| Hi Kevin, congrats on the launch! I'm the cofounder and CEO of FINSIGHT, one of the few... sustained (for lack of a better word)... entrants into the capital markets infrastructure space (we own Deal Roadshow which markets about roughly half of IPOs, 99% of ABS and 20% of corporate DCM new issue in the US). My two cents on overall go to market: 1) Good job not mentioning AI/ML/Blockchain/Distributed Ledger anywhere on your website. This market does not trust black boxes or anything they do not understand. How you solve the problem is no one's business but yours, they just want the job done well. 2) Sales cycles are long, today is always the best day to begin prospecting clients. Every successful enterprise fintech company I know was built on strong outbound (cold calls and cold emails, conferences, etc), not inbound. This is not an industry where you can sit back and throw money at AdWords and Instagram. Put differently, your target customers are not looking for this solution so you have to find them and convince them why they need it. 3) The most important factor in winning new business here is social proof. Do whatever it takes to get it, even if it means giving it away for free. Get those logos on your website! 4) Never, ever cut out the banks and remove any site copy that could be mistaken for you doing it. I know of no startup that has succeeded in this endeavor and many have been destroyed for it (I don't want to mention names lest this comment offends some of these people). 5) As PG has written about previously, don't be afraid to do things that don't scale. I can run our whole company from a smart phone but I still have clients (including some from GS) that insist on emailing us to do things for them despite the fact it took them longer to to explain what they wanted over email than than log in and make the change. I don't care, people are more intelligent than machines. I actually find the clients that make us do the work for them to be the most loyal and supportive. That last mile of development to perfectly automate this workflow often isnt worth the brain damage and I would NEVER push the client to do it on their own if they don't want to. That's what they pay us for. 6) Your lights can be turned off overnight if BlueCoat's (Symantec > Broadridge) web filter categorizes you as anything remotely close to a virtual data room, file sharing or social networking site. Go ahead and get yourself categorized properly and monitor it regularly. Do the same for your email IP addresses. 7) I operate with the assumption that no one is going to log into my website (thankfully many do). Figure out a way to push value to them. Monitor space is the most expensive real estate per square inch in the world for this crowd. 8) Regarding your website: I think there is too much white space and scrolling. This market values content density (don't believe? look at bloomberg). I realize this is super subjective. 9) I found that focusing on value created resonated more than costs saved. As an owner of our company, I like saving money because it flows straight to our bottom line. Most people I pitch are not compensated that way and naturally don't care. Convince them they can make more money or execute better for their clients and their ears perk up. I'm sure there's more... feel free to reach out and I would love to get a demo. |
Love these two cents. It's early, but good to know we’re building some right muscles with things we’re doing today. We’ve embraced the PG mantra and have been putting in extra efforts to prospect/reach out to clients, win social proof, and do the things that don’t scale to bolster our automation and make our customers love us. We’ll keep that spirit strong as we grow.
Also completely agree with your point on prospecting clients proactively + early. As you know, there’s such a knowledge gap in this space that it doesn’t make sense to expect customers to show up on our doorstep with ads. Though we’re investing in content since we think there isn’t enough education out there for e.g. first-time fintech founders, we’ll keep outbound core to our DNA. Also appreciate the thoughtful feedback on our website, value-props, go-to market. Looking forward to connecting!