Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who was doing the software work?

Brent Jackson: We have a team in India. I’m a sole founder. One of the investors at the last company had a lot of ties to consultants in India. We used them to build the first prototype.

Sramana Mitra: What about the earliest customers? Did you go back to the people you were working with?

Brent Jackson: I talked to all the customers we were working with. It’s a sensitive area. I didn’t want to poach customers. We went more to investors. We tapped into their network.

Sramana Mitra: Did you build the software before going to customers or were the customers part of the early software development process?

Brent Jackson: Both. We did mockups first. We had a clickable prototype. Once we had 25 people, then we started coding.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get the MVP going?

Brent Jackson: It took us about seven months. That was bare bones.

Sramana Mitra: Those 25 customers that you had talked to, did they all come on board?

Brent Jackson: 10 of them came on board in the first iteration.

Sramana Mitra: What were the business model dynamics? You’re saying you want to issue a corporate card. There’s credit involved. How were you supporting that credit? It’s not just software, right? There’s a FinTech element to it.

Brent Jackson: That is the most difficult part. We’re essentially lending money to all these small businesses. If a company wants to spend a thousand dollars on a Torpago card, we are taking the balance sheet risks. In the early days, it was hard. If you don’t have a lending track record, it’s hard to get capital. It takes time.

We used the money that we raised and started allowing customers to spend. We lent based on the money we had raised. We built up enough track record over the first six months. Then we got a loan from a non-bank debt fund called Pier Asset Management. We used that to onboard our first 300 customers.

Sramana Mitra: How much was that loan?

Brent Jackson: $3 million.

Sramana Mitra: That allowed you to service 300 small businesses.

Brent Jackson: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these 300 customers? What was your customer acquisition strategy?

Brent Jackson: It was your traditional direct sales approach. We quickly learned that it’s hard to scale that way. We built out this partner program for various content creators. We create an affiliate link for them and pay them per approved application. It has allowed us to scale tremendously. We’re getting 4,000 signups a month with this system.

Sramana Mitra: At this point, are you still a solo founder with an Indian agency?

Brent Jackson: Yes, still solo founder. We had a team of three. We had one sales rep, one operations person, and then a team of seven in India.

Sramana Mitra: That got you to 300 customers. We are now in the end of 2020?

Brent Jackson: Yes. Then we scaled significantly. We saw that the partner program was working. We doubled down on this partner program. We started onboarding more partners. We just started scaling. At that point, we were receiving a couple of hundred applications a month. Then we jumped up to 3,000 applications a month. That led us to a new lender which was $75 million.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson
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