Overview
Boosted.ai was launching Equity Explorer, a new feature most of the company didn't yet understand well enough to talk about, so I ran a two-week internal incentive program that turned employees' own use of the feature into three customer-ready case studies and drove a 70% internal activation rate.
3
Case studies produced
70%
Internal activation rate
The challenge
A deep product nobody could write a credible case study about
Boosted.ai is an AI equity research platform for fundamental investors. Its machine-learning models help users generate ideas for stock selection and portfolio construction. It's a genuinely technical product, and that was the catch: not everyone at the company understood it deeply enough to use it, let alone explain what it could do.
That gap showed up in two places. Feature adoption was slow, and product launches kept hitting alignment problems internally. It also starved marketing of the one thing that actually sells a research tool: specific, credible case studies showing what the product does in real hands. We were launching Equity Explorer into exactly that vacuum.
The approach
Pay people to learn the feature, then mine what they found
Instead of writing case studies from the outside, I wanted them to come from real use. So I partnered with leadership to run a "spiff," an internal incentive program with gift-card rewards, built around three asks:
- Learn the new Equity Explorer feature.
- Use it to generate a real investment insight.
- Submit that insight for review.
The bet was that a research tool used by a mix of roles and investment styles would surface a wider range of real use cases than any marketer could invent. Get enough people actually using it, and the best submissions would double as proof.
What I did
Ran a two-week program and turned the winners into collateral
Opened it to the whole company. Over two weeks, participants from different roles and backgrounds used Equity Explorer and submitted the insights they generated. The range of investment approaches and customer exposure across the group meant the submissions covered very different angles on the feature.
Reviewed and awarded the submissions. The product team evaluated every entry, judged them on the quality and specificity of the insight, and awarded the top performers their gift cards.
Converted the best entries into case studies. The strongest submissions weren't just internal wins. I took the top ones and turned them into polished marketing materials, three customer-ready case studies built entirely from how our own team used the feature.
The results
The program produced collateral and proved the feature in one move
The headline was the content. Three finished case studies came out of the top submissions, each grounded in a real insight a real person had generated, which is exactly the kind of specific proof a technical research product needs and rarely has on launch day.
The adoption number is what made that possible. By the end, 70% of the company had tried Equity Explorer, an activation rate that exceeded most of our established core features. That mattered twice over. It meant the case studies were drawn from a deep, varied pool of real use rather than a handful of power users, and it quietly answered the original problem: a feature that 70% of a technical company picks up in two weeks is a feature people can actually use.
One incentive program, and the launch had both its proof and its marketing collateral.