Crossed $10K rev & $2K MRR
by Shawn CaoWe launched Fina in March 2023, and till today, we have achieved
- 450+ paid users
- 1000+ free users
- 4500+ total sign-ups (including markets we don't serve today)
With 2000+ financial institutions connected in 3 months, I'd say our small team of 2 (now 3) did a wonderful job.
The product has no official design, we just use our best sense of engineering to make this V1 product available, the only principle is to make only useful features available, keep it as simple as we can, and constantly listen to users' criticism, and sometimes their praise.
Having these many early users pay us to continue developing this financial data platform is a pleasure and honor, we deeply appreciate all the trust put in us.
In the long run, we want to build Fina as the de-facto GO-TO financial data platform where all users get their personalized finances in a few minutes if not seconds.
By "financial data platform", we really mean it by creating Fina as an ecosystem that unites Users, Creators (advisors), and Developers to enable all types of financial scenarios, so that anyone can find what they need by simply typing a "/" or a simple question.
For this unique experience to offer financial insights through a document interface, we sometimes call Fina "Notion for Finance".
I hope you check us out and build with us!
with @sweetpotatoguy
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I enjoyed reading this so much I logged back into my IH account after 3 years! Really inspiring to see you getting that many paid users with an MVP. I would love to hear more about how your co-founder actually built you list. Also be interesting to know what you budget for Influencers was.
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Happy to share some strategies sometime if you ever have any questions :)
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Awesome, glad you made a back! And thanks for your comment, it's encouraging.
Re. List - It's basically a tally form that was built as a beginning, and socialize on Twitter talking about the promised part of the product, and slowly see signups coming in through.Currently, we don't run any paid ads, so the partnership with influencers is the main marketing we do - the interesting part is not all influencers are equal even though they have similar social stats (eg. # of followers), and the outcome differs a lot. I can't share the budget details, but overall, our current revenue goes to cloud services, tools, third-party API, and influencer marketing.
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Congrats on the milestone and the work done! Would love to learn more about the features u provide with a quick video or how it works page. Do u have this?
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Absolutely, take a look at this demo - https://youtu.be/QLcNIC23WjQ
Also, sign up for a free account, you will have an "Onboarding page" in your profile where you can see some materials too.
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Great product! When it reaches Brazil, for sure +1 paid user.
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How many devs do you have?
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It's just myself, :) Will add a couple more by the end of the year.
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Awesome stuff @sweetpotatoguy and @shawncao
I must say I love how you preach the principle of keeping it simple as you can. Often times I find lots of tools that require a steeper learning curve than necessary.
Anyways, keep on keeping on. Wishing you two continued success!
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very solid product 👍
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Thanks so much!! More to come
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
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Thank you for your question, @barnoev
My co-founder @sweetpotatoguy is a great wizard on this, I'm pretty sure he can share a ton. From my perspective, we have done a few things very well to acquire our initial users:
- [Email list] Building waitlist/signups before the product is ready so you know who you can talk to. As time goes on, this list grows.
- [Social influencers] Find influencers in Finance domains who can endorse us. Currently, we mainly talk to Twitter influencers.
- [In-App feedback] Having an in-app feedback and communication channel is the best to reach users for a zero-friction feedback loop. Users won't have a burden or feel a burden to share in this way.
Constantly building, keeping it simple, and eventually letting the Product itself speak is what we hope eventually.
Hope it's meaningful for my 2 cents.
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
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Good luck to you as well!
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Shawn is pretty much on point. The actual act of getting the initial users REALLY comes down to actually talking to them 1:1 first. You need to talk with them so you can understand if there's actually any excitement for what problem you're solving.
Our first almost 50 paid users all came from 1:1 conversations with me, and I was selling a VERY low ticket product (usually not worth the time longterm). But the conversations were worth their weight in gold to me, so I've prob had 100s of them.
If you can't immediately identify a few people you know who could use it, even for free just to give some feedback, you might not understand who it's for well enough yet. It should be a group you know at least one person in!
So figure out who it's for, go talk to them 1:1 however you can (in person is best, zoom is second), and then once you figure out the type of person who may be interested in using it, you can go find where they hang out online and buy some arbitrage (find someone with an audience there and pay them to help you get in front of the right people with a basic description of the idea and a waitlist and see what kinda response it gets)
Start with the least friction, just collecting an email is enough signal to figure out if people are ever going to be interested. If you can get enough interest to motivate you, keep building!
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