On Launching A Personal Finance Platform With 1K Users

Ben Waterman

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Published: April 17th, 2022

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Ben Waterman

Founder, Strabo

Founders

Employees

Strabo

strabo.app

from London

started February 2021

Founders

Employees

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Webflow

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social media

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Slack

Trello

design

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Hubspot

other

Miro

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I’m Ben, and along with my co-founder Mike, we run Strabo, a financial portfolio management tool for internationals. Strabo helps you track and manage all kinds of asset classes across countries and currencies, including analytics, goal setting, FX transfers, and customizability. We’re currently offering the product for free for a really limited amount of time only!

We’ve had over 1,000 signups already, and we’re planning to continue letting users onboard for free until the new year.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I am originally a professional athlete, having competed on the track for Great Britain. I also worked in the city managing investments for high net worth clients, before joining up with Mike, an international who grew up in the US, studied in mainland Europe and then worked at Amazon in London. He was fed up with managing a whole bunch of bank and investment accounts across countries, and was putting together some ideas for a platform to solve this. I was fed up with the sub-par services that even premium investment clients had come to expect from their wealth managers. And so Strabo was born. We’d both had small entrepreneurial ventures before but this was different - it combined both personal pain points and professional experience, and married our skill sets perfectly.

We decided to go out and talk to everyone we knew to find out if it was just us, or others were having similar problems. It was immediately clear that internationals and expats were a forgotten corner of personal finance. On the higher end of the spectrum, private investors with significant assets and capital were being denied technical solutions to wealth management by arrogant banks who were unwilling and incapable of innovating. The lower end of the spectrum was being served with basic day-to-day budgeting tools, but even the middle had been almost entirely forgotten.

Start networking in the space you’re interested in even before you have an idea

We interviewed several hundred of our target demographic via personal calls and focus groups to validate our idea and quit our successful corporate jobs to go full-time on building Strabo. Fortunately, we’ve managed to live on savings for long enough to get our product to market and in the hands of early users.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

Given the amount of time we’d spent thinking about what we wanted the platform to look like, we had a pretty good head start when it came to designing. We mocked up the designs on Figma and had them built pretty quickly using the no-code platform Bubble. This allowed us to get users on the platform quickly for some quick iterations while we had the full version built out using a code stack. No-code is all the rage at the moment, and for good reason. It does have limitations but for an MVP, it’s hard to beat in terms of time and cost. Attached below is an early screenshot of the first version of the platform (forgive us, we’re not designers!)

And how it looks today:

Describe the process of launching the business.

Fortunately, the UK ecosystem is fairly well developed and reasonably straightforward when it comes to starting and running businesses, especially in London, the financial capital of Europe. As business school graduates, we were lucky enough to have a fairly large network of our target demographic to tap into, meaning the first few hundred users came pretty quickly.

We built our first website on Webflow (self-taught, would certainly recommend it!) and managed signups with Hubspot, which made the process significantly easier.

Fortunately, we had a small friend and family round of c.£25k to burn through, although this still needed a founder topup to get us to our first round. A booming stock and crypto market certainly helped us find excess cash when we needed it!

I suppose our biggest lessons learned, as cliche as it sounds, were around being super product-focused. The majority of the company resources at any one time should be going towards building and iterating the product. That, spending a lot of time making sure early hires are a good fit and waiting until you have something to show off before going out and fundraising. You hear stories of eye-watering large pre-seed rounds being written on napkins in the US on just an idea, but in general, European investors are much more risk-averse and like to see a solid product demo and some traction before considering a term sheet.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

We’ve tried a whole load of different ways of marketing and found that at the beginning, you just can’t beat talking to people individually (in person if possible) and building connections. It’s the classic “Do things that don’t scale” that Paul Graham made famously, but it genuinely works and is necessary at the beginning. We saw a ridiculous differential in conversion between genuine discussion and in-person outreach, and automated messages or “spray and pray” approaches. Of course, Facebook and Google ads are necessary at some point but you will have to build your user base with no budget at some point, so it’s vital to learn the basics.

Things like SEO are pretty widely discussed online so there’s lots of material (we like Neil Patel’s blogs on this), and content marketing is important although it’s a much longer-term strategy and is more about building the foundations for the future.

We also took some great tips from Seedrs founder Jeff Lynn, who reminded us of the importance of a newsletter - it’s a great way to make sure people don’t forget what you’re doing. A little harder to grift signups in the age of GDPR, but we routinely ask everyone we speak to if we can add them to the list, and it quickly adds up.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We’re just coming to the end of F10, our accelerator program in Zurich. We’ll be pitching the last 6 months of progress at our demo day on the Swiss stock exchange in early December, which coincides with the official close of our fundraising round. The team will then be building out the backlog of features and putting further resources towards marketing our product.

Longer-term, we are going to be working on some of the more exciting features that make our product unique. We’ll be adding market-leading FX in-app, as well as full customizability to allow users to build their dashboard exactly as they want it - a landlord would want to see completely different information to a crypto entrepreneur, and thus will need a different view.

We are expecting to hit profitability in October 2022, following which we will raise a further round of fundraising to expand more aggressively. This will allow us to reach a broader audience and move from catering primarily to expats and internationals to being able to cater to millennial investors more broadly. It will also coincide with a change in customer acquisition cost, which starts just under £1 as we leverage existing personal and professional networks, all the way up to £50 as we reach out to the broader fintech market where customer acquisition is notoriously difficult.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

We’ve learned a ton! About ourselves individually, the market, and also the challenges involved in building a startup. Some of the most notable are that the traditional literature (think YC et al), is almost always right. It can be tempting to stray from these principles based on individual skill sets and preferences, but spending early months writing code and talking to users (and repeating) is the key to finding early success.

Other than that, we liked starting with a no-code platform and also spent a huge amount of time fundraising - important to be confident in what you’re building and know when to compromise and when not to budge on your vision. Keep track of investors, spend time figuring out who’s at the right stage and try to network as much as possible: warm intros always do better than cold ones. Finally, never pay to pitch anywhere!

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We use a load of different tools, many of which we love. Here are some of our favorites:

Webflow: intuitive and easy to build responsive websites
Canva: great for decks, social media material, and promo. Can’t believe it’s free!
Slack: of course, who doesn’t
Bubble: the no-code leader
Figma: web and platform design
Trello: productivity and task setting
Hubspot: CRM, mail tool, and signup tracker
Miro: customer data collection, action planning, and mind maps

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

There is of course a great deal to be learned from the classic startup library (YC, Zero to One, Lean Startup, etc) but we’ve found the sector-specific videos and literature to have helped us upskill on things we have no experience of - Neil Patel for marketing for example. We are also big Twitter users! Spend a few months curating a feed of people doing the things you struggle with, and you’ll be surprised at the value you can extract.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

There is no right time! Get out and start speaking to people about their problems or your idea today. Secondly, start networking in the space you’re interested in even before you have an idea - it makes life much much easier. Join the subreddit, engage on Twitter or write a newsletter / Medium. Pays dividends!

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are actually in the process of expanding the team - we’re on the lookout for a superstar product designer (please do send over your portfolio), and potentially also a full-stack/front-end developer. Aside from that, things change so quickly that it’s not always possible to predict requirements - if you love the space and want to work with us in any capacity, don’t be shy about reaching out.