Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you launched on the app store while you were in YC, what was the regulatory status? Did you go through all these individual state-wise regulatory approval processes for all of them?

Carl Memnon: One of the learnings that came out of Arizona was that we don’t need to be the lender on record. In order to get a financial institution to deploy this technology, we needed to get to that point of maturity in terms of the product.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain CoFounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: After you graduated from Arizona, were you successful in raising funding?

Carl Memnon: Absolutely. We spent a lot of time on the product itself and taking the learnings from that program and implementing it into the product. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the sandbox itself was the thing that allowed us to raise money in the same way that YC will help facilitate raising money. What it did do is it allowed us to get the company in a position where we could raise money.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain Cofounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your competition in this?

Carl Memnon: The way we see it and by what’s reflected in our customer base, our primary competitors are the traditional credit cards. Those are our competitors. That’s because the product functions exactly like a credit card in terms of reporting and a revolving line. But there’s no product that’s exactly like Grain.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Grain Cofounder and COO Carl Memnon (Part 1)

Carl discusses Grain’s FinTech innovation, and also some of the unique ways in which his company has been financed. Excellent conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Grain.

Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me about the competition? There is a whole bunch of players in the EdTech space who also cater to the same customers that you are interested in. Pluralsight is a very good example. Who else do you consider as a competitor?

Ben Spring: There are a couple of labs in the industry. They all have their own USP. Where TryHackMe is really strong is delivering training content to an individual. We heavily embed gamification into the product to make it engaging and fun. A lot of our competitors are catering to the enterprise space.

Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many enterprise customers do you have right now?

Ben Spring: Well over a hundred. We’ve been super fortunate to onboard Fortune 500 companies, lots of governments, lots of schools, and colleges. We’ve done some really rewarding work with the education of Scotland to provide training to 14 and 15-year-olds to break into the industry. We’ve been able to expand the number of people using TryHackMe whether you’re a 14-year-old, someone who wants to transition jobs, or someone who’s working in a business.

Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was happening with the business? Were the conversation rates increasing? Was the number of users increasing and how?

Ben Spring: It was completely organic. We were incredibly lucky. It was just word-of-mouth. We really tried to make a great user experience and understand the user’s problem. At the time, I was constantly iterating on the product and speaking to users. The conversion was still fairly low. I was going into my old job and I just couldn’t stop thinking about TryHackMe. I’d go out on my lunch and I’d be writing emails and doing stuff on the side. I took the jump to leave.

Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you finished university, what point were you at?

Ben Spring: I can’t remember now. It must have been 10,000 users.

Sramana Mitra: All free still?

Ben Spring: We introduced a pay-as-you-go model. You can pay per course. After talking to users, we found that it wasn’t the best model for us, so we moved over to a subscription model where you pay monthly and you get access to every single thing on TryHackMe.