How it all started?
Patrick thought his life and career is all sorted out after working 90+ hours for weeks in investment banking at Rothschild and then transitioning to private equity for two years. He even landed his dream job and had a healthy work life. But nothing remains the same forever right? And in Patrick’s case, his career turned into a nightmare in a blink of an eye.
He was fired less than 4 months after he joined and asked to sign and waiver and take a small amount of $10,000 to go away. This whole nightmare shattered his confidence and he was torn to pieces. What’s even worse is that he was blackballed from that firm which made it impossible for him to get a new job. Whenever he had an offer in hand, it would get declined as his previous employer had fired him and didn’t give him a reference as well.
What saved him from all this embarrassment was his network and luckily he found a former colleague at Rothschild who vouched for him in his private equity fund back in New York. Patrick considered this chance a blessing and decided to stay on track and not derail his career. So he accepted the offer and worked really hard there.
So this was the point that made him realize he could do something more with his skills. So he along with his friend decided to create a fun community centered on young finance professionals. In the start, they had no idea what they should do next or how they would be able to generate revenue but they only knew one thing that is, to build a strong following which they did.
And that is how Wall Street Oasis was formed. They started to reach out to a group of students that focused on finance and got feedback from them and thus the cycle of getting activity on the forum started.
What does Wall Street Oasis offer?
Wall Street offers different products and services including selling interview courses for finance careers. The aim of these courses is to help students and young finance professionals understand the requirements and how they can pull off the investment banking interview questions. They also offer guidance on how to answer private equity interview questions among other industries.
Next, they sell premium one-on-one services including resume reviews.
One of the services includes mentorship that allows people to connect with professionals from their target industry and get detailed advice on their unique situation.
Wall Street Oasis is a thriving online community that is invested heavily in making the most out of the educational content in the finance career space. Fortunately, this community has reached around 100 million visitors in the span of its 14-year history. Currently, it has over 2 million visits per month.
The working process
Now let us discuss what exactly happens in Wall Street Oasis:
Patrick and his co-founder use a content management system called Drupal which allows them to configure and modify the site and release new features at a decent clip. The initial design and community are very basic and the company uses a free template theme and even paid $50 for a logo. Initially, the idea was to get as many people talking in the forum as possible so they sent thousands of emails from finance student clubs and luckily they got enough actual professionals on board to quickly answer the questions.
The entire collection process took months and this was their only chance to get the community active. Once they had a targeted list of 3000 undergraduates and young finance professionals, they started to send them personalized emails and asked for their feedback.
This strategy resulted in around 200 people registering by offering a free compensation report the company had put together and out of these 200 people, they immediately started building out content of 50 people with the conversations that were happening naturally.
What helped Wall Street in sustaining the business?
Now the business is on track and they are getting customers so what’s next? Well, the next step was to sustain the business and the only way that helped them sustain this business was to offer a community that was fun and functional at the same time and welcomed a variety of different perspectives.
There was a massive inflow of user-generated content (UGC) and this led to natural growth in organic search traffic the content base went from 100 topics to 1000 to now over 400,000 discussions and millions of comments. Now Wall Street Oasis has 7 million impressions and around 500,000 engagements every month and is growing really fast.
Reaching $200,000 a year
So this is how Wall Street grew its community and traffic and was actually able to get into a vertical ad network that was focused on financial products. This helped them to go from $50,000 per year in revenue to $200,000 per year.
Launch of interview courses
The launch of interview courses was a big success for Wall Street Oasis and the company was shocked at the demand and number of sales that came in the first release in 2009 which was over $20,000. So this allowed them to release courses for other industries as well. This helped them increase their revenue even more and grow more traffic alongside.
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Final Thoughts
This is the story of an individual who even though failed badly at one point in his life yet managed to get up and made a huge company for himself. Therefore, if you want to accelerate your finance career and get access to courses taught by elite professionals, you can always join the community of 900,000+ students and get the best coaching advice ever.
