Cost per household: $23.60
A Household Acquisition Protocol for Dosh
Fintech’s First Physical Growth System: Turning Cash Into Household Infrastructure
Fintech doesn’t have a marketing problem. It has a trust problem.
While competitors buy digital attention, Dosh can own the physical layer of belief.
For The Household is a tangible acquisition protocol engineered to make Dosh the default financial layer for shared living — by onboarding households as units, not individuals.
The Diagnosis: Social Money Has No Home
Most financial products treat people as isolated users.
But real money behaviour is social — rent splits, power bills, shared groceries, informal debts, and the constant “who paid last?” fog.
The friction isn’t banking.
It’s awkwardness inside the household.
To win, Dosh doesn’t need more users.
It needs households.
The Blueprint: One Envelope, One Household. One Thousand Times.
A pilot of 1,000 minimalist window envelopes delivered to flats and shared houses during high-formation windows (uni intake + lease turnover). Each contains:
- One $20 note — real legal tender, not split per person
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The window framing: FOR THE FLAT
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A QR insert engineered to trigger a
household onboarding ritual:
Open → Scan → Create household → Invite flatmates → Capture the first shared expense
The Economics:
$23,600 / 1,000 Household Seeds
($20 note + envelope + insert + stamp)
This isn’t a mailing.
It’s a behavioural intervention deployed at scale.
Engineered for Behaviour
This system is built on simple truths:
- Cash moves. People spend cash faster than digital credit because it feels like “free money.”
- A forced conversation. One note creates a social dilemma: Who keeps it? What do we buy?
- The capture. The first shared purchase becomes the first Dosh ledger entry.
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Instant network formation. One envelope onboards a unit — not a person.
You’re not acquiring a user.
You’re installing a system. Trust as Medium
Most fintechs ask for trust before giving value.
This protocol reverses the order:
Dosh gives value first → the household chooses trust second.
A $10 digital credit feels like a transaction.
It disappears into the interface and is forgotten as noise.
A $20 physical note feels like belief.
It lives in the home, carries story, and gets discussed.
Credit is for accounting. Cash is for culture.
Even loss and theft become proof of the stance:
trust costs money — and Dosh is willing to pay it. Memory: The Switching Prompt
Even when people don’t convert immediately, the encounter sticks.
A physical note is memorable because it’s real, unusual, and social.
Then later — when someone opens their bank app and hits familiar friction (bad UI, awkward splitting, messy transfers) — Dosh returns to mind.
The envelope becomes a switching prompt that outlives the day. The Payoff: Infrastructure, Not Ads
For The Household turns acquisition from a digital numbers game into behavioural design:
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Onboarding becomes a group ritual
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Retention becomes social (peer-to-peer), not individual
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Dosh becomes the default ledger for shared living
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The protocol becomes repeatable, seasonal, and scalable
The envelope isn’t the campaign. It’s the growth model.