GoSolo

Lots of entrepreneurs are suffering from getting paid late.
Many of our users send out invoices for their services.
It is one thing to make the invoice clear, professional, with the correct info, etc. etc.
As many of us know, paying the invoice is quite tedious. You need to copy-paste a lot of info from the invoice into the accounting system or internet/mobile banking:

• recipient name,
• bank account details,
• amount,
  -reference number,
  -sometimes a description

Introducing GoSolo Easy-pay invoices (just made up the name now :)

The basic concept is that we have introduced a "Pay securely now" button on the invoice, which takes the end-customer to their internet/mobile banking app via Open Banking/PSD2 and creates a payment with all the fields filled in, all they need to do is press the "Authorise" button. The whole experience makes no more than a few clicks/taps on the phone and hopefully gets our users paid much faster.

Behind the scenes, we have integrated with Plaid (https://plaid.com/uk) and enabled this workflow in less than 4 weeks

Have been absent for a while. Personally has been busy with fundraising, there has been some progress (fingers crossed), but it is quite brutal for pre-seed/seed stage out there. Contrary to tons of news about how much money there, it is very restrained for the early stage. Anyways, in other news we have:

1. Mobile Apps are now launched on both Apple & Android
2. Integrated with Plaid for Open Banking / PSD2 Payment initiation to create "1-Click" Invoices. The idea is that an invoice raised via GoSolo App can be paid by "1-Click" from the customer's mobile banking app. Technically it will be 3-4 clicks or taps, but still, it is much faster and easier than copy-pasting the details from an invoice.
3. Newly updated website, please "Roast" it :) https://gosolo.net/
4. Launching on Product Hunt tomorrow, please stand-by to UpVote us :)

The single & simple process of company formation plus bank account opening is our USP for the moment. We also appreciate that business founders invest a lot into business naming and the search for the "perfect name" is a very involving process. Hence we have adjusted the website in a way to make the process of name search and commitment to proceed with registration much simpler.

Also, our observation is that contrary to our initial assumptions, a lot of people approach company formation and account opening on their mobile devices, so we have expedited our plans for mobile adaptation and mobile apps development. The adaptation is already applied, so while it is still a web-first app, it will look reasonably well on the mobile device.

Would be happy if you guys had a look and commented on the mechanics.
https://gosolo.net/

I have 226 versions of our GoSolo pitch deck created over the course of the past 2+ years of research & ideation of the idea plus two rounds of fundraising. That is an average of 1 new version per 3 days :)

Below is a compilation of some extracts to give you a better idea why there are so many.

Real users always find a way to surprise you :) So we had a client who had a single name instead of a common name-surname format. All legal checks out with documents, KYC, compliance...but not our APIs. Had to perform an emergency hotfix to enable him, but all good in the end.

My sister was the guinea pig for the company formation process. We had a small hiccup but again everything worked out in the end. Company registration is a difficult process as CH works on the submissions in a semi-automated way, with some manual check along the way. You would not believe how many rules there are on naming your company - crazy logic to reproduce. Anyways, this was critical for us because company formation + bank account is our USP and it worked as desired.

After more delays with cards setup, we were actually in a position to open the first business bank account in March and without further a due I went ahead and opened one for my own company. All went well - happy times! The rest of the day was spent live-testing my account on zoom with all of our team: payments, card management, invoicing. It is really live now!

This was always quite optimistic, but I always maintained that at optimum we should achieve a working product in 4 months. While technically the product was indeed ready, it was not tested, we have not done our cyber-security checks and compliance was not complete. Cyber/Penetration is the easiest but still requires preparation, I would say that ideally, you need a month from initial contact to report. Testing is never-ending, and never enough so you just need to do as much as you can to complete all the runbooks. For us compliance was a major obstacle as our BaaS provider kept coming up with new requirements. In the end it took all of January and February to complete... = delay :(

A major achievement that was easier than I expected was getting the FCA E-money Agent license, this is because our Banking provider helped a lot (and little did I know that most of the compliance would happen later). Regardless, We were quite happy on the day :)

Eventually, I found some F&F funding back in May-June 2020 and this gave me the confidence to start building the product. It took longer than I thought to find a decent PM2 (Project & Product Manager) but after spending whole summer looking for options eventually found someone all the way in Brasil. Side note - Brasil's Fintech ecosystem is booming, lots of opportunities!