SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Finimize Uses 1m Email List to Launch API SaaS, Grows to 30% of Total Revenue
21 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: How much funding did Finimize raise in its early years?
How much did you raise in 2016? We did around about like half a million pounds then. And then we did something in the single digit million altogether. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one.
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He's the founder of Finimize, the world's largest and most engaged finance community. He previously co-founded one of the largest e-commerce players in Switzerland and sold it with 200 employees to the largest Swiss media house. He was a Forbes 30 Under 30 participant in 2016 and also a Techstars mentor. Max, you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Thanks for having me. That's great.
So when did you start building Finimize? Was it during you building the e-commerce business or was it after? It kind of started a little bit as a side project. And then I really started to devote my time to it fully at the end of 2016. So I started the company in August of 2016. And what is the company? Is it a community play? How do you make money? So we define ourselves as a community business.
And we make money through multiple revenue streams. So we have three revenue streams. We have advertising, we have subscription, and we have advertising. perhaps most relevant for your audience, the B2B licensing play as well, where we license content to other platforms. Oh, that's really interesting. So I think I get the ads model. That's probably sponsorships in your email sends on your site.
Peel back that onion real quick before we do the other two revenue streams. What's a sponsorship to like your email list look like? Exactly. So we have around about a million users, members as we refer to them, all over the world. It's a very relevant target group for many specifically financial institutions.
And so they can buy access to that audience primarily through the newsletter, but also on the website, some of our meetups, etc., And you can buy a daily or weekly or like a multi-month slot and get that brand awareness, brand exposure and education of the market about your product. Can we go deeper for there for a second? So how many people are on the email list? Around about a million. Okay.
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Chapter 2: What are the different revenue streams for Finimize?
And what that does is... And that's per year or per month? Per year. And so what that does is it unlocks our full content library, which is currently primarily in the app, but we're also building out a web app for this.
We have over 100 different audio guides, long-form audio guides that explain anything from how to think about investing in Microsoft or how to think about Google's Moonshot when you think about their investment thesis there. But the primary driver that we see why people buy this is we have two products. One is we have a daily brief.
So we basically explain to you every single day in under seven minutes as an audio product. what's happened in the world of finance, very similar to our newsletter. And then we have our analyst insights, which is, I think, personally the most exciting product. So we have a whole team of analysts who previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg, really, really sophisticated financial experts.
And they share their views and opinions on investing opportunities, investing trends. And so you can learn from their insights. And that is, again, is available in text and in audio. Are they full-time employees of Finamize or they volunteer their time and analysis? No, it's our, we have a full team of analysts. It's one of the core assets that we have is that team. How big is that team?
Uh, I think we are now six people. Oh, wow. Wow. And how big is like your whole, the whole operation, everything all together? How many total team members? Um, including a couple of like part-timers, uh, I would say around about 30, um, between 25 and 30, depending on how you count it. Yeah. So we're pretty lean, but, uh, but it works. Yeah.
Well, Hey, lean, there's nothing wrong with being lean, nothing wrong at all. All right. So newsletter membership, consumer subscriptions, and the last one. Uh, so the last one is our API business, which is, uh, sort of our newest business, uh, which very much came up from inbound that we received. Oh, wow.
So what happened essentially was we started getting a lot of investment platforms, a lot of brokerages come to us and say, hey, we have a huge user base. We're struggling a little bit to activate all of them, and we want to use content to activate them. There's a couple of examples. Robinhood has done a decent job with this.
You're starting to see an E-Trade, those kind of guys in their latest earnings reports talk about how content is a major activation driver for them. And so these platforms come to us and they say, hey, we've tried content ourselves. We couldn't really crack it. We love the way that you guys do content. Can we have it? And so...
When we started to receive a couple of these inbound requests, we thought about what can we do. And we essentially created an API. And now you can go and plug into an API and pull sort of a product palette that we've created from daily, weekly news, text, and audio, plug it directly into your own app. And so then all of a sudden, you have a really, really nice content library.
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Chapter 3: How does Finimize leverage its email list for sponsorships?
And the power here was that we had such a large audience that we could do that. And so that's, I think, was one of the I think kernels that then led me in the way I started building Finamize is that scale is so crucial because exactly what you said, it allows you to start testing some things as we're doing now. Did you gain financial independence from the DynDeal exit?
So you could take a big risk with Finamize or was it sort of a nice exit? You could take a couple months off, but you had to sort of get back to work building something new. Yeah, so I think I was 28 at the time. And I wouldn't say that I would have never had to work again. But it was a nice exit. And I think it gave me freedom to experiment with a new product, which I'm super grateful for.
Yeah, and there were several of you guys there at the top, right? I mean, there are a lot of founders. Five, yes. Yeah. It's a lot of people to get to agree on one single direction, right? Exactly. How many, are you a sole founder now of Finamize or you have multiple co-founders? I'm the only founder. Oh, great. So gone the totally other direction. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I asked, right?
You got one way, now you go the other. Now, have you bootstrapped Finamize or have you raised? We raised a little bit of money from some angels and from some VCs, but really not that much. What year was that?
We raised a pre-seed in 2016, at the end of 2016 when we started, and then raised a little bit more money after that, primarily just to get a bunch of interesting people on board who could help us. But like I said, we've been pretty lean, which has advantages and disadvantages. Yeah. I want to talk more about leanness in our last five minutes here, but can you quantify that for us?
I mean, you did two rounds, it sounds like. How much did you raise in 2016? Uh, we did round about like half a million pounds, uh, then, and then we did, um, we did something in the single digit, uh, um, million altogether. Um, I don't actually have the exact number off the top of my head. So nothing by any means, nothing major. Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah.
So altogether some, some maybe around a million bucks, USD, something like that. Probably a little bit more, but, uh, yeah, in that ballpark. Okay. Fair enough. So, so you use that capital, bring on, uh, you know, great, great new talent, run some new tests. Um, talk to me about running lean, right? I mean, how have you resisted the urge to go raise more capital to accelerate growth?
How have you been able to stay patient? Yeah. So I think, um, it's a, it's a, it's a good question. Uh, So I think fundamentally, one of the things that I think is really important is that you're able to build a business and it feels like your business. And I think what's sometimes a bit challenging is if you end up with 7% of the business that you started...
um then and everybody else has the full control and you ultimately have become an employee uh you're no longer the actual founder um so i think that was uh i think something that i valued is just having that independence um and being able to steer the company and i think you know the thing that we're building is is not something that a has been done before and b um is
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