral moments, in Covey's new brand.
- Coded them for reliable rendering across email clients and mobile, and QA'd every template against the Figma designs.
- Wired the program into SendGrid for automated sending.
The results
| Metric | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Likelihood to try Covey (moderated user testing) | 5.6 → 9.4 / 10 | Testers moved from lukewarm to highly likely to sign up after the redesigned flow |
| User comprehension and fit | Clearer | Testers reported they better understood Covey and saw it as built for someone like them, removing the core confusion blocking sign-ups |
| Lifecycle email program | 11 shipped | A repeatable onboarding and retention engine tied to Covey's token mechanics |
The redesigned onboarding did the heavy lifting. Even where the landing page alone did not fully land, the sign-up flow cleared up what Covey is and who it is for, and testers' stated likelihood to join climbed from 5.6 to 9.4 out of 10, a 68 percent relative lift.
Winston Francois delivered the findings as a short recorded walkthrough so the founders could act on them right away.
“This is great! Love the video, that is a very effective way of sharing your learnings!”Brooker BelcourtCo-founder & CEO, Covey
What we learned
- A single line of hero copy was quietly disqualifying the exact users Covey wanted, and testing made the fix obvious.
- A short recorded walkthrough of user-test results moved the founders faster than a written report would have.
- For token and web3 products, onboarding has to teach the mechanic, not assume users already understand it.
- Lifecycle email lands hardest when each message is tied to a real product action, such as earning a token or placing a first trade.