Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is the revenue trajectory that you can share? How many subscribers do you have? What is the situation now?

Eytan Bensoussan: We don’t share specifics on that. What COVID did for us was, it actually put jet fuel in the engine and nobody told us. We thought it was the end of everything. Small businesses in America were looking for some sort of a banking offering that could be run from their basement. It turned a lot of eyes on folks like us and others in our space who are designed for branchless banking. The company grew dramatically.

In the next piece of our journey, as COVID started becoming less of a day-to-day piece, we saw the creation of an insane number of businesses. The idea of people trying their hand at entrepreneurship was the next big giant volley of growth for us that we had never expected. Each one of them had this S-curve where we go to this other level of scale.

Looking into the future, it’s going to be a different challenge. This will be another moment where we’re going to figure out what the impact is on a macro-scale to small businesses in America. It’s about looking at these quick signals and making a lot of decisions as quickly as possible to set yourself up for success.

Sramana Mitra: What is the total amount of funding that you have put into the company?

Eytan Bensoussan: We raised the original round I told you and then the $20 million Series A.

Sramana Mitra: You’re in significant revenue now?

Eytan Bensoussan: We’ve built this business to be sustainable. The investors that we get, they’ve helped us get out the door and also be aggressive when we need to. The basis is one that’s meant to be sustainable over time.

Sramana Mitra: So you have good unit economics.

Eytan Bensoussan: By design, yes. A customer can carry their weight very quickly.

Sramana Mitra: Anything else that you want to share?

Eytan Bensoussan: I actually think the role of mistakes is crucial. We have likely done everything wrong. It was our ability to learn what was wrong and how it was wrong that has been the real important part of our success. We had ideas on how businesses would use the product. As soon as you got it in the hand, we would sit in the office with them and watch them navigate.

We realized that so many of our assumptions were just sideways. Before launching, it was a guessing game. It’s less about getting it right the first time; it’s about how quickly we can iterate once we get data coming in. In the early days, it was anecdotal. Later on, it’s larger datasets where we can see behaviors moving with statistical significance.

At any stage in time, it’s about figuring out that particular assumption we made, cataloging the assumptions, and then saying how is this wrong, who is this failing, and what can we do about it. That has been a massive part of our journey.

Sramana Mitra: That needs to be the culture of any tech company these days. One, technology is changing all the time. Even the platforms that we use like Facebook advertising are changing. They’re making things different. Sometimes you try something at one part of your journey, it doesn’t work then, but it may work later because something has changed. A good tech company needs to have the ability to learn fast and fail fast.

Eytan Bensoussan: I agree. The institutional memory of a company is so important. It’s the hardest thing to spend time on when you’re building and everything seems to be moving at a hundred miles per hour. Even just notes on what you’ve done is so critical to being able to not lose it over the course of time.

Sramana Mitra: It was very nice talking to you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan
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