The client is a proprietary trading firm serving Russian-speaking traders across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with a meaningful secondary following among diaspora communities further afield. By the end of the period covered here, registrations had arrived from 99 countries — but the centre of gravity stayed firmly in the founding region, and roughly two-thirds of the trader base chose to use the platform in Russian.
They came to us as a startup in the truest sense: no existing CRM, no trader base to migrate, no live trading infrastructure. What they had was a clear commercial thesis — that a prop firm in their market could be grown far faster through a network of trading influencers and affiliate partners than through paid acquisition — and a need for technology that could support that thesis on day one rather than in a year’s time.
Their product ambition was equally specific. They wanted evaluation challenges across the full ladder of account sizes, one-phase and two-phase variants, a Master tier for proven traders, and the ability to run competitions alongside the standard product line. They wanted it on more than one trading platform. And they wanted a mobile app, because their audience lives on their phones.
The engagement moved quickly. Our proposed workflow for a build of this shape runs four to five weeks across discovery, development, testing and deployment. This project beat that timeline.
The environment was provisioned and the first administrator account created on Day 1. The first trader registered on Day 2 — before the challenge catalogue had even been built. By Day 8 the client’s product team had configured the initial catalogue, the first promotional code had been issued, and the first paid challenge had been purchased and provisioned to a live account, all within the same afternoon.
Seven days from provisioning to first revenue. For a firm that had never operated before, that meant the marketing engine could start on schedule rather than waiting on the technology.
The initial deployment included the Trader’s Room Prop Firm Edition with its built-in CRM, the Express Checkout page and its API, bank transfer and crypto deposit forms, the Notifications module, live chat, multi-language support and a first PSP gateway. The mobile application, the ML Affiliates expansion, the Competitions module and Leaderboards were built alongside it.
By the close of Month 1 the platform was also running a second trading platform, single sign-on between the Trader’s Room and both web terminals, a second payment provider, dark mode, and a read-only database mirror so the client’s own analysts could query their data without touching production.
The client did not want to be locked to a single trading platform, and we did not ask them to be.
MT5 was integrated first and carried the launch. MatchTrader was deployed in Month 1, roughly three weeks after go-live, together with a single sign-on bridge so that a trader moving from the Trader’s Room into either web terminal never re-authenticates. Both platforms ran side by side from that point on — the same challenge catalogue, the same checkout, the same CRM, two execution venues underneath.
In Month 5 the client launched a second region: a full white label of the primary Trader’s Room, with its own branding, its own challenge catalogue, its own FAQ and its own MatchTrader service, administered from the same CRM. This was the operational test of the architecture, and it surfaced the one genuine friction point of the engagement — the client’s product team was now maintaining two catalogues by hand.
We solved that in Month 7 by building cross-region copy tooling: challenge settings, upsale configurations and promotional codes can all be duplicated from one region into another in a single action. A product change that had taken an afternoon of duplicated data entry became a two-click operation. It is a small feature that says something larger about how this engagement ran — the client told us where the friction was, and it was gone within a development cycle.
This is the module that defined the client’s growth, and it is worth dwelling on.
The client’s thesis was that partner referrals would out-perform paid acquisition in their market. The data vindicated them completely: 83% of every client who ever registered on the platform arrived through a partner referral link. Fewer than one in six found their own way to the trader-facing portal.
We deployed the multi-level affiliate expansion with a three-tier commission structure, referral URL tracking, promotional materials, per-partner performance reporting and self-service commission withdrawal. Partners apply through their own Trader’s Room, and the client’s team approves or declines from the CRM.
As the network matured, that approval step became the bottleneck. In Month 8 we automated it: affiliate registration requests now auto-approve at a standard first-level commission rate, with the client’s team retaining override control. The partner network could grow without a human in the loop for every new signup.
The network’s shape is worth noting for anyone building a similar model. It is genuinely concentrated at the top — the single largest partner accounts for just under a third of all referred clients, and the top five together account for 57%. But it has a real tail behind that: a partner roster in the dozens actively referring clients, growing steadily throughout the period. Commission events grew from a single event in the first quarter to a sustained monthly rhythm by the peak, and by Month 11 the affiliate programme was processing more commission payouts per month than the firm had processed in its entire first quarter.
The client built out an unusually deep product catalogue for a firm of their age: 62 distinct challenge configurations spanning seven account-size tiers, across one-phase, two-phase, Master and Competition categories, using normal, percentage, percentage-2B and trailing drawdown models. Alongside these they configured 220 upsale options — leverage upgrades, consistency-rule variations and profit-target adjustments that traders can attach at checkout.
Product velocity came in two deliberate waves. The first, in Month 1, established the core catalogue. The second, in Months 7 and 8, roughly doubled it — driven by the second region and the cross-region tooling that made a wider catalogue cheap to maintain.
Sitting on top of the catalogue is what became the client’s signature acquisition tactic. Over the period they created more than 2,700 promotional codes, the overwhelming majority of them full-discount codes distributed through partners, competitions and influencer campaigns. Roughly two in three of all challenges issued came through a promotional code rather than a full-price purchase.
This is a deliberate strategy, not a leak. Free and discounted evaluations are the client’s top-of-funnel: they cost nothing to issue, they arrive through a partner who is compensated on conversion, and they seed a trader base that then buys again at full price. Promotional code redemptions grew 14.8× from Month 1 to Month 11 — and paid challenge revenue grew alongside them, not instead of them.
The promo engine got heavy investment through the period: promotional codes gained region-copy support in Month 7, category and group filtering in Month 10, and improved validation and error messaging when the client’s campaigns started outgrowing the original interface.
We integrated three payment providers over the period alongside the standard bank transfer and crypto wallet forms.
A regional card and local-methods provider went in before launch. A crypto provider was integrated in Month 1, covering BTC, USDT and USDC across five networks for both deposits and withdrawals, and was later re-integrated on an upgraded account in Month 11. A third provider was added in Month 11 as the client’s volumes justified more routing options.
Ninjacharge sits above these as the payment aggregator, routing each transaction to whichever provider the client selects, rather than being a payment processor in its own right. Adding a provider is a configuration change at the aggregator layer, not a re-integration of the checkout.
Across the whole period, 89% of all challenge payment attempts that reached a final state completed successfully — a figure that matters more than it sounds for a firm whose customers are frequently buying an evaluation on impulse from a mobile phone.
Native iOS and Android builds were delivered in Month 2, distributed through the client’s own developer accounts. The app mirrors the web Trader’s Room: challenge purchase, promo code entry at signup, KYC submission, withdrawal requests, live challenge tracking with progress indicators, certificates, competition standings and the affiliate tools.
Adoption was steady rather than explosive, and it compounded: by Month 11 roughly one in four registered traders had an active mobile device on their account, and the monthly count of traders registering a device grew consistently from Month 2 onward.
The Competitions module and public Leaderboards shipped as part of the launch package, giving the client a mechanic for community engagement that sits alongside — and feeds — the challenge product. Won-challenge and withdrawal certificates were added in Month 2, giving successful traders something to post publicly. For a firm whose entire acquisition model runs through influencers and partners, shareable proof of payout is not a vanity feature; it is marketing collateral generated automatically by the platform.
Full KYC document submission and review runs through the CRM, with AML scoring on the trader record. Roughly one in five registered traders completed approved verification — the expected shape for a prop firm where verification is triggered by progression rather than at signup.
Compliance work continued throughout: restricted-country controls were tightened in Month 9, the Access Rules module went live in Month 10 giving the client IP, CIDR and country-level allow and block rules with optional expiry, and rejection-reason emails were reworked so traders understood what to resubmit.
Four public languages were deployed — English, Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish — backed by more than 13,000 translated interface strings and over 500 email templates. Spanish was added in Month 4 as the client tested audiences outside the core region. Language-specific FAQ links and language-dependent document downloads followed, so a Spanish-speaking trader and a Russian-speaking trader receive genuinely different supporting material, not the same PDF with a different button label.
Alongside the standard module set, the platform absorbed a continuous stream of client-driven change. Across the engagement we logged 129 development items and closed 97% of them.
The pattern is worth describing because it is the actual product being sold here. The client’s operations team would hit a limit — a report that did not break out the field they needed, a checkout flow that asked for confirmation in the wrong order, an affiliate statistics table that miscounted registrations, a promo code validator that rejected valid campaigns. They would raise it. It would be fixed, typically inside the same month.
The larger custom builds included:
Eight additional platform modules were activated after launch — Email Values, Overview, Admin Journals, Activity Log, Access Rules, Leads Overview, No-Trading Commission and the Risk module — each switched on as the client’s operation grew into it.
All figures below are indexed or expressed as ratios. Month 1 is the first full month of live operation; the series is cut at Month 11, the platform’s operational peak across every major activity measure.
Monthly successful challenge issuance grew 10.9× from Month 1 to Month 11. Challenge accounts provisioned onto the trading platforms grew 7.4× over the same window. Measured by quarter, with the first quarter indexed at 100, challenge sales ran at 139 in Q2, 127 in Q3, and 193 across Months 10–11.
The Q3 dip is real and worth naming: it coincides with the second-region launch consuming the product team’s attention. The recovery in Months 10 and 11 — to the highest sustained level of the entire period — came once the cross-region tooling removed that overhead.
Paid challenge revenue, indexed to Month 1 at 100, reached 823 by Month 11 — an 8.2× increase. On a quarterly basis with Q1 at 100: Q2 at 442, Q3 at 367, and Months 10–11 at 496, a run rate roughly five times the opening quarter.
Note that paid revenue grew 8.2× while total challenge issuance grew 10.9×. The gap is the promotional engine widening — the client deliberately let the free tier grow faster than the paid tier, buying funnel volume, and still grew paid revenue eightfold underneath it.
Across the period the ratio of challenge purchase income to funded-trader payouts held at 3.7:1. Payouts themselves grew — 3.7× from the first quarter to the second, and the single largest payout month of the entire engagement fell after the Month 11 cut — but the underlying economics stayed comfortably sustainable throughout. The client was never in the position, common among young prop firms, of paying out faster than the funnel could refill.
Evaluation pass rates landed at 17.9% across the demo phase, toward the generous end of the industry range and consistent with the client’s stated positioning as a firm that wants traders to reach funding.
Traders bought an average of 1.85 challenges each, and paying traders averaged 1.56 paid attempts — meaning repeat purchase, not single-shot churn, was the norm.
83% of all registered clients arrived through a partner referral. Partner concentration sat at 32% for the single largest referrer and 57% across the top five, with an active roster in the dozens behind them. Affiliate commission events grew from effectively nothing in the opening quarter to a settled monthly cadence by Month 11 — a 68× increase in monthly commission events between Month 1 and Month 11.
Registrations arrived from 99 countries, across four supported interface languages, served from two regions on two trading platforms through three payment providers and an aggregator layer.
Launch speed is a commercial weapon, not a convenience. This client sold their first challenge seven days after provisioning and had a full second trading platform live inside the first month. For a startup prop firm, every week between funding and first revenue is a week of burn — and their marketing spend hit a platform that was already ready to convert.
A platform should bend toward the client’s growth model, not the other way round. This firm bet on partner-led acquisition. Kenmore’s role was to make that bet cheap to execute: three-tier commissions, automated partner approval, referral tracking, campaign-level UTM attribution and 2,700 promotional codes issued without a developer touching anything. Eighty-three per cent attribution is not a platform metric — but a platform that made partner recruitment frictionless is why it was reachable.
Scaling should not mean re-platforming. A second region, a second trading platform, a fourth language and three payment providers were all added to a running system without migration, downtime or a rebuild. When the second region created a maintenance burden, the answer was a feature delivered inside a cycle — not a change in architecture.
Operational leverage is what makes a small team viable. Fewer than one support ticket per twenty traders, an 89% payment success rate, and a 97% development close rate meant the client’s team spent its time on marketing and risk, not on administration. That is the whole point.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Provisioning → first live challenge sale | 7 days |
| Provisioning → second trading platform live | Within Month 1 |
| Monthly challenge sales, Month 1 → Month 11 | 10.9× |
| Challenge accounts provisioned, Month 1 → Month 11 | 7.4× |
| Paid challenge revenue, Month 1 → Month 11 | 8.2× (indexed 100 → 823) |
| Paid challenge revenue, Q1 → Months 10–11 run rate | ~5× |
| Promo code redemptions, Month 1 → Month 11 | 14.8× |
| Affiliate commission events, Month 1 → Month 11 | 68× |
| CRM task throughput, Month 1 → Month 11 | 6.9× |
| Clients arriving via partner referral | 83% |
| Top-5 partner concentration | 57% |
| Challenge income : trader payouts | 3.7:1 |
| Evaluation pass rate | 17.9% |
| Challenges per buyer | 1.85 |
| Payment success rate | 89% |
| Email confirmation rate | 81.8% |
| Support tickets per registered trader | < 1 per 20 |
| Mobile adoption | ~1 in 4 traders |
| Challenge configurations built | 62 |
| Upsale configurations | 220 |
| Promotional codes issued | 2,700+ |
| Trading platforms | 2 (MT5, MatchTrader) |
| Regions / white labels | 2 |
| Payment providers + aggregator | 3 + Ninjacharge |
| Interface languages | 4 |
| Countries represented | 99 |
| Development items delivered | 129 (97% closed) |
Kenmore Design gives prop firms the CRM, Trader's Room, affiliate tools, challenge management, payments, and automation needed to launch fast and scale partner-led growth.
Launch fast. Scale through partners.
