Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski (Part 3)

David Chmielewski: We established Quavo as a virtual company. We used most of the methodology that we learned at BoA. How do you run a remote company? We all decided to leave our positions and start the company.

We knew our platform like what we wanted to build on. We had a general idea of what we wanted to do. We wanted to work in financial services. We wanted to build products. We wanted them to be repeatable from one financial institution to another. It was very difficult to bootstrap from that.

One thing people don’t realize is how much a company like BoA has set up for you when you walk in the door. There are so many things laid out for you. There you are out in the world. It was shocking at first how much we had to figure out for ourselves. How do we bring business in the door? How do we start to build those products? How do we get them to market?

I would say our journey for the first couple of years was, we’ll do whatever it takes pretty much. We used some of our relationships at Pega to sell services work. We knew people at BoA and people who I worked with at Auto Owners and we said, “We’re starting a company. Let’s go do some services work.”

Sramana Mitra: We have a name for what you did in our program. It’s called Bootstrapping using Services.

David Chmielewski: There you go. We had the benefit of quite a few folks that we could bring along and do the services work. We got some relatively large contracts. We had, at one point, eight or nine folks working on the 2020 census.

Because we were good at this Pega platform, we could get these services jobs and we had Pega’s reputation as far as selling their platform. We were able to acquire several services positions that allowed us to get more people in the door. We were on a services trajectory for the first couple of years. We did always want to build products.

We were six or eight months into doing this services stuff where we landed our first client that still uses our product today. That was First Tech Credit Union. We had, pretty much, no money in our bank account. We had no product to sell them. We basically built our product hand-in-hand with First Tech.

They were used to working with entrepreneurs. They knew we were entrepreneurs. We weren’t selling them something that didn’t exist. We were, but they knew it didn’t exist I guess. Finding an entrepreneur-friendly company for this gig was extremely important, especially in finance. Banks and credit unions do a lot of due diligence. It’s hard to sell a solution to them without a reputation.

We were able to impart Pega’s reputation to help us. We largely had a lot of grit and determination to do what we wanted to do. We found a partner at First Tech who had that same kind of drive. She wanted to make a name for herself. She liked us and wanted to give us a chance. She pushed to get us selected by the organization. We got our shot.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services: Quavo Co-Founder David Chmielewski
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