SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
775: FinTech Founder: I'll Never Raise Capital Again!
07 Sep 2017
Chapter 1: What led Andy Swan to start LikeFolio?
he had two successful exits before this one in my trade he raised about 400 500 grand which just diluted him he sold that to ameritrade for kind of a good amount everyone got a healthy return but they stayed there for four years so obviously part of it was a aqua hire as well they really won that talent once they earned that they spun out like folio which is again doing sentiment analysis uh across tweets in a marketplace that basically helps investors to make decisions about kind of different investment criteria and what the next big wins are and kind of trend analysis they've got a team of four down in argentina doing that analysis that's the engineering
Another team of four or five there in Kentucky, again, focused on bootstrapping and building this business, staying lean, serving that sector of 30 to 50 of the big, big, big want guys. Those are annual contract values, 200, 300, 400 grand. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: How did MyTrade evolve and what led to its acquisition?
I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
Chapter 3: What unique technology does LikeFolio use for consumer behavior analysis?
Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B2B SaaS CEO that I've interviewed. If you want to get access to the database I've created, with year-over-year growth rates, customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to getlatka.com. Here's the thing, though. This database, I keep it to myself.
Chapter 4: What subscription models does LikeFolio offer and how do they generate revenue?
It's so freaking valuable. And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of.
Chapter 5: Why has Andy decided not to raise capital for LikeFolio?
You've probably heard of them. They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list. Go get on now at getlatka.com. This is episode 775.
Chapter 6: What challenges does LikeFolio face in sentiment analysis?
Coming up tomorrow morning, the CEO of Texting Base shares his margins, his cap table structure, his valuation, and more. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Andy Swan. He's the founder of a company called Likefolio. The company uses social data to determine shifts in consumer behavior on Main Street before it becomes news on Wall Street.
Chapter 7: How does Andy define success in entrepreneurship?
This is his third financial technology company. The second, MyTrade, was acquired by TD Ameritrade in 2007. Andy, are you ready to take us to the top?
Oh yeah.
Okay.
Chapter 8: What advice does Andy Swan have for young entrepreneurs?
So let's go back real quick and get some history. So 2007, my trade, what did my trade do and why'd you decide to exit it?
My trade was basically a, um, it w it was a Twitter geared directly towards, um, options traders and very active stock traders. And we developed a technology that allowed people to, with one click, copy another person's very complex options trade, which made it a lot easier for people to share what they were doing, to learn about options trading, that sort of thing.
And so part of the reason that we sold was because basically the service, MyTrade itself, was fairly useless without a brokerage back end. And so We developed the technology. We had a longstanding relationship with TD Ameritrade's subsidiary, Thinkorswim. And, you know, I pretty much developed it with them in mind. And so it kind of worked out well for us and for them.
It's now probably the number one stock trading and options trading community in the world.
And what did the, I mean, did you decide to bootstrap that company or do you raise capital or what?
We've raised a little bit. What's a little bit? $500,000 or $600,000. Okay. I don't think that we ever really tapped into that money because we sold the company like three or four months after raising. So really, we just diluted our own ownership and kind of a lesson learned there.
Why'd you do that if you knew the sale was coming? It sounds like you were building this all the whole time in mind for Ameritrade.
Well, we didn't know that the sale was coming. You know, we thought that there was a good opportunity to at least partner with them. We did not know that they would jump on the idea of acquiring it. But, you know, so we raised the money thinking, all right, this will get us 12 to 18 months worth of capital to build this out properly.
But, you know, they kind of acquired us right out of the starting gate, which we did not expect, but it turned out to work out well.
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