Category: Financing, Banking, Inclusion & SMBs
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I talked about pivoting, using my own fintech startup as an example. Setting out to boil the ocean of small business lending, we’d built a working capital platform that combined a borrower/lender marketplace; invoicing; and basic collections CRM. Market timing, borrower behaviour, public policy all shaped the months that…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 1
Product (or business) life extension is a boon when you learn marketing and strategy in business school. But for an undercapitalized startup without a full time marketing brain, it can just prolong the pain. You can’t fail fast if you are continually creating new use cases and finding new doors to knock on! Waiting seems…
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Failing fast isn’t always easy for startups when tackling complexity or inertia
“Gain traction fast, or fail fast and move on”. All start-ups hear this. The logic behind this is sound: if enough users attach to a product, the need must be strong enough to back. Then, it becomes a race hinged on marketing and viable customer acquisition. Create website, build prototype, beta and MVP. Get early…
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Why are business payments in the US still analog?
NACHA in the US recently approved same day ACH, something consumers and businesses in the UK take for granted. There is plenty if activity in person to person payments, mobile wallets etc. We can save the last 10 feet of effort to buy a coffee, or having to even dig into our wallets for a…
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5 bumps my banking experience found it harder to avoid in my fintech startup – Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I summarized some of the bumps/lessons that, despite being ‘common sense’ still had to be experienced. Sales cycles: As a startup, everyone makes you wait and everything seems to move at a glacial pace. Banks and corporations take time. We all ‘know’ this but yet the world of enterprise…
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5 bumps my banking experience found it harder to avoid in my fintech startup – Part 1
In the previous post, I listed some of the bumps we could have avoided. In this second part, I’ve summarized some of the lessons that, while easy to dismiss as common sense, would need to have been experienced one way or another. Unanticipated, Harder to Avoid Lessons 1. Immunity to Change: This is always the…
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5 bumps my banking experience didn’t avoid in my fintech startup
I’d like to think we did a few things really well in our fintech start-up, Bilbus. And, of course, we made our share of mistakes. In between, there were a lot of things we could have done better. Good timing forgives mistakes. Bad timing highlights them. It’s easier to simplify some of our lessons learned…
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Closing a chapter
Sometimes we get an opportunity to reset, reorganize and push ahead. Timing, funding, team: all the pitons that slow the start-up climb up the cliff. And sometimes, the climb isn’t the one you set out on and it would be quicker to start again using lessons learned, than to try to pivot from the current…