What's up, everybody, this is Cortland from ndhackers.com, where I talk to the founders
of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they
are today.
Today, I'm talking to Rachel Carpenter, the CEO of a company called Entreneo.
Entreneo really does two things.
Number one, they have access to financial data like stock prices and index prices.
And they make this data available to developers through their APIs.
Number two, they have apps and analytics built on top of this data, which they sell to investors
who use these apps to make better investment decisions.
Now, what's really cool is the story behind how they built all of this stuff because it
wasn't easy.
On the contrary, it was super hard, and they had to be scrappy and determined and not give
up when things got tough.
So there's a lot to learn here, and I'm super excited to get into it.
So Rachel, thanks for coming on the show.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, no problem.
Thanks for coming on.
Let's start at the beginning because I think one of the coolest and most interesting parts
of your story is how you got started.
And you guys actually weren't in the data business to begin with.
You guys, what you started doing is totally different than what Entreneo does today.
But while you were on that path, you ran into this wall, and you ended up pivoting in order
to tear down that wall for yourself and for other people.
So what's the story there?
It is an interesting story because we weren't always in the data business.
I met my co-founder, Joey French, when I was in college.
We both went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Heavy into the finance side of things, he was studying to become a CPA.
I was studying finance, and we came together and had an idea for an app that we wanted
to build.
We wanted to build something to disrupt the valuation space.
So getting a valuation, whether it's a stock that you want to buy or a business or an entity
or an estate, is a really expensive service to have done, it's typically like $50,000
to $100,000 to have a valuation run on your business.
But a lot of what happens there is really automated.
So that's how we think.
We always think about what's a more efficient way, how can things be automated.
We wanted to build an app to do that.
So we set off and actually taught ourselves how to program the following year.
Lesson to be learned here, we built the app before looking for the data for it.
So we took an entire year, which ended up being a great decision because it really shaped
both of our perspectives as leaders to teach ourselves web development.
So Joey learned all the backend side of things, Ruby database architectures, and I learned
all the front-end design languages that we needed.
So together with the finance background and then all of the technical skills built on
top of that, we started to build our app out.
And we probably put a year and a half into this.
Currently we were screen scraping data from 10,000 websites, things like the finance API
and different things like that.
Because there's a lot of different data that goes into building an app like that for valuation.
And obviously that is semi-illegal and not a product that you can commercialize or use
publicly or sell anywhere.
So once we finally had everything built, we started looking for legitimate ways to source
that data.
Things like financial statement information, stock prices, there's a multitude of different
types of data you need to power an application like that.
So we went to the big providers, the typical suspects, Bloomberg, Capital IQ, Thompson
Reuters, FactSet, Morningstars of the world, these big five firms that basically have an
oligopoly in the data space.
And we got quoted $50,000 a month.
So I think for many of the listeners who were kind of in the same boat that we were in,
when you're in early stage, I was sleeping on a couch that year, I wasn't making any
money.
I had just learned how to program and we were trying to get this thing off the ground.
We thought we had a really good idea and it was just a complete dead stop for us.
So we had to really reconvene and think about it's pretty much impossible at that stage
to justify an expense like that.
We would have had to go out and raise at least $5 million to be able to afford those resources
to power our app.
So we had to stop and think really long and hard about how can we solve this problem,
which kind of catapulted us on this new journey to figure out data because data was a roadblock
and if it was a roadblock for us, we knew it was a roadblock for other people.
And as was mentioned in our article, we were angry.
We had put all this work in and building an innovative app like that is just not feasible
and it's hindering a lot of innovation.
So we took that anger and productively went out and figured out a way to source all the
data and that's kind of how we ended up in the data business instead.
Wow, so there's a lot there but I want to start by zooming in on the fact that very
early in your business's life, you guys decided to drop everything and learn how to code.
And what's fascinating about that to me is that there's a lot of aspiring founders and
entrepreneurs who don't know how to code and are trying to make this decision.
Should I learn how to code now and then start my business or should I just start right now
and outsource all my development?
Or maybe find a co-founder to work with who's technical.
And it's a tough decision to make because obviously both options are pretty expensive.
Learning to code takes a ton of time and that's a huge investment and hiring developers also
cost us a lot of money.
So how did you guys come to the conclusion that you did where you ended up learning to
code?
I mean, did you pick that just because it was the cheaper of the two options or were
other factors at play?
Yeah, it was cheaper.
We didn't want to, you know, we thought we were onto a pretty powerful idea and we didn't
want to give away a huge chunk of the business with one part of it to save money, not get
a bunch away.
But on the other hand as well, FinTech is so specific to having area expertise of finance,
the calculations that were being run in the background of all of our code and understanding
how the relationships among line items in a financial statement and how you calculate
return on equity and how all of these different ratios and metrics are calculated and standardized.
It's not just basic coding, it's very complex when you add in all the financial side of
things as well.
So, you know, I lived in the easy, happy front-end land that Joey, Joey spent a lot of time in
the back end building our database and all of our algorithms and machine learning stuff
out.
So he was in the sick of basically taking his knowledge as a CPA and coding that into
logic.
So if you would have taken a CPA and put them next to a back-end developer, it probably
would have taken four times as long for them to communicate.
Also because a CPA doesn't think like a developer, they have very different mindsets, very different
ways of attacking problems and solving things.
So having both of those mindsets that we both had financial expertise and we both had the
technical skills, we were able to move really fast and build something pretty powerful quickly.
So it was a competitive advantage for us to learn how to code on our own because most
people don't take the time to do that and then there's a communication barrier there
and we can't move quite as quickly.
So it was a good decision.
That makes perfect sense.
Do you have any tips for people who are listening who might have just started learning to code
or thinking about it to help them, I guess, succeed and learn as fast as possible?
How did you go about it and how long did it take you to learn?
Oh my gosh.
It took, I mean, Joey was in the programming mindset since he was like 16.
He started with VBA, so doing Excel programming and then Drupal and then kind of moved on
to the Ruby technologies and database technologies.
So he had been learning, I would say, casually for a few years and then pretty seriously
for about two years to get to where he is.
I took an entire year to get me from complete zero computer literacy, like none at all.
Really just Googling, you know, how do I set up a development environment?
How do I make a square up here on the screen?
How do I turn that square blue?
How do I rotate it 180 degrees to the right?
You know, just step by step teaching myself using Google, using Code Academy a little
bit until I got to a point where I could build an entire website from scratch for us.
It wasn't great, don't get me wrong, but after that year of, you know, self-teaching
and getting to that point, I took a course from a group in Chicago called the Starterly.
It's actually a pretty phenomenal organization.
They call it the Starterly because they help you start something, is their idea.
You know, you have to get started and learning how to code is the way to get started.
So people that want to start a business don't know how to code.
They take you in and they help you start, basically.
So I took an advanced HTML and CSS course for animations, transitions, you know, all
the complex stuff.
I hadn't taught myself to take myself from kind of high school to college level.
So it was a journey of about a year and a half for myself.
And to be honest, I've since hired a CTO who is ridiculous at coding.
He is, you know, extremely talented and I don't necessarily do the day-to-day coding
anymore because we've grown and I've since hired people to do that, but learning even
just a little bit at the beginning is so important if you're going to be the leader of a company
because it's my job to consistently communicate between what we call the back of the house
and the front of the house, the development team and the revenue team, and being able
to communicate between both teams.
I don't know if you've ever seen that hilarious skit where they have the project management
team talking to the developers and the project management team is like, well, we want the
lines to be parallel and perpendicular.
Why can't you do that?
We want it to be red and blue at the same time.
And the developer is like, oh my God, you just don't understand why that's impossible.
That makes no sense.
Yeah.
But it's hilarious because that is the reality of the front of the house talking in the back
of the house.
There are problems like that if you don't understand at a base level how development
works, how logic works, back end, front end.
So I would say that I'm not a great developer, but I got to the point where I knew how to
hire a great developer and I know how to talk to them and how to communicate well between
the teams.
And that's pretty important.
At least it has been in our experience.
So it's worth whether you want to be great and really focus on it and be the programmer
or whether you want to just learn enough to be able to be knowledgeable about it.
Either way, I think it's pretty important.
So fast forward to like 2015.
You guys have learned basically how to code.
Just for some context, your brother, Andrew Garpinder, who works with you at Entronio
and was one of the first employees, actually did a text interview on ND Hackers.
So if you're listening and you haven't checked out that interview, definitely give it a read
after this podcast.
But one of the things he mentioned was that it took you guys a few years to really get
to the point where your product worked and it was something that you were ready to push
out to people.
Besides learning the code, what went into that time period?
What took so long?
And also, how did you persevere?
Because it's super easy to quit six months into a project, let alone like three years.
Yeah, definitely.
So we went about it in an interesting way.
Whether it was the easiest way to do it or not, I don't know.
Probably not.
But we built what I would call our technology before we built our business.
We needed to find a way to source data, and we spent a year and a half manually sifting
through financial statements, as thrilling as that sounds.
Trust me, it wasn't, and that was a bad year.
In order to basically train a machine learning algorithm, you have to feed it the correct
data and let it grow over time.
So we had to understand the logic and the relationships within financial statements
in order to teach our code to automatically clean them up and organize them.
So there was a big manual approach, and then once we understood it well, we turned that
into just algorithmic, rule-based kind of a system, and then we took that algorithmic
system and eventually started incorporating aspects of machine learning to it to get it
to a point where it's really just humming and digging along and pulling in financial
filings and other structured data sets and automatically cleaning them up with very little
human intervention with a really high quality rate.
So that solved our problem, right?
We had built a better way to source data.
It was faster, it was cheaper, it was algorithmic, and it meant that we ended up with higher
quality data.
So that was great, and we started feeding that into our app, and we knew that that was
a more powerful business even than the app, and we wanted to build a business around it.
So we were sitting on top of a disruptive technology.
We built it.
It was great.
That took over a year just to build that technology, and at that point, we had to look at it and
go, okay, but now how do we build a business around this?
Because that technology isn't useful unless you have a business around it, and that's
when that journey kind of started of how do we price this?
It's so disruptively cheap for us to service this data relative to these super expensive
seat licenses and subscriptions with all these restrictions.
How do we land on the right price to build a profitable business with it, but also making
it still affordable enough that we can reach huge markets of people?
So figuring out pricing was one whole problem, and then figuring out distribution was another
one.
So let me stop you there, because I definitely want to deep dive into the whole pricing thing
and the fact that you guys compete on price, which is pretty unique among the people that
I've interviewed.
But before we get into that, how many of you were there working on this initial product
to get the technology done?
So building the technology was pretty much – that was a lot on Joey's shoulders.
He did a lot of that, and it was myself and him for a solid year and a half.
And then we brought Connor Farley on board, who's now our chief revenue officer.
So that was about the time the technology was getting there.
We were feeding securities and working our way up to full coverage of US companies, so
the technology was built, but it took a lot of time to feed all of the data through it.
So Connor came on about that time, which was kind of tiny, because at that time we needed
to figure out our business model around the technology.
So then it was just three of us for that.
And if I can just interrupt here for a second.
You guys weren't generating any revenue here at this point.
So how did you afford to pay for all of this?
We had raised a small amount from friends and family at that point.
That was pretty much enough to keep ramen noodles on the table.
We lived off of $100,000 investment from friends and family for close to three years with three
people.
So it was tough.
But again, we knew what we were building was powerful.
We didn't want to give it away.
We knew we were close to figuring out the right formula for the business model.
We didn't want to get ahead of ourselves, and we wanted to get further before we raised
further funds.
So it was really, Joey and I, for a year and a half, Connor came on.
And then right when things started getting figured out with the business models, my brother
Andrew Carpenter joined us.
So now we have eight employees, so we're getting up there.
So you guys must have had pretty fanatical belief in your eventual success to have pushed
on through that period, because that's not a lot of money for three people to live off
of.
No, not at all.
And as Andrew points out, if the listeners have a chance to read the article, it's pretty
hilarious.
But my mom actually owns a Y bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, and we all bartended at the Y bar.
So I think Joey was the only one who didn't bartend.
We just because we used to make and wash dishes sometimes.
But so we were bartending, you know, working, coding, programming, building the website,
figuring things out during the day and bartending through the night.
Joey and I were sharing a studio apartment together.
We had two beds in a tiny box, and Connor and Andrew were living in a sailboat together.
So we had probably combined with the four of us, the number of square footage we were
living in was pretty pathetic, but it made us stronger and kind of reinforced, you know,
it's not always easy.
And there's definitely the top and the bottom of the roller coaster continuously to get
to if you're if you're building something great, it doesn't happen overnight.
So yeah, that was a tough year, I'm not gonna lie.
But it was after that, that we got to a point where we thought we had something pretty good.
And it was it was easier to raise angel capital at that point.
And we were able to get off the ramen noodle diet.
Yeah.
And you guys are obviously like a very mission driven company, where you care a lot about
making this data cheaper and more easily available to people.
Do you think this is a topic that a lot of people brought up to me recently, actually,
like they've asked me, you know, whether or not I think that you have to be mission driven
in order to succeed?
What do you think about it?
Do you think it's possible to build a successful company if you're just in it for the money
or for the lifestyle?
Do you think you have to passionately care about a product that you're building to?
I don't know, because I've never known anything else.
I wouldn't even call myself a serial entrepreneur, I'm just a single entrepreneur, this is the
only thing I've ever done.
I, you know, straight from my senior year of college, I started doing this, and I had
friends who would ask me, this is great, Rachel, but you're sleeping on the couch and you don't
have any money.
So what's your plan B?
And I just look at them with this blank stare because I don't have a plan B, this is I believe
very strongly was, yeah, what is that?
So I believe very strongly in it, and I've, I've done my best to instill that in everybody
that we've added to the team since that point.
So I don't know anything else.
And I think it's been the reason we got through those hard times.
I mean, I can count dozen times that we would look at each other and go, is this going to
work?
Maybe we should stop.
And we didn't, I think, and pretty much the only reason we didn't is because we cared
so much about making this available.
You know, we were personally affected by the gap in the industry.
So I personally don't know anything else.
And it's the reason we're still here.
So I think it's very important, but I do also recognize that there are different business
models, you know, business models that you don't necessarily need to raise capital to
grow business models that are more brick and mortar, or kind of lifestyle businesses.
So I think some of those types of businesses are easier if you aren't super passionately
burning this desire to build something, but if you're, if you have a big idea that has
a big market and requires time and effort and raising capital, especially, because that's
one of the biggest keys to feedback I've gotten from investors that I've spoken to is that
my passion shows through.
And that's the reason we've gotten some of the funding we have.
So if you need to raise money and you have a big idea, it's super important.
But you know, there's definitely business models in which it's not as important.
Yeah, I mean, if you're an investor and you're looking at someone and, you know, she spent
a year and a half learning the code and she's living in like sharing a studio with her co-founder
and it's like not done anything else, and I could easily get a job elsewhere making
a lot more money than it's like, this is somebody I can believe in, you know, somebody I can
invest in and I know that they're not going to quit until they succeed.
Absolutely.
So let's let's fast forward to your four people now.
And you're kind of, you know, thinking about pricing, you know, how are you going to actually
and your business model as a whole, like how you're actually going to find customers and
start making money?
What was going through your mind at that time?
Oh, my goodness.
Well, we were getting feedback from, you know, everybody tells you something different.
I had traditional older advisors and investors who were like, you're way under pricing this.
There's no way you're leaving so much on the table.
And then I had other people saying, yeah, but you want to capture all the market share
and make it a no brainer for somebody to not make it so affordable.
They can't say no.
And so you have kind of these pressures coming from both sides.
And the evolution of our pricing model is freaking hilarious.
We did everything.
We started off with just it's twenty five bucks across the board for anyone, which was
great.
We got a ton of people to sign up.
We were giving away like massive amount of value.
So we got a lot of signups right away, which is exciting.
And then we realized, OK, but this is wrong.
So we swung from that direction so far to the other side to this like enterprise only
pricing model and tried to make it look like an institutional product, which scared people
away because we didn't even put the pricing on the website.
We just had contact us for pricing, enterprise pricing, which is the exact opposite of that.
That didn't work either.
That was way too far to the other direction.
So then we came up with this like crazy tiered approach where we had like eight tiers of
pricing.
Tier one, tier two.
People were like, what's a tier?
Nobody had any idea what that meant.
And it was so complex in terms of like API call limits like it was like a slider bar
basically up and down with API call limits, which to a degree is at the root of our mission,
which is like you pay for what you use, but also just eight different levels and tiers.
It was so confusing and so complex.
It was damaging our signup rate.
So then we kind of realized at that point after having been through three different
models, we were like, I think what we need more is personas.
We have a challenge in that we are selling APIs, but we have one API with a bunch of
data feeds that get fed through it.
So for developers, speaking about API call limits, obviously we understand it, but we
also sell our data to investors who just use it in Excel.
They don't know what an API is, they don't know what an API call is.
So we said, maybe if we personify these plans, people will understand where they fit a little
bit better.
And that's when we finally landed on this individual professional developer startup
enterprise, which is kind of the taking the tiered approach, slimming it down and putting
personas on top of it, which just made the user experience a lot better.
Somebody comes to the website, they're not looking for a plan with 100,000 daily API
calls.
They're looking for, I'm a developer, this is the plan for me.
So through personifying it, and that was about the time that we realized we needed to make
a marketplace out of the data because we had so many products at that point.
So switching to the marketplace plan and switching to those kind of personified pricing plans
was hitting the sweet spot for us.
And that's where we finally landed.
Yeah, the personas thing is really smart because like you said, it's basically just tears.
But I think when people go to a website and they're like, looking at a product or service,
the question at the top of their mind is like, okay, is this for me?
Is this like something that's made for people like me or is made for like some other type
of person and I shouldn't use it.
And so if you just like change the wording and say, okay, if you're a developer, this
is what you should do.
Or if you're an investor, is what you should do, then it instantly answers that question
for people.
When you're iterating through all these different pricing models, did you have in mind the entire
time who exactly your customer would be or were you also kind of figuring that out along
the way?
We were figuring that out along the way.
And I think Andrew kind of touched on this in the written article as well, that we were
beating our head against the wall because initially we were more focused on investors
than we were developers coming from a company where at that point in time, 75% of our employees
were developers.
We weren't even really focusing that much on that.
We didn't realize that we were on a hotbed.
We had built the most efficient distribution architecture for data that I've ever seen
in the finance industry through open, easily accessible APIs, chat support, great documentation.
That just screams developer.
I mean, the feedback we get today from developers is phenomenal, they love our system.
But we were like, this is financial data, it should be sold to financial analysts and
quant funds and hedge funds, and it is, we still do, but we were almost beating our head
against the ground with that because it's not as easy for them to switch.
We're seeing margins tightening and we're seeing the financial landscape change and
that those investor types are looking for more affordable solutions, but it's really
hard to convince them.
I think they'll come around and we're starting to see them come to the site, but going and
knocking down the door of Morgan Stanley and telling everybody to use our data instead,
it's not a smart strategy, I think, as we're scaling up.
I think our story resonates a lot better with developers because we're selling products
to developers that are going through exactly what we went through.
We created a solution to solve that problem.
I think we had this massive brainstorming session where we went, are we targeting the
right people?
Should we change our language?
Should we change what we're doing?
Twist it a little bit towards a different target market and we realized that developers
were the sweet spot.
What we've built is a perfect solution for them.
It is an API at the end of the day.
Underneath the Excel add-in, it's an API.
Underneath Google Sheets, it's an API and that's the system we've built.
We did beat our heads against the wall with the investors and I went to meeting after
meeting and not understanding why they didn't want to get rid of their Bloomberg terminal
or they didn't want to get rid of their Capital IQ subscription.
It was a struggle, but we figured it out.
The community of developers that we're building around ourselves is fantastic and it's so
rewarding to see all these apps come alive with our data because it's kind of why we
started in the first place.
I think we found the sweet spot.
Yeah, it sounds like it.
I totally understand from a revenue perspective the appeal of wanting to target investors
just because there's so much money there.
What kind of information informed your decision to switch your focus to developers?
Because you said that you had this brainstorming session.
What did everybody bring to the table in this meeting?
I mean, were you talking to customers to find out who they were or did you see an uptick
in your user growth coming from developers or did you kind of just reason from first
principles that you would be better off targeting developers?
It was a combination of a couple of things, we use Intercom, which is something that Andrew
talked about.
It's not one of, it is the most transformative tool we've used in building our business.
It's a chat support on our website, it's very easy integration, chat bubble, analytics on
every single thing the customer is doing, when did they join, how many API calls have
they made, how much are they paying us, what's their location, what operating system are
they using.
I mean, you have a direct insight into the customer you're chatting and you can help
them along the journey in real time, which is great.
So we survey our customers, we talk to them, we chat them and just a general sentiment,
we were talking to a lot more developers than we had been and we had just launched our developer
program which gives for qualifying startups to give data to them for free for six months.
And we were adding like two to three startups to that program a week, the inbound interest
for that program was huge.
So the companies who have kind of just a sentiment of talking to our customers all day long,
we've had thousands and thousands of conversations with them, but also that program starting
to take off and it was about that time too that we brought Alex Solow on as our CTO,
who obviously lived and breathed in the developer community and has been for some time.
And he's like, you guys, this is the perfect product for a developer.
It's funny having somebody from the back of the house come from not even remotely close
to the marketing side of the business saying, this is who we need to be marketing to.
I live and breathe in this and these guys are loving this.
So Alex is a pretty big influence in saying, hey, wake up.
This is a better direction for us.
And you know, listening to our customers as well.
So it's kind of a combination of those things.
That's really cool.
I think there's a lot of people who are in the position where they've got a startup or
they got like an app that they launched and you know, maybe they're targeting or their
marketing is super vague and it's kind of like everything to everyone and they might
run across the advice online that they should target like a particular niche or you know,
they should find a customer for whom their product is a really good solution.
And it's just so hard for a lot of people to figure out who that is.
And so it's fascinating to hear about you guys talking to your customers on Anacom.
Did you have everybody at the company doing customer support or was it just a few people?
Oh, it was a nightmare.
Oh my God.
I mean, it's that it's that growth stage where you're not expanding your team quite yet
and everybody has to help out.
So we have somebody who does it full-time now, but you know, last year there were five
of us and we were all doing customer support.
We got to the point where we had to schedule it 24 hours a day.
Thankfully, Joey, my co-founder, he has to do a lot of his programming when the markets
are closed and he prefers programming at night, but he had like through three to four am covered
pretty well.
And I'm an early riser.
I had like five, six am covered.
There was really only like an hour a day in which customers is like, you know, Asian markets
were messaging us that we didn't have great coverage, but our response time for that entire
year was like less than 60 seconds to consumer customer messages.
So Anacom's great.
You know, you have it on your phone.
So I'd be at the gym answering questions.
I would be in my car at Red Life to answering questions and everybody's doing it constantly
all the time.
And we would almost make a game out of it, race to see who could answer the question
faster.
But it was great from my perspective as well, because, you know, at steering the ship, it's
important for me as well to understand what's going on, you know, at the ground level and
having conversations and getting the sentiment of our customers.
And, you know, if anybody's upset and be jumping in and being able to chat with them when they
find out they're talking to the CEO, even though they don't know it's the CEO of a five
person company, it still means a lot to them to know that, you know, it's important for
me to talk to the customers.
And I still have on chat support every once in a while just to get a pulse on it as well.
But it was definitely tough for a while, but it was also at the same time, it's a good
thing because people are visiting you, so visiting your website, so it was a challenge,
but it was good.
Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna ask how you balance to doing all that customer support
was actually like working on your product and doing like marketing and stuff, because
it's like, it can be a lot of work.
Just answering emails, especially like, I mean, people will send you just like the most
like random requests and just spend like you can spend an hour easily on one customer's
email, let alone hundreds.
Yeah, it's a challenge.
Like I said, we just scheduled shifts, there's obviously sometimes those conversations you
can't get to right away.
But you're also talking about an industry where chat support doesn't even exist.
I mean, on a Bloomberg terminal, they have they have pretty good support, actually.
But you know, we've talked to customers where some of these bigger data vendors take six
months, sometimes to get back to them with like a spreadsheet update or something.
So people aren't used to having real time support like that, which worked in our favor,
because nobody's ever done it before in this industry.
So that works, you know, sometimes we can't get there right away, people are so grateful
that we're helping them out on chat, but really just scheduling.
So you were just like, you're just blowing their minds, basically, they're like, Oh,
my God, this is ridiculous.
Yeah.
Not only is it test for but I'm talking to CEO and this has never happened with a financial,
you know, financial product before.
So having it on our phones and mobile app that intercom had was huge, because if I'm
running between meetings with investors or out on the go, I can hop in, you know, maybe
somebody else on a sales call or Joey's deep into coding project, I could still hop out
and help when I'm on the go.
And then scheduling shifts was pretty important too.
But it was not easy.
Definitely not easy.
Yeah.
And I think one of the things that makes it hard for people to kind of strike the right
balance or it makes it hard for people to commit to doing good customer support is that
it just doesn't seem like, you know, it's easy for it to seem like, okay, well, I'm
helping out my customers.
But is it really the best way for me to spend my time, you know, is it making my company
better?
And you guys talked to like thousands of users.
So what kinds of things did you learn?
And what was the best thing to come out of doing customer support?
We went through evolutions, right, we didn't, we're in constant state of adding new data
feeds to our marketplace.
And we're in constant state of adding features and functionality, like our API call builder
or formula builder data explorer, different features and things like that.
So I think constantly having a pulse on what people are looking for, you know, like currently
we're getting so much so many requests for Indian market fundamentals, we have Indian
market stock prices, but we don't have fundamentals yet.
And the amount of interest we have in that people chat up and say, do you have this?
Do you have that?
And we keep a tally of it saying, oh, we had 75 conversations in the past month with people
who want this data feed, maybe we should prioritize adding that to the marketplace.
So in terms of directing our product expansion, and which data feeds and data sets we go after
is huge.
And then also, just general, like support type questions, like frequently asked questions.
So maybe we had like, at one point, a bunch of conversations with somebody who said, where
do I enter my credit card?
And we went, Oh, maybe our credit card page sucks.
People aren't finding it.
What's wrong with this?
And so it helps you kind of direct your attention into those different areas of the website
that maybe need a little UX touch up or a little help.
You know, maybe things they don't understand the way something's worded, doesn't make sense.
It kind of helps you fix those things.
And then we also had a system that Andrew built, which is pretty genius, where if we
get asked a question a certain number of times, we write a blog about it, just because we
don't have time to answer these questions over and over again.
So Intercom has a feature where you can have saved replies.
So if somebody frequently asks, like, we get questions all the time about market cap, hilarious,
like the amount of time people ask us about market cap, how do I pull historical market
cap?
And so we have a saved reply where you just start typing market cap and the answer automatically
comes up.
And it saves a ton of time because when you have, you know, 20 conversations going at
once with customers, being able to just shoot them an answer really quick, it's huge.
So we use a saved reply.
And then, like I said, if we get enough questions, we write a blog about market cap, we went,
hey, here's all the ways you can pull market cap, current market cap, historical market
cap.
Here's how you pull it through the API.
Here's how you do it via Excel.
Here's how we calculate it.
Here's where it comes from.
Every piece of information you would need, and then we just shoot a link to that blog
through a saved reply to the customer and their questions are immediately answered.
Another huge one for us.
Microsoft Excel is clunky and when people try to download the add-in to use the data
in Excel, it's a nightmare sometimes.
And there's frequently something really simple, like you didn't enable your macros or something
simple like that.
So instead of diagnosing the problem step by step with them, we wrote a troubleshooting
guide and we just shoot them the troubleshooting guide and say, hey, have you gone through
all these steps?
If not, okay, then go check this out.
I'm sure you'll solve your problem.
If not, come back and chat to us and we're more than happy to help you.
So just little efficiencies like that helps with UX, helps us determine which products
to go after and helps fix little areas of the website that maybe people are getting
stuck on.
So it's been a huge help to us.
I think people really underestimate the benefit of talking to users because it's so easy to
have a model in your head of what your business does and who uses it and where to find them
and what the best things to work on are.
And if you don't actually talk to people, you never reconcile that mental model with
reality.
So it's super helpful to talk to people.
Was there anything that customers asked you about or asked you for all the time that you
just decided not to do?
That's a great question.
Because it's difficult to draw a line sometimes between, you know, okay, what are we going
to do because we know it's the right thing to do versus like, what are we going to do
that's reactionary?
Yeah, one of the biggest challenges we have right now is with novice developers.
So we can absolutely support API issues, if it's an issue with our API, if it's a data
point that's not working correctly, and even kind of on the fringe, like how to authenticate
correctly with the API, like getting it set up, getting it running.
But when it comes to, hey, I got authenticated correctly and I'm pulling your data through
me and my Python code, but something's not working, we can't teach you how to code in
the nicest way possible, right?
Like, we can't, you can't just, you know, add us to your GitHub repository and have
us go in and fix it for you, like, we're not, yeah, we're not your code teachers.
And it's tough for me because I learned how to code and the amount of times I run into
a bug and be stuck for two weeks, and it was something super simple, but if somebody had
just looked at it and fixed it, so it's painful for me because I totally get it.
But at the same time, we're chatting customers, you're about to pay us and do all this stuff,
you know, we can't, we can't edit your code for you.
So that's a painful one, but we do have to draw a line there and say, you know, we leave
it open, we're like, we have developers on staff, if somebody's feeling really nice,
maybe Alex, our CTO is bored, he wants to hop on there and just be nice and solve something
for you.
Like, maybe we'll take a look at it, but we don't solve code issues.
So if you're having a problem with the API, we can help you, but, you know, go on Stack
Overflow, Google it, be diligent, I'm sure you'll figure it out.
So that's, that is a tough one for us.
So let's go back in time a little bit, because in order to even get to the point where you're
doing like this fanatical customer support and writing blog posts to preempt customers
questions and having everybody say up at all hours of the night to talk to customers, you
actually have to have people coming to your website, right, so they can actually get into
this intercom widget.
How did you, you know, go from just having your technology and your product to having,
you know, getting your first customers and you're like the first trickle of users to
your website?
Well, the good news about marketing to developers is that you guys are really smart.
And unlike a lot of normal consumers, you know how to find what you need on the internet
and you do it very well.
So, you know, we found that the Ruby developers were living in these little communities online
and talking to each other and the Java developers were living in these communities and the Ruby
developers.
So the thing that we figured out is that they were really good at finding out, which was
great when we were getting started because we didn't necessarily have a marketing strategy
figured out on day one.
So just in terms of search engine optimization, we were kind of killing it from day one.
We optimized our site really well.
We were doing a lot of blogging, a lot of content, a lot of quality content, and that
piggybacked really well into our forum strategy.
So I know Andrew spoke a little bit on the article about Quora, but Quora was one of
the most genuine ways for us to drive traffic because you're, you know, searching around
Quora, finding somebody that says, where is there an affordable data API for stock prices?
Like I can't get it from Yahoo, it's illegal.
I can't buy a Bloomberg terminal.
Like where can I find this?
And people are literally asking specifically for what you do.
You can find and answer those questions and it is like the most, not only the most genuine
answer, you know, we're not selling you, you're literally asking for this, a link that links
to our website that lives forever as long as Quora's around and driving really high
quality traffic for us, which is important to them.
And you can drive hundreds of thousands of hits, but if they're not the right people,
it doesn't matter.
So it was super targeted, super genuine, and super evergreen in terms of just the links
living for a long time.
So we were able to really target in customers that way.
And after that strategy started, I mean, within a month, Quora, outside of direct and search
engine, Quora was our number three driver of traffic to the website, which is pretty,
you know, above social media, above the blog, above anything else.
So building content, quality content was important, finding people asking questions on forums
and being genuine was really important.
So our SEO strategy was huge in the beginning, and that's a big part of what drove our growth.
But I got to give credit to the developers themselves.
I mean, they find us, they find us from all stretches of the internet somehow, they know
what they're looking for, they search for the right terms, we pop up and they find us.
So we were very lucky and fortunate earlier on just to have a lot of tracks from people
because I think for a long time, people didn't have a solution like this, and they've been
waiting for it.
So they were ready to come say hi, which was good.
Yeah, I think that's like a huge benefit of your decision to focus on developers.
Because like you said, like developers are a community, you know, they're a good niche
where they hang out with each other, and they talk to each other, and they share things
that are good.
And you know, for people listening, if you're worried, you know, oh, should I, you know,
pivot my business to target a specific niche?
If I do that, won't I be excluding other people?
I think the benefits are well worth the cost because people in a niche talk to each other,
you know, you're not going to have a product spread via word of mouth.
If it's, you know, something you sell to everybody, because teachers don't talk to construction
workers about, you know, your tool, but you know, if it's only one group, you know, you
know exactly where to hang out, then like you can get them talking and spreading your
stuff.
So I think that's really awesome.
Did you guys have like an SEO expert in the house, like a content expert, or were you
kind of just winging it early on?
We were winging it.
I got a C in marketing, and I did all of our marketing in the beginning.
So I just researched, you know, I'm true to my nature, the way I taught myself how to
program, there's a lot of content out there that can teach you pretty quickly.
So you know, I have YouTube videos and blogs and different things and webinars and different
resources online that I could look to to figure out what the right strategy was.
And you know, when it comes down to it, it's content and it's creating quality content
that actually matters to the customers that you want.
So that's when we started really focusing on our blog.
Andrew, who did the article with you guys online, is a phenomenal writer.
He's actually a published author.
And he has a degree in psychology, which is really interesting for creating content.
So he's done a great job of building out our blog.
He writes very clearly about topics that he knows our customers care about.
So he was great on the content creation side and obviously a social media strategy that
goes hand in hand with that.
And I did a lot of social media early on as well.
So in our CTO, Alex, in terms of like the on-site SEO, he killed that.
He's very good at it.
And then the content stuff, we just kind of learned as we went and figured out over time.
Do you think blogging and writing articles was more or like the SEO aspect of things
was more or less impactful than, say, your efforts to answer questions on Quora?
If you could only choose one of those, which one would you have done?
Quora.
Hand found.
Interesting.
So Quora is just driving crazy traffic for you guys, huh?
Yeah.
I mean, it was phenomenal.
It's a tough one because you can't not blog.
I mean, you have to have a pulse and a presence and we have to have somewhere where our customers
can come learn about new features and different things like that.
You kind of have to blog.
But I would say Quora was way more powerful in terms of driving traffic than our blog
was.
And what kinds of things would you be blogging about?
Because I totally agree with you.
You can't not blog.
But at the same time, it's very easy to just not blog or to do a really bad job at blogging
because, like, I heard I have to blog, so I guess I'll just write about how I started
my company and then I won't post for another three months.
What did you write about and how did you come up with ideas for content?
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, early on, we weren't great.
We all made mistakes.
I mean, I wrote blogs sometimes that people just didn't make any sense or nobody cared
about.
Joey did a massively academic, like, 12-page blog that nobody would ever read.
So we made mistakes.
And, you know, don't get me wrong, there's blogs out there that are not great.
But I think it's a combination of a lot of different things.
First of all, the support questions, which, you know, for us, it's more of we want to
be able to direct people there so we don't have to spend time answering their questions
to be frank with you.
But those are so important.
People can...
If they have a problem, they can search and find a blog to help answer their questions.
So how to do this, how to do that, troubleshooting guides, and then we do a blog every single
time we introduce a new product in the marketplace.
So, hey, we have a new product.
You can come here to read all about it.
You know, who do we partner with or do we source it ourselves?
How is it used?
What's some examples of the data?
You know, how are other customers using it?
What are they building with it?
Just kind of an announcement about a new product on the marketplace, which is another good
piece of content.
And then just updates from the company, you know, how are we growing?
We do updates once in a while.
We add new people to the team.
And then we also do a lot of spotlights, so examples of developers that have built in
and cool with our data.
So everybody that goes through our developer program, that six-month free data program,
we do a spotlight on them and we say, you know, here's how they got started, here's
how they learned to code, here's what they built with our data.
It's great for us because it's an opportunity to show what's possible.
And you know, these are the kinds of things people are building when they get access to
this.
But for them, it's also important, too, because they might not necessarily have marketing
skills.
They're probably a badass developer who built an awesome FinTech technology, but they might
not necessarily know how to talk about it or how to describe it yet.
So it's a promotional help for them, too, to get the word out and kind of showcase the
hard work they put in.
So that's one of my favorites, that developer spotlight series.
I personally write those because it's so rewarding to dig into the new products that are built.
So that spotlight series is great.
So you know, it's a combination of help, FAQ, troubleshooting guides, new product announcements,
just updates from the company, spotlights of people that are using our data.
So it's a pretty big range, but it's getting robust.
Yeah, the spotlights sound great because it's like a perfect demonstration of what your
product can do.
So anyone who's like on the fence about using it, who doesn't understand it, could just
read that and be like, oh, I get it, like, look what this guy built.
Yeah, that's great.
On that note, you had all these developers basically talking about Entreneo.
And I know you guys aren't the only company to exist that sells financial data and APIs.
What do you think differentiated you from the competition that made it so people would
talk about you instead of talking about other companies?
Well, I mean, obviously, we've beaten Intercom support over the head that I can't stress
it enough.
The amount of love we get from our customers, they're like, oh, you actually talked to me,
you were a human being in the United States, like most likely are a developer yourself
that's chatting with me, and it was instant, and you solved my problem.
So we get a lot of respect and a lot of shout outs in terms of support, which is great.
So support is one big thing.
The other thing that's huge for us is the fact that we actually source a lot of the
products on our own.
So there's other marketplaces out there and other places to buy data.
Half of them are big firms that's restrictive and expensive, and the other half are marketplace
is that just redistribute data from the big firms.
So they're not necessarily sourcing any of the products on their own.
And because we have this underlying technology underneath the marketplace, it means that
we can source data sets.
And since we did it algorithmically, it's cheaper and not subject to any restrictions.
That's why we have such a loose and open redistribution policy with all of our data feeds.
So the fact that we're built on top of that solid foundation means our products are cheaper
and way less restrictive in terms of we want you to go build something.
That's why we focus on developers, like go build something off and take this data.
We want to power you to go build something cool.
So support's huge.
The fact that we have a technology, it's cheaper, it's higher quality, and it's very low restriction.
It's huge as well.
And then also architecture.
I think the fact that we have spent so much time from a financial perspective, we're dealing
with a niche of financial data.
And in terms of the architecture that goes into constructing that, you have to be very
organized.
You're dealing with over 300,000 global securities.
Some of them trade on multiple exchanges.
They have different identifications between tickers and other identification numbers,
different classes of stock, different securities within companies.
It's crazy how complex it is.
And hats off to Joey because he's the one who built our security master.
So we are one API, which makes it so much easier for developers to integrate versus
integrating multiple APIs.
You just choose which data feeds you want, and they all flow through one singular API,
which makes development so much easier.
We did it on purpose because the point is to market this for developers.
So having that clean architecture that if you're calling a piece of data you want from,
let's say, Tesla, from three different data feeds, maybe you want the stock price from
one feed, you want the revenue from another feed, and you want the executive compensation
from the third feed, you know you're getting the same data across all data sets.
It's not just individual static databases that are sitting there.
It's a totally integrated data set.
So that infrastructure, I think, is pretty important and especially makes development
a lot more efficient for our customers.
Yeah.
I mean, you guys got a pretty complex product.
You've got all sorts of different data feeds and different APIs, and then you've got a
bunch of apps and plugins that you've built.
I think the coolest one is this, I have a screenshot of it or an animated GIF of it
inside the text interview of like the Excel one where you just go into Excel and you just
type like equals and training or something and it'll give you a stock price.
I think this is totally different than a lot of companies which have the opposite approach.
They're just going to do one super simple thing and that's it.
For example, a company like Scotch Cheap Flights, who I talked to last week, and all they do
is just find cheap flights.
Do you see any of your products standing out above the rest and how do you know what to
build and what to focus on when you have so many different products?
We think about the business in kind of two chunks, data and apps.
The data feeds, like I said, we just listen to our customers.
Do you want Indian fundamentals?
Maybe they want the sentiment data or some random alternative data set.
We know we can go focus on that and get that because we're listening to our customers.
We've got it down pat in terms of the R&D pathway to new data feeds, and then we kind
of let the market just drive the app side of the business.
Because you're a pretty hard line in terms of we want to be the data provider and not
the analytics builder.
Part of the reason a lot of the big firms have such crazy redistribution fees is because
they do both data and analytics.
Those guys don't want to give you an open API because they know that you're going to
go build something better than what they built, right?
That's why they put massive restrictions on.
We made a point to not be in that camp.
We want to be just a data provider so that you can build the app.
We don't have a conflict of interest.
We want you to succeed.
We want you to redistribute.
We have this influx of developers coming to the site, and we believe they have the best
pulse on the market.
They know what they're building.
They're the expert in their specific type of syntax or whatever technology or app they're
building.
As long as you meet our two basic qualifications, you get into the developer program and you
can build an app, and then we put that app on our marketplace.
We're building out our own apps per se just on the data digestion side.
Microsoft, Excel, Google Sheets, the screener is on the border that we built in collaboration
with Microsoft.
We're working on enhancing those things, enhancing the ways you can digest the data, which is
where those Intranio apps, the Excel screener, come into play.
We're not really playing in the camp of building actual apps because we want our community
to build those.
When they do build them, we put them up on the marketplace so that it's similar to Google
Play, but for FinTech.
It's just extra exposure for them to provide that.
We also offer authentication and payment processing as well.
The annoying parts of building an app is stuff that you don't want to build.
You can authenticate through Intranio.
We can handle payment processing and stuff for you.
You can just focus on what you're good at.
That's authentication, payment processing, promotion, distribution in the marketplace.
We offer all those services to the developers if you want them so the developers can focus
on what they're good at.
They tell us what apps are valuable.
They come to us and say, we're building this, it's a good idea, and put it on the marketplace.
We're just focused on supporting them and listening to our investor customers about
which data sets to go after.
Yeah.
It sounds like there's a consistent theme here of how are you growing while you're talking
to customers and delivering good customer support, which makes them love you and spread
you through word of mouth, or how are you deciding what to build while you're talking
to customers and figuring out what their pain points are, et cetera, et cetera.
That's like the answer to everything.
Maybe the answer to my next question is kind of predictable, but to end with, what is your
advice for aspiring founders, or what is something that you wish you knew right when you were
starting out?
Yeah.
I mean, you nailed it.
Talking to customers is the biggest thing.
Don't be afraid would be another one.
There are so many resources out there.
Even us, we're a resource.
We give you data.
We give you support.
If you have an idea and you know it's good, don't wait.
Don't just go after it.
I mean, my favorite phrase I've been using around the office lately is that the big don't
eat too small, the fast eat too slow, and the FinTech market is moving so quickly that
if you have a good idea, just go after it.
Learn how to code, get after it, start, as the starter league in Chicago would say, because
things are moving too quickly.
There are resources out there, so just do Google search, find out who's there to help
you and support you.
That would be one thing, and then also talk to your customers.
We would have gone down so many wrong paths.
We would be getting stupid data sets that nobody wants, or we would be still beating
down the doors of institutional investors if we weren't listening to our customers.
That's pretty important.
Use chat support.
Use different things like that.
It's going to be a pain in the ass.
I was the CEO trying to raise money and focus on really important things and getting up
at 2 in the morning to answer a question from somebody in Singapore.
It's a pain in the ass, but you wouldn't be doing this if you weren't willing to go
through all that stuff anyway.
So it is super important to talk to your customers and to move quickly.
Alright, well thanks so much for coming on the show.
I think that's awesome advice and I hope people can force themselves to follow it even
when it is a pain in the ass.
Can you let us know where people can go to find out more about you, Rachel, and about
Intrenio?
Yeah, absolutely.
Just hop on our website at www.intrenio.com.
It's I-N-T-R-I-N-I-O.
Obviously, definitely check out the article that was written on indiehackers.com.
They did a fantastic job.
Thank you so much for featuring us.
This has been a pleasure.
I mean, you guys have a mission that's very parallel with ours as well in helping developers
get started.
So thank you for having me.
This is The Blast.
Thanks for coming on.
It's nice talking to you.
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