How to launch a new category in the fintech space?

In a fascinating discussion, Dimitri Dadiomov, co-founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, shares his journey of launching a new category in the fintech space.

He delves into the challenges faced, strategies for acquiring initial customers, the importance of building trust with early adopters, and the analogy between developing new features and birding.

One of the biggest challenges about this problem was not just the actual technology and the actual product experience but it’s also a level of trust that you have to have in outsourcing something like this to a third party. – Dimitri Dadiomov

To expedite decision-making within their founding team, primary and secondary roles were assigned for all tasks.

This strategy ensured quick decisions as there was always someone who held all relevant information about a specific topic.

As an infrastructure startup, convincing customers about their long-term stability was vital as clients were investing not just in features but also in availability over an extended period.

Strategies included developing personal relationships, sticking to their model consistently without frequent pivots or changes, signing new customers regularly while adding new features and banks.

Modern Treasury sought to pioneer a new category – payment operations – that was not widely recognized or discussed before their advent.

Their objective was to spotlight common challenges in payment operations and how software solutions could address them.

Despite the importance of sales, Modern Treasury initially prioritized marketing as it generated numerous inbound leads via content creation, bank referrals, etc., allowing everyone in the company to focus on customer interactions without rushing to build a sales machine prematurely.

Modern Treasury strategized and prioritized feature requests from customers by gaining a deeper understanding of their problems.

They likened this process to birding where initial feature requests seem random but become increasingly smaller changes from what already exists as more customer interactions occur.

As Modern Treasury expanded and started working with larger companies, they had to adapt their messaging and build trust differently due to these companies’ more established methods of quantifying trust and understanding business scale.

Most business failures are attributed to internal issues rather than external competition.

Therefore, the emphasis should be on building good software for businesses rather than worrying excessively about competition.

Early-stage founders should focus more on developing a product that people love instead of obsessing over the business model and pricing in the initial stages.

Often early-stage founders spend excessive time contemplating business aspects at the expense of product development.

The initial focus for Modern Treasury was on product development rather than immediate sales, ensuring that their product was robust before scaling up.

This approach helped them create an expertise cluster around payments, an area often overlooked by many companies.