A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So until this point, what you are doing has been more the SaaS business. The FinTech business is just starting to come into play.

Felix Rodriguez: Yes, but we spent most of our time and engineering resources in building an expense management platform, a card connecting with banks, handling repayments, dealing with fraud, building underwriting, getting the team, and being able to report to our credit provider.

Sramana Mitra: So far until the end of 2023, the revenues have been ARR, SaaS based.

Felix Rodriguez: Right. At this point, we have both. Even though we were building, we’re still taking on some selective customers during that beta period to manually handle them and figure it all out. It’s like a bunch of rails. FinTech is very different from SaaS because you’ve a lot of things to worry about.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the number of customers?

Felix Rodriguez: We’re well over a thousand customers now, and we’re seeing several thousand new customers a month.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size or segmentation? Where is your focus? What’s a sweet spot?

Felix Rodriguez: Right now, it’s SMBs. We define that as any company that has less than 350 employees. That’s where we like to play right now.

Sramana Mitra: Less than 350 employees. What is the floor? I mean, is it 50 employees, 50-350, 10-350, or 0-350?

Felix Rodriguez: We look at it more from a revenue number.

Sramana Mitra: And what is that? What revenue number band are you talking about?

Felix Rodriguez: We like to see a million dollars in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: So million to fifty million.

Felix Rodriguez: You know, there’s no end in sight on top of top line. Like in that size, we’re seeing everything. We’re seeing companies doing $100M, $50M, $20M to some companies doing $2 or $3M. So it’s everywhere.

Sramana Mitra: And how do you acquire customers? What is the go-to-market strategy? How do people find out about you?

Felix Rodriguez: We have an inside sales team, some partnerships, and some SEO.

 Sramana Mitra: What kind of partnerships?

Felix Rodriguez: Industry partnerships that could also benefit from the tech we’re building. I would say accounting folks are good partners because they understand it deeply, right? We’re automating their work.  

Sramana Mitra: So you’ve built an accounting partner channel network. Where is the primary lead generation happening?

Felix Rodriguez: Right now, it’s a flywheel. We’re looking at everything from folks that are looking for a credit solution to pay their business bills and then folks who need help with taxes. I think those are the biggest drivers for us, because one of the reasons you do your books is because you must file your taxes.

Sramana Mitra: That lead generation is happening because of your SEO and content marketing work.

Felix Rodriguez: Yes, SEO has a lot to do with it and some of the partnerships that we talked about as well.

Sramana Mitra: So in the beginning, when you were talking about your entrepreneurial journey, very early on, you did a venture that was primarily SEO based. You did a lot of automated content and generation. Is that something that you’re doing in this venture?

Felix Rodriguez: Not yet. We’re exploring it. We’ve been heavy on AI and automating workflow and finance where we keep dreaming of things we could use it for. I know we could use it for content. I’m just a little more on the conservative side, I would say, because I don’t know what the stance is going to be on the search engines. One day you have the traffic and the next day you don’t have it, you know?

Sramana Mitra: This is a good point because I think the jury is out on how the search engines are going to look at auto-generated content right now, because auto-generated content is creating havoc on the content side of the internet, right?

Felix Rodriguez: Yeah, it is. I try to go through it, and I’ve certainly done some tests and stuff. The truth is, is that it almost looks as good as human content. It doesn’t have the flavor, and it misses the personality and the tonality.

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Felix Rodriguez: But there’re some topics that are kind of quite boring that needs it.

Sramana Mitra: Needs that kind of tonality.

Felix Rodriguez: Yes, there’s a lot of Wikipedia stuff that has no tonality. Look at how much traffic they have.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, and your category doesn’t need tonality. Your category is a fairly boring category where just pure content would help.

Felix Rodriguez: That’s right. So I’m being a little cautious there. But if I had my way, as we continue to scale the company and invest more in traffic, we’d like to get more writers and more people and possibly figure out some combination of AI with people. Some of the content we write has to do with laws and they’ve changed a lot. I know that a lot of these AI models are based on old information, not real time. So, we’d hate to put something out that would be factually incorrect.

Sramana Mitra: All right. I think I’ve got your story. Your journey of different entrepreneurship projects is fascinating. So, congratulations and we will be following your journey further. Take care. Bye.

This segment is part 7 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur's Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally
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