- Pitbull has this great song where it's like,
"Ask for money, get advice,
ask for advice, get money twice."
He says that in his lyric 'cause he's been there before.
(upbeat music)
Wasan, Ryan, how are you guys doing?
- All good, how about you? - Fantastic.
- Cool, I'm doing incredible.
Tell me about the business.
- [Wasan] Go ahead, Ryan.
- [Ryan] I'll start here, thank you very much.
So we're building Rise as the first FinTech
for B2B in Canada.
We're providing the corporate cards
that provide services
in terms of credit limits for credit cards specifically.
So you're a startup, you just, you know, raise funds.
- [Dan] Yeah.
- Eventually you need to apply for credit cards, right?
- [Dan] Yep.
- If you go through the traditional way
of getting credit card,
there's a traditional way of getting it, right?
It's two years history plus guarantee for the founders.
- I've been there, yep.
- Exactly.
So actually there is,
we thought about like a better solution for this.
So why not providing a credit card
based on the balance of the business as of today, you know.
- Got it, so it uses cash in the bank account
as security to back the credit card?
- Exactly, exactly.
- [Dan] Got it.
- So based off that, we provide a lot of tools,
a lot of features, in terms of accounting integration,
which should save a lot of time
for their founders and startups,
business tools, you know, issuing cards for corporate,
you know, for monthlies. - Yeah.
- And anything else.
- And the company is called Rise.
- [Ryan] Yes.
- Perfect, what stage are you guys at today?
- At the very beginning.
So we are building the MVP
and eventually we have a deadline
of launching the product by end of July,
so beginning of August.
- Got it, all right, what questions do you have for me?
- All right.
So the first question that we have here is
so in order to get the licences
and everything else, right?
We had laid the chicken and the egg problem, right?
So in order to have these funds,
we need to have some traction before,
and you know, to have some traction,
we need to have the licences already in place.
So, if you have this problem,
how would you solve it?
- I find a partner that already has the licences
and then they become the credibility
for me to bootstrap on them
until I can build in enough volume
to be able to go direct.
- [Ryan] Okay, thank you very much.
- Yeah, I've used that quite a bit.
- Perfect, thank you.
Okay, the second question I have here,
what is the best way to pre-sell FinTech services?
Because our business model
is interchange fees at the beginning,
later on, we gotta launch our premium account, right?
So we can charge monthly SAS fees.
So how would you pre-sale FinTech services if-
- Yeah, so a few things, Ryan, I would suggest
that you don't call it FinTech services to a business owner,
'cause they don't know what that is.
So one of my rules in marketing is, you know,
we gotta use what's called echo marketing,
meaning what our customers would call it
is what we call it, right?
So if I presented your solution to a startup,
and I say, what do you call that?
I just described what it does, what do you call that?
They're gonna say, so you're telling me,
it's a way for me to get credit card approval when I can?
Yeah, okay.
Now I know that you have all these other things
that it could do, right?
And this is where I get a lot of founders.
They talk about their blockchain, their AI,
their, you know, whatever and tokens.
And the reality of it is, at the end of the day
you solve a problem for a customer.
They describe that problem and that solution,
how you do it is up to you, right?
We don't even get the chance to describe
or talk about that if they don't buy.
So sometimes we need to just,
it's called chocolate broccoli.
We need to sell the chocolate,
and once they come into our world,
we can give them the broccoli,
which is all the stuff they don't even know they need
because they've never had the chocolate in the first place,
so they don't realise they need the broccoli.
- [Ryan] Understand.
- So what I do is,
the way I pre-sell anything,
is first define what are the three features
that you think's important to the market, right?
So credit card approval,
easily manage multiple accounts, and, you know,
use it as a line of credit, potentially.
Your decision, I don't know,
but that's an idea that I would be like,
okay, these three things are interesting.
Then I would go and I talk to the ideal customer, right?
In your case, it sounds like funded startups.
So I- - Exactly.
- What I would do is I'd call up
all the funded startups in Canada,
or like the accelerators that would know
who the funded startups are.
I would explain to them what I'm doing
and ask them for advice.
I go in for the advice angle
because when you ask people for advice,
they then give you the answer that they would do,
which gets them bought into the solution,
which then gets them committed to seeing you succeed,
which then gets them asking,
hey, do you want me to make some introductions for you?
Whereas if you- - Got it.
- Go in asking for the introductions,
they're gonna tell you all the things that need to
be true for you to get a good introduction,
but they're not gonna offer to make it.
Sounds hilarious, it's how the world works.
You know, Pitbull has this great song.
I don't know the song, I should get the song name,
but he has this lyric where it's like,
"Ask for money, get advice,
ask for advice, get money twice."
He says that in his lyric
'cause he's been there before, right?
And to me, that's kind of the same premise
is ask for advice, get anything.
Then you get in front of these companies
and you do the same thing.
You do a customer discovery call.
A customer discovery call
is completely different than a sales call.
The beauty though is a customer discovery call
can turn into a sales call,
meaning that you go in trying to learn.
The most valuable asset that a startup can get is learning.
So it's not about revenue,
it's not about raising money,
it's not about hiring team members.
The most important thing that I can learn as a startup
if I've got an idea is about the market.
So I tell a lot of early stage founders is find an agency
that's currently doing this for your target market
because they would have so much rich knowledge
around the problem set and the solution set
and the intricacies of what you're trying to build.
Because as a consultant, they're in there, right?
They know when I presented X solution to the customer,
they said this, they know that we've tried to do this
that way and it didn't work.
Or this worked, or this is the way we figured it out here.
It can only work in this scenario, et cetera.
So there's just a lot of learning there.
I'm giving you a lot,
but I thought that this would be valuable.
But once I talked to those companies,
I do the customer discovery call,
which is a series of questions you can Google.
I have a whole list of questions on on the internet
and at the end of that, once you've learned.
So that's why I say, you can end on the sales call,
you can't start on the sales call
'cause if you go on a sales call,
you're essentially selling, you're not learning nothing.
Okay?
But if you start with the discovery,
at the end, you can transition into a sales process,
which typically they're gonna, you know,
you go in for advice,
ask questions, questions, questions,
understand the problems,
understand the potential solution, blah blah.
Then you go, well, I'd love to tell you
about how we're thinking of solving that,
would you be interested?
They go, of course!
That's your open.
Then you go, well, here's the things I heard you say.
And here's the way we're looking at solving it.
And you mind if I do a demo?
You pull up your clickable prototype, okay?
Even if it's not real product,
a clickable prototype is way better than words, right?
Share your screen, show your phone.
Here's how it works.
They go, that's amazing.
Then you make your offer.
What we're doing now is we've got a thing
called the Early Adopter Programme, or the Inner Circle,
or the Founders Group, or whatever you wanna call it.
You can give it a cool name,
pick one of those three of I gave you.
But different clients call different things
for whatever reason, but Early Adopter Programme,
the EAP is a good one, especially for enterprise.
And the way it works is we're looking for 25 early customers
to come on board to help co-create this.
And because they're supporting that co-creation,
here are the things that they get as benefits.
They get 12 months, no fees.
They get, you know, access to the customer advisory board.
They get mentioned on our website as part of the launch
as an innovator, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We do a monthly call with other people
in the financial industry, not FinTech,
because they don't know what that is.
Financial industry that focuses specifically with startups.
So figure out what's valuable to the startup.
Maybe they wanna get access to Series A investors
and you can grab six of those Series A investors
and have a monthly call, so that they can understand,
like there's a bunch of stuff you could do
to make the offer.
And they gotta pay for it though.
- [Ryan] Okay.
- And then you pre-sell, right?
The key is don't make the offer not about your software
so much so that people will buy it just for the other stuff.
And it doesn't give you true customer validation
on the product.
- [Ryan] Makes sense.
- Yeah, I've seen a lot of people make that mistake.
And then you have a signal issue where you thought
you had something, but you didn't,
you're just really good at selling and creating offers.
People bought it because of the thing, you know.
For 500 bucks, you can get an one hour call with Mark Cuban.
100%, 100% people buy.
And you're like, yeah, the winner.
It's like, no, they bought
because of this unrealistic offer,
that is worth the 500 bucks,
not because they want your software.
- [Ryan] Exactly, so how would you-
- And usually the discount, the discount,
it's 12 months for 50%.
So if you're charging a hundred bucks a month for your SAS,
it's 1200 bucks for the year.
You know, if you are part of the Early Adopter Programme,
it's only 600, but they gotta pay
for the whole year upfront.
- [Ryan] Perfect.
- If you take 25 sales,
and you go to a partner that can issue the cards
and you can show them that,
that's gonna open the door, right?
And that's where a lot of people always argue with me.
You can't pre-sell social, you know,
you can't pre-sell social networks.
You can't pre-sell enterprise software, blah, blah.
It's just not true.
Okay, there's crowdfunding, it happens every day.
It's like a, I don't know, $18 billion a year market.
I don't know, I'm making that number up, but it's big.
Okay, people crowdfund stuff that ain't real every day.
It's not easy, it's not supposed to be easy.
(Ryan laughs)
The harder it is, this is the fun part, Ryan.
I just wanna share this.
The harder the process is for you,
the more excited you should be,
because when you figure it out,
you'll know that everybody else gave up along that journey.
- Awesome, I like that.
- Yeah, most people don't realise that.
When I'm working on something,
like really trying to crack the nut
around some kind of distribution channel
or monetization strategy,
or whatever it is, go to market anything, and it's hard,
and a thing I thought was gonna work was gonna be a layup,
ends up not being a layup,
I'm like, yes, 'cause I'm gonna figure it out.
I have confidence in my ability to problem solve.
And when I figure it out,
I know that my competitors would have gave up
'cause this is ridiculous
that it doesn't work 'cause it should work.
So just know that 'cause you're gonna be littered with that.
And that's the perspective
that allows you to go from problem to problem
or failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
People say that, it's a quote, right?
I think it's Einstein or whoever, Thomas Edison.
And it's like, success is going from failure to failure
without losing enthusiasm.
They don't give you the mindset reframe that's required.
And it's just truth.
It's literally the harder it is,
the less competitors are gonna be at the top.
- Thanks very much.
As we mentioned, we are building the MVP,
we're launching, hopefully, end of July,
beginning of August.
So eventually,
we gotta raise some funds eventually for this,
because we got some huge expenses, even for us.
So we are building the tool
that we would like to use, pretty much.
So based on your videos,
because I'm a big fan of you, YouTube and all the stuff.
There's three seeds there.
There's a seed after that, the series ABC.
So we are the pre-seed right now.
We self-funded our company or startup.
So do you think it's a good idea to go right away to seed
once we launch the MVP?
Which is, we're talking about
between two million to eight million, right.
We gotta use the product marketing and sales.
So do you think it is a good idea to have that?
- There's two optimal times to raise money, okay.
There's before you figure it out
and there's after you figure it out.
And the worst time
is when you're in the middle of that curve, okay.
Because what happens is, in the early stages of the MVP,
the EAP programme, the coming soon launch page, essentially,
in many ways you can kind of manufacture traction.
Let's be honest, like I'm a founder
and I'm also an investor.
So I understand that, hey,
a certain activity shows a certain type of activity volume
like Google analytics.
So if I do X, I get a little bit of traffic.
Well, if I do X in a certain sequence
over a certain period of time,
I can manufacture a growth curve.
Does that make sense?
If I have a beta list of people that opt in
to be notified when I subscribe
and, or I launch and I systematically,
every day allow two people, three people,
four people into my system
and then somebody asked me to look at my numbers,
I can create that traction, right?
So what I always tell people is
there is the point where there's enough there
for you to tell a compelling story
of how you're gonna create a hundred million a year company
over the next seven years.
That's kind of the ballpark, right?
And it doesn't mean that you have high revenue.
It doesn't mean that you figured it all out.
If anything, you don't wanna figure too much stuff out,
you just wanna show there's a there there, right?
Because think of it this way,
what an investor is investing in.
And I have a bunch of videos online
about this around the team and the product
and the size of the market and all these things.
But like, if we even took it a step back and said,
what is it?
It's a hundred percent of the people, right?
Do I believe they're willing to put their head
through a wall to make this work?
And I don't even care if it's this thing that works,
do I wanna make a bet on the people?
At the pre-seed level, it's a hundred percent on the people.
And is there enough of a data point
to show me that my assumptions,
if I believe that there's this vision, right,
of a multi-billion dollar market?
you can paint that story clearly crisply, okay.
And language I understand,
not language you wanna communicate,
but my language and I believe you have the right team.
And then the kicker, if you see me talk about fundraising,
which I've bunch of trainings on
is can you create enough demand
for your round to create a competitive process?
'Cause if I'm only talking to one investor,
probability of closing, hashtag money in the bank, low.
But if I've got 15 investors
and I'm making a commitment to close my round in August,
I know I'm gonna get the right people.
Those are the factors.
It's can I tell a story how this thing
becomes a big business?
Can I show them enough data points
to show that there's a thing there,
but not too much so that they can run the spreadsheets.
That's the other people,
sometimes people launch and then they're going
and they're like, look, we have 26 customers.
It's like, yeah, but you've only added two a week
for the last six months or nine months or a year, right?
So you're not showing growth,
you're just showing sideways, right?
So like, just know that there's,
before you figure it out and you can control it.
And then afterwards, where you go through this journey
in this valley of just struggling,
to finally it pops and now you can go
and tell a compelling story.
'Cause it's easy to paint the picture of the future, right?
But they're gonna look at the present
to confirm their assumptions about that potential future.
- [Ryan] Got it, thank you very much.
- I wanna ask you guys real quick.
What did you take away?
What resonated the most for you
around our conversation today?
- I'll say language, like use the right language
and for the audience,
I think we definitely should not assume
that the other side understand what we're talking about.
Echo marketing was great,
the learning process, things are good,
it's a good call and more practically,
the customer discovery call is this is something
we should definitely do a bit more.
I know you don't like the MVP process
where we dump an MVP directly,
we should probably focus on clickable, proper prototype.
So that, but...
- I also know that sometimes
you have to go through the pain
to really appreciate the lesson, okay?
My brother, one time he started at home building company
and I let him go through the pain
of managing his own financials.
And then one day, I introduced them to a bookkeeper
and he asked me, why didn't you tell me this a year ago?
And I said, you wouldn't have appreciated
how important it was.
You would have fought with me on why you should pay people
to do something that you could do.
So I get that, it's your journey.
Ryan, what'd you take away?
- Well, definitely, we have to focus on people
before anything else, that's really important,
specially for the pre-seeds.
We have to get traction by contacting the customers.
We have to learn before we sail, right?
Best learning will bring the sales, definitely.
We can create groups of community as well.
We can ask some questions and based on the questions,
actually we can, you know,
we filter, I would say, to filter the customers,
a greater community, and definitely after that we can sail,
we can pre-seed, we can raise funds, join as well.
- I love it.
You guys are gonna have a lot of fun,
I appreciate the conversation.
- Definitely. - Thanks for your time.
- Bye, see you guys soon, have an amazing day.
- You too, bye-bye.
(upbeat music)