Hey everyone! Ian here…surprise! lol.
You may not normally get FTT content on Sunday’s but that doesn’t mean we’re not working—Julie VerHage, my cofounder & formerly the lead fintech reporter at Bloomberg News, has been meticulously publishing her in-depth column on fintech since March.
She’s written about wide range of topics: the impending explosion of credit building products, Shopify’s fintech partnerships (where she mentioned that she heard Affirm was a Shopify partner about 3 months before it was public), and a deep dive on Robinhood’s revenue model and the question on moral hazard & a fintech company’s responsibility for a user’s actions.
We started a new $10/month tier so that more people can learn and enjoy Julie’s great content, more premium content, and other perks we’re going to be rolling out over the next few months. Get Julie’s column every Sunday in your inbox by signing up here:
This week’s issue is a new segment we’re going to be doing: Ask The FTT Slack.
The FTT Slack is an invite only community for experienced operators in fintech. Most of the folks there have deep experience in building the current generation of massive fintech companies.
Unfortunately, private Slack’s don’t really scale in the way we want them too. They also get really expensive really fast. But most importantly, but we want to create a better, more unified, experience for members too. In the meantime, we’re going to be leveraging our community’s collective expertise to create more high quality content for you all! Which is exciting and will be a ton of fun. If you have questions for the community, hit me up at ian@fintechtoday.co.
For FTT+ members, we’re beta testing a new community product in Q4! We’re super excited to build this new community, with a lot more functionality, with our members. If you’re an FTT+ member, check your FTT+ email you received earlier today for a link to the waitlist!
If you’re not an FTT+ member, in the long run you’re going to be missing out on the non-content stuff we’ll be doing, which I’m *extremely* excited about. Hit the link to sign up below!
Ask The FTT Slack: What Do Your Users *Really* Care About?
Hi all, Julie here. Before we dive into fintech, I want to acknowledge world mental health day (which was Saturday). This is a topic that is very near and dear to me. Long story short, I suffered from severe depression and anxiety while in high school. It got to the point where I didn’t think life was worth living anymore, and I asked my parents to take me to rehab as a 15 year-old. I can’t even begin to tell you how much this helped me. Not necessarily because of the exercises they have you do or the doctors you meet with, but because for the first time in my life, I realized I wasn’t alone in my struggle. This is something I worry about a lot for my generation as well as company founders. The amount of pressure we put on ourselves to execute is like Mount Everest sometimes. It seems like there a million things we need to be doing...products to launch, ideas to test, but don’t forget one very important fact: we are human, and humans are not perfect. Don’t be afraid to talk to someone about your struggles and the pressure you face. A friend, a spouse, a family member or a therapist (highly highly recommend). People ask you for help all the time, so you shouldn’t be afraid to reach out for help either.
Ok, back to fintech. This week’s topic stems from something I’ve been thinking a lot about from my journalism days. Editors and reporters put a TON of pressure on themselves to be the first to break the news. While I understand why this might be an important metric for traditional media publications, I’ve come to realize that readers don’t care about who’s “first” as much as readers do. As long as you can quickly match whatever the news is and get a story up, most of the time your readers don’t even know who had it before anyone else.
As many of you know, Ian started an invite-only Slack group for experience operators in fintech last August. And as we start testing out new community products for all of you this quarter (if you’re interested in the Q4 beta, you can sign up here and Ian will reach out!)
As we try to connect the broader fintech community with the FTT Slack, I asked people there for similar examples of things startups tend to prioritize far more than their users. Here’s what they had to say.
Funding News
This is one that actually drove me crazy as a reporter. Companies always tried to put so much pressure on covering their funding news and I’d just keep telling them that no one cared. Some of my stories at Bloomberg would get hundreds of thousands of readers. You wanna know how many looked at funding news? Not even in the tens of thousands. I get that this can help you recruit, but just make a quick post on your company blog or include it in your about page then, heck, even just send a tweet about it. I promise your time is better spent elsewhere, like using the money you just raised to do something big that I actually do want to write about.
Card Design
This one made me laugh. The design of your card is important to a certain extent since people don’t like an ugly card or one that seems super flimsy, but I guarantee 90%+ of your users aren’t choosing you for your card. Though I do have to give a nod to Cash App because the emojis are kinda cool.
Your Tech Stack
As Cherry Miao, a partner at Accel, told me: “People care about how good the sausage tastes, not how it got made. :]” Exactly, Cherry, exactly. How you use buzzwords like AI and ML don’t matter to your users as long as the product is working for them.
An example from Frederik Waller, a product manager at Germany’s Trade Republic: “I think no one cares how TikTok actually chooses the videos it shows them. They just care that the videos are funny/relevant. Same for many financial products. Nobody cares if you decide on their credit card limit with a sophisticated AI/ML model or an endless if-else statement. What matters if people get a loan/credit limit.”
Bank Charters and Bank Partners
Yes, who you have as a banking partner or whether or not you have a charter can impact what you offer customers and how you offer it, but your users don’t care about the behind the scenes. They care that your service is reliable, that you don’t charge fees, that they get a competitive interest rate on their savings or a loan. Thankfully for startups and their users, there are a lot of banks that can help with this. AND, as we talked about last week, this process might get a lot easier in the future.
TBD
This is where I challenge you to think about where your company, or the companies you’ve invested in, might be placing too much importance on. Maybe take another look at some of the user research you’ve done and see if there is something you’re missing or something that you might have misinterpreted, and don’t be afraid to change the path forward.
