How to Get Your Startup Written Up – Without Paying a Cent

01 /The Concept

A swipeable dating app – but with a membership requirement that would get you thrown out of most conversations: a credit score of at least 675.

The check happens only at signup. After that, the score doesn't affect anything and isn't visible on any profile.

675 isn't a particularly high bar. Across all US adult age groups, even the youngest and typically least creditworthy cohort (ages 18–25) averages around 680. The threshold isn't designed to identify the financially exceptional; it's designed to filter out anyone meaningfully below average.

Score was released on Valentine's Day by Neon Money Club. The app is reportedly available for only 90 days before being pulled from the app stores.

Neon Money Club's primary product is a credit card – currently in pre-order – with a specific twist: the rewards points earned on transactions can be used to buy stocks through the startup's own app.

Neon Money Club has raised $10 million total, including $6.83 million in a round closed last spring.

02 /Why It Matters

The "politically incorrect" approach to filtering romantic matches by credit score generated immediate media coverage.

Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and a range of other outlets picked up the story. The debate framing: "Can you really fall in love with someone's credit score?" and "Does a low score disqualify someone from romance?" – exactly the kind of coverage that earns a startup months of earned media without paying for a single ad.

At minimum, Neon Money Club achieved its real objective: people found out the company exists. And specifically, they found out about the card.

The lesson is simple and underappreciated. The most expensive thing a startup does is get attention. You can only sell your product to people who've heard of it. And as it turns out, the cheapest way to get attention is to add something small but genuinely controversial to your product.

Neon Money Club's stated strategy is more ambitious than launching a credit card: they want to build "financial products that are relevant to a new generation looking for new financial possibilities." The tactic – exemplified by Score – is to make financial health a natural part of everyday life by introducing it in contexts where it would previously have felt out of place. (After all, most people don't ask about credit scores on a first date)

Both the strategy and the tactic are worth studying.

An ambitious startup shouldn't define itself by a specific product. It should define itself by the problem it's solving or the possibility it's creating for people. That framing gives you room to test multiple product hypotheses until you find traction – and to launch related products that attract different users, create cross-product retention, and open new revenue streams. A strategy tied to a single product either collapses when that product fails or forces you to keep flogging a dead horse.

Good tactics find ways to pursue that strategy in places where nobody expected it. Especially places that feel slightly wrong or taboo – because those combinations attract attention.

03 /Opportunities

The main takeaways here are general – applicable to startups in any category.

Start by formulating your startup's strategy independent of any specific product you're building or planning to build. Then work outward: is there a simpler, faster product you could launch first to get into the market sooner? What other products could you build within the same strategic frame, giving you more hypotheses to test?

Beyond that, try combining things that don't obviously go together. This is essentially the "focal objects" method – a classic creativity technique. You take the thing you want to develop, then force-connect it to properties of three to five randomly selected objects.

There are countless articles on applying this to business. Example: you're building a website creation platform. Random object: a car. Random properties: "stalled," "two-door." Outputs:

- "Stalled website services" – rescuing and maintaining sites abandoned by previous developers. - "Two-door website development" – a platform for building minimal one- or two-page sites.

As noted above, pay special attention to combinations that feel controversial or counterintuitive. Score works because it crosses "finance" and "dating" – two categories most people would never connect. Once you've framed the problem that way, other uncomfortable combinations start suggesting themselves naturally.

So: how do you articulate your startup's strategy without naming a specific product? What other products could live inside that strategy? Where could you apply it that nobody has tried? And are any of those combinations controversial enough to earn you some free attention?