(2010-07-30) Kaching Pivot

A case study of the Pivot made by Ka Ching, a site for Investment Manager-s and their clients, which started out as something like an investing game. The (original) intent was to discover amateurs who could manage a portfolio as well if not better than professionals (think American Idol) and then facilitate individual investors giving them their real money to manage... Within a month (of Oct19'2009 launch), kaChing observed several interesting things. First, because the amateurs weren’t SEC-registered, the site had to refer to them with awkward terms like “geniuses.” That was confusing for consumers, who already had to figure out what on kaChing.com was a game and what was real. Second, out of 450,000 gamers, only seven had qualified to become kaChing managers. Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers.

As of Jul30'2010 they have 18 professional managers, and $10M total invested.