The PLANADVISER Interview: Miles Cole, Follow Co-Founder and CEO

As investors flock to social media for advice and investing, Miles Cole, co-founder and CEO of Follow, has a solution to link financial advice to actual investing. A retail investing app, Follow allows users to automatically copy the money moves of financial influencers who have amassed large followings on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms. “They’re incredibly talented,” Cole says. “As much, if not more so, than most professional investors or hedge fund managers.”

Launched only three months ago, Follow secured $9 million in funding from venture capital firms. The Follow app is still in its infancy, but the potential to further the online investing trend that gathered steam during the pandemic is there, according to Cole. The former Princeton student says there is a lot in the pipeline. The 24-year-old believes there is real potential for offering content on retirement advice and personal finance in the future by meeting users where they are—which is very often on social media apps. The young co-founder discusses the idea behind Follow and plans for the future.

PLANADVISER: How did the idea for Follow come about? 

COLE: The idea for Follow came about two years ago now during the GameStop-running craziness. We noticed that there was this pretty interesting gap in public markets preventing talented retail investors from investing beyond their own capital. I was working with a venture studio, Atomic, at that time on another company. In collaboration with Atomic, we looked closer at the space and realized there are a lot of really talented retail investors out there that didn’t really have a solution, so we co-founded this company and started building that. 

PLANADVISER: Could you give an overview of how the Follow app works?  

COLE: It’s a two-sided marketplace where you have the experienced investors supply side, and these are financial influencers, financial traders that have large followings on places like TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Then you have the consumer demand side, and how it works is when a consumer downloads the app, the first thing they can do is they can browse all the leaders that we have. We call the financial creators ‘leaders.’ They’re able to look at the leader’s profile, see their bio, their photo, learn a little bit about them, and they’re actually able to see the quantitative performance. They can pay a subscription fee in order to unlock access to that exclusive investment content, as well as the ability to potentially mirror the Follow portfolio created for that leader within their own personal brokerage account. 

PLANADVISER: What is your response to those who say social media or financial influencers aren’t as reliable, since they’re not certified professionals? 

COLE: In the 2021 craziness, we realized that there’s a lot of retail investors out there that are incredibly talented, and we can prove it quantitatively. You saw the media saying, “All these stupid Reddit kids don’t really know what they’re doing.” [and] “These retail investors are so unsophisticated.” But we saw a lot of them were incredibly sophisticated, some of the most sophisticated investors I’ve ever seen, but they didn’t really have the ability to prove that transparently. At the time, the only thing available to retail investors was posting screenshots on Twitter or having a discord room. There was really no verified way to actually see, transparently, how good they really were. That’s what we provide by allowing them to link to their real brokerage account. That’s what we started building for them. 

PLANADVISER: The types of people who follow financial influencers might already be investing, so how are you getting these types of people to move to your app? 

COLE: Our goal is just to be another tool that these creators can use to offer to their audience. We no way whatsoever want to replace anything that they’re doing, really. We just want to be something positive that these creators can use on top of their existing businesses and maybe even as an upsell to stuff they’re already doing.  

PLANADVISER: Do you offer any retirement advice on your platform? 

COLE: Today, we just launched three months ago, so we’re a very new product, but we have a lot of stuff like that on our roadmap that we hope to include over time, for sure. There are different asset classes that we might be able to include. Currently we focus on single stocks and ETFs. We could see Follow also including crypto or options or shorting and different things like that. Another way to look at it is a content and educational standpoint. Right now the content is mostly newsletter, but we also see a world where we build out a lot of other features in terms of, like you said, retirement planning and savings, shifting more toward personal finance. 

PLANADVISER: How are you trying to get those who aren’t financially inclined to start investing? 

COLE: Hopefully Follow is the solution for that. I think the rise of these financial creators is a great bridge. If I was someone who didn’t really know how to get started, I’d probably do what we’ve seen most people do, which is go on Twitter and follow a couple of creators. I’d go on TikTok and follow a couple of people that seem like they know what they’re talking about. Before Follow, the next step was: You can go over your Robinhood account and start placing your own stocks. I actually think Follow is more of like an easy segue. You can subscribe to a creator, start mirroring their portfolio and learn about how they’re investing. Then you could build up enough confidence for going and running your own strategy. 

PLANADVISER: Can you expand on how you differentiate yourself from other social investment platforms? 

COLE: A lot of these other apps, they let you “follow the trades of other people.” But what that meant is that you would get a text message or a notification when someone else made a trade. Unless you’re on your phone 24/7 to see that notification the second it happens and then go open up your Robinhood account and manually paste that trade, you’re not going to get the same execution, you’re not going to get the same returns. Our big differentiator is this level of automation, where we actually automate all of that, and so on Follow, what you can do is you can subscribe to a creator […] and then you could turn your phone off and go on a camping trip for a week and not have to think about it. Your trades are automatically mirroring the trades of that leaders’ portfolio.