🚪How Ben raised capital with a No-Code prototype
The No-Code Success Story of Ben Waterman and Strabo
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 63 new subscribers this week. 👯
Sorry a bit late today. I’m in a GPT’s rabbit hole because of the new OpenAI release. You too?
For this week’s No-Code success story I talked with Ben Waterman. Read about:
🏃♀️ From professional athlete to Fintech startup
💡 Solving their own problem
💬 Finding and talking to potential users
🔥 Building a No-Code prototype to raise capital
🎈Keeping it free until there is product market fit
Enjoy reading and happy building!
PS: did you miss last weeks interview? Read how Chris built and sold a product without revenue for 5-figures.
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🔥 Maker Story
Hello! What's your background?
My name is Ben Waterman. I'm the founder of Strabo, a customisable personal finance dashboard. I was originally a professional athlete, running on the track before moving into wealth management and VC.
I experienced the difficulties managing the varied and complex range of investments on offer today from around the world in one place, Being non-technical, no-code was the logical place to get started building an MVP.
What is the product you have been working on?
Strabo is a customisable wealth management solution. It was born from a a problem that we experienced ourselves:
It’s difficult to make portfolio decisions if you don’t have a centralised dashboard
It’s time-consuming to manage assets for multiple countries
We have tried all the finance apps you’ve heard of and many you haven’t heard of. There is nothing that covers multiple countries and enough asset classes. So… we decided to build our own.
Our Notion-style customisable platform can be individually tailored to each user, making your experience exactly how you want it to be. We are building investment forecasting, risk management and portfolio allocation tools to modernise all the facets of traditional wealth management.
What went into building the first version?
We started with interviewing more than 100 potential users before settling on a demographic and product.
We found most of these from our personal and professional networks. We reached out by text and personalisation was key here.
Inspired by the book The Mom Test, we talked to users. Some examples of good questions:
Tell me more about your problem?
What makes this so awful for you specifically?
Talk me through the last time that happened.
Have you tried doing something to fix this?
What else have you tried?
How are you dealing with it now?
What will be the perfect solution for you?
Talk me through the last time that happened?
After interviewing we spent a month building the first version. This first version was essential as we wanted to talk to investors to raise funding and to onboard users and quickly get direct feedback.
Why did you choose to raise capital?
The simple answer is that building a company is expensive. We also realised that building a global wealth management platform is ambitious. Although building a platform with no-code is a cheaper than a full code stack. API costs are also expensive and there are minimum quantities to get set up. So it wasn’t viable to foot these costs ourselves.
With warm introductions through our network we raised:
£300k in equity financing
£200k in grant funding
By that point we already had 150 users on the platform and a waitlist approaching 1000.
Which No-Code tools did you use?
Bubble because it is the market leader in no-code platform building
Webflow because it is by far the most powerful and simple to use website and community builder
Mailchimp because we tested a few mailing list management tools but found Mailchimp to be the best
Zapier because it is the best way of linking together different tools without code
What's your business model?
At this moment we are not yet charging a subscription fee (so sign up now😉)! We’re prioritising finding product market fit and making sure the product is sticky before starting to charge. We also conduct surveys on willingness to pay and estimated price point, and are waiting for these to be overwhelmingly positive. Monetisation is the most difficult part of this sector, so we’re keen to get this right
Soon we will switch to a SaaS subscription model and include a premium tier when we grow our feature set.
How have you attracted users and grown your product?
We started with lots of word of mouth and network advertising to get our first 300 or so users. Beyond that, it has largely been features online through partner institutions and universities, posts on Reddit and Indiehackers, and SEO.
What's your advice for people just getting started?
The number one thing is to build something people want - sounds simple but is so easy to forget.
Thanks for sharing your very inspiring story Ben. Now back to GPT’s 😁
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