[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we're speaking with Felix Rodriguez, CEO and founder of Finally.com, a finance automation platform that's raised over 110 million in funding. Felix, how are you? I'm doing great. Nice, I'm super excited to have you on. I want to go ahead and talk about your domain. So what I've found for my conversations with other founders is, anytime you have a domain like this, there's always a story. So tell us, what's the story behind it? >> Brett, I'll give you the short and sweet of it. But yeah, look, I'm going to say it's at the point where we had our eye on this domain for about a year, and by the time we close our series A, we were looking to rebrand and just my luck. I'm going to say, fortunately and unfortunately for me, someone owned it that seemed like it was going to be impossible to get because this was a very successful entrepreneur that had taken his company public. By the time he sold it, I'm going to say he took it public, and then Yahoo bought it. So what do you give a guy who's got everything in the world? So for me, I was like, oh man, it's not going to be money. I had to get on the phone with him and pitch him the vision, the idea, and I sold him on the vision of finally you can get everything in one place in terms of your finances and all your back office in front of office that you need to run your business. So I think that resonated with him and we did a deal and he became an advisor and also got some shares in the company and he wanted a mentor. And obviously somebody that would do great by that name and we were very fortunate that we partnered up together. So yeah, now he's on my cap table. Wow, that's amazing. Now, just looking at your background, I noticed a theme there. You start companies and then they get acquired. How many companies have you started and sold in your career? I'm going to say that was really early on, my first three. You know, what I learned from that is building a team is really hard. So unless you're going really far, really long, you shouldn't take the exercise. So yeah, I'm going to say that it helped build a nice resume and definitely give me a great experience. But looking back at it, I wish I would have probably maybe held on to it longer or maybe sold to a different buyer. That first one you started in 2003. How does starting a company back in 2003 compared to finally what you started in 2019? What's the biggest difference, would you say? Yeah, I would say there's no APIs in 2003. I don't think people know what an API was. So if you're building anything, chances are you're probably building all of it yourself. You're taking like non-technology and archaic ways of doing things and try to build technology on top of it. That was really, really hard. Whereas today, I mean, you got all sorts of APIs and all sorts of fundamental things that allow you to build things. Even if you think about AI, when we first started with a company, we launched the AI five years ago and used that to get into 500 startups. But there were transformers and then were our LLMs and certainly not accessible. So yeah, I would say it's like starting a company back then with less APIs. It's probably super hard. So yeah, you got to build more. It's slower, more costly, and then less people that know how to do things, right? So everybody's doing things for the first time. So that makes it much harder. I would have to imagine back then as well, there was less competition, right? It sounds like the barrier to entry was much higher. What situation would you rather be in? Back in the early 2000s where it was hard, but there was less competition, or now where it's easier, but there's dramatically more competition out there. You know, I love superheroes and special powers. But a power I would want is the ability to control time and maybe go back and forth. So I would love to take what I know now, go back and go build what I'm building. But maybe 50, 60% of it, 70% of it wouldn't be possible. So you almost got to be careful what you wish for. Now, one hard question I have to ask, because in the pre-interview, we were laughing that we have very similar statues in our offices. Who is your favorite historical figure of all time and why? Yeah, for me, I think it's quite easy. Alexander the Great, you know, he much like a startup. You're against tremendous odds. Usually they have better funding, better armies. They're ahead of you, larger teams, and you're going to war and you're fighting over some kind of territory or some kind of market share or some kind of product. So yeah, definitely I get a ton of inspiration from Alexander Concrete and doing it with I'm going to say smaller numbers against all odds. I haven't watched the Netflix show about him yet. Have you watched it? And if so, what do you think? I'm one episode in. It's been really tough lately, you know, being able to just watch shows on Netflix. But yeah, that first episode seemed great. Nice. All right. I'll have to check it out. Your mind's Napoleon, as you can gather from that statue in the movie that they just made with him. It was horrible. It was an absolutely terrible movie, so I was very sad to see this big figure that I kind of admire a lot. Movie was a disaster, so hopefully Alexander the Great is better for you. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely better. I mean, look, I think one of these great things about these historical figures is maybe one day you and I could go make the ideal movie for our characters that we love and historical figures. So hopefully there'll be another take on your guy, Napoleon. Yeah, let's hope, let's hope. It's good motivation to build. Now, let's switch gears and let's talk about everything that you're building today. So I'd introduce finally as a finance automation platform. Can you expand on that? What does the platform do? Who does it serve and what kind of value does it bring to users? Yeah, I mean, in a simplest form, we're just trying to make things simple again. I think we're living a world where being a small business owner is hard. There's all these tools, all this software. It's never at the core of what you're doing. And it's actually getting harder, not easier. And I think part of it is the market, the way companies are built. I think people have spent just a ton of time building point solutions, go build the best widget for this. But in the end, the user is kind of left in a bad place because how many apps do you have space for? So the idea for finally is that you can get all your finance, your accounting, bookkeeping, checking done in one place. And certainly the vision for it is much broader where as we grow and expand, you'll be able to just do a bunch of things there and deal with one vendor as opposed to dealing with 20 vendors and 20 different UIs and UXs and just being stressed out about it. Makes a lot of sense. Who were the early customers? You had mentioned, I believe, 500 startups there. What was that kind of profile of customer that you were initially targeting? And how did you know to begin with that segment? I would guess that there were a lot of different segments that you could serve. How did you know to serve that segment? I mean, I think for us, we've been focused on SMB since inception. So I've been dealing with everything from the A to Z on SMB since we started. And we've certainly found some best ones there and some that aren't as good. But what I can tell you is most businesses, 95, 98 percent of businesses need what we have. So it's just a question of making sure that your software and your systems and processes are able to handle that. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now, back to today's episode. Now, I want to talk about trust because when you're dealing with a startup's finances like this, obviously, trust is everything. I'm going to go ahead and say a company name. If you want me, I can remove it afterwards, but I was a bench.co customer for about five years. And that platform went to complete crap. Completely fell apart, was giving us wrong information, wrong numbers. And we stopped using them because of that. And how do you build trust with users so that they don't have those kinds of issues? Because once you start to have a trust issue with a platform like this, it's hard to continue using them. Yeah, I mean, I think the best one of the challenges is definitely tough for the accounting and bookkeeping industry. So having good data, solid data, great data and not being lost by a penny is paramount. So I think for us, we've really focused on how we ingest that data and where that data is coming from. So it sounds like maybe you experienced something where there was either missing data or too much data and it just gave you, obviously, long reports. So it just sucks. And I would say that in this part of the industry, we're working very hard on our side to make sure that ingesting the data is done in the best way possible, because I think that would definitely reduce errors. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. What types of segments are you looking at now? Is it always going to be SMB? Is the master plan to dominate SMB? Or do you eventually want to move up to mid-market, to enterprise? What are the long-term expansion plans look like? Yeah, I mean, I think for us, we've been really good with SMBs and medium-sized businesses. So I think if we can just stay focused on those two verticals there, those two killers, we can build a pretty successful company. When you think about winning that market, what's going to be key to your success there? How do you win the market? Obviously, there's probably a long list of things, but if you had to pick out a few things, what are those real keys to success? Yeah, look, I think it's all about team building a great team, having a great vision and being able to execute. So I think it just boils down to that. The best team is going to win with the best vision and the best execution. What's your secret sauce for recruiting team members? How do you get an amazing team? Because I'm sure every founder listening in is hearing that saying, "It makes sense. I want to have a great team, too." How do you get a great team? Yeah, it's grinding 24/7 and being genuine and definitely making an effort to make things better and to leave this place a little better than we found it. So don't just go build the same damn thing. Everybody else is building, have a unique perspective on it and have conviction. Yeah, and if you're passionate about it, I think it's a natural attractant to other people. Eight players also like to be with eight players. So if you're an eight player, you're going to attract eight players, so you got to just stay true to that. Let's talk a little bit about marketing. So how would you describe the general marketing strategy and approach today? Yeah, I mean, I think for us, there's a lot of things you could do out there. We certainly have a very open-minded way of testing and always be testing because there's a lot of channels out there you could test. So I think if you treat them like experiments every single time, you're going to be happy because the point of an experiment is just to see what works, what doesn't work, how well it works. So we've taken that approach to marketing. There's so many different things you can do. And if you have a testing mindset, I think you come away from it very encouraged. What's an example of a test that you ran that you thought was going to be successful and it didn't work out? I would say that as you go after these verticals or these different categories, definitely getting messaging, trying to get the message down for each vertical is important because if you don't, then it's not, even though it might appear it's like a one-size-fits-all messaging, it should be more tailored. So we learned that for sure. What other go-to-market lessons have you learned? Any tough lessons that were kind of brutal to learn them but useful afterwards? Yeah, I would say back to the messaging, right? If we just get better messaging, then conversion rates are better and cap is lower and success is found faster for the customer and also for your go-to-market team. How do you get messaging right, especially for you when I'm looking at the platform? There's a lot of aspects. You have bookkeeping, expense management, corporate card, bill pay, invoicing, payroll. It goes on and on. There's a lot of components to the platform. How do you get messaging right when there's so much in the platform? Yeah. For example, I would say like a dentist probably doesn't care about like invoicing. They don't invoice consumers that come in for their dental work. So definitely don't send a dentist messaging about sending invoices. They probably don't care about that. So that's why I think you've got to verticalize the solution. That makes a lot of sense. What else from a marketing perspective or maybe let's talk about a test you ran that was a massive home run? What was a big home run test that you did? I'd say building an inside sales team has been our home run. Being able to not just focus on, I'm going to say PLG is also exciting because our product has that built in, but not forgetting that even though you may have some good PLG stuff going on, investing in sales is important. How do you build an inside sales team? What have you learned from that journey? You know, I think it goes back to my first startup. We grew really, really fast. There's no way we do that without building a team and having cohesion and a single message and getting good at those things. So I think definitely processes, right, having good processes and good systems that allows you to scale from one to as many as you need, right? So it's all about the process and the systems. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70 percent less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit global talent.co. And then who was that first hire that you made to lead building the team or were you leading that sales team initially or were one of your co-founders? Yeah, I've been very lucky that I always get to lead that sales team because I always have to be the first sales rep, to be quite honest with you. I feel like if I could sell it myself, if I could solve someone's pain, then I can help teach others what's resonating in the market and what customers solve. I think that's been really a superpower that I encourage every founder to try that because it helps you build your product and then it also helps you onboard team members faster. And the truth is, you as a founder have a problem resonating or bringing the solution to market. Others are going to have that problem as well. Do you still do sales or are you completely out of sales now? No, I get pulled into bigger deals and I look to get rolled up my sleeves and stay connected to customers and see what kind of matches up with what a day in the life of a small or medium sized business owner or operators. I think that's really important as you continue to build product. You know, with our own company, I just transitioned out of founder sales about six months ago and I miss it. It was so much fun. I want to go back and start taking you just a few calls per week just because it's so fun. And I've heard that from other founders too, that when you eventually delegate that roll, start building a team that they miss it too. So glad to know that you're still doing some sales calls. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of things you got to sell, right? You got to sell the product. You got to sell the vision. You got to sell new recruits. You got to sell investors. You got to sell your vision continuously. You're never going to stop. So I think if you don't keep that muscle warm, you're making it harder for yourself. When it comes to vision, which you just mentioned there, what is that vision? Five years from today, what is finally going to look like and what's your impact going to be for the segments that you serve? Yeah. I think we're going to bring some publicity back and make a beautiful product that saves people a ton of time, obviously money and allows them to focus on what they do best, right? You should just be focused on being a great dentist. You shouldn't have to worry about 20 different pieces of software that don't connect well together. And then as a business owner, you don't know what your levers are. You don't know where you stand and how your company is doing and it's always behind. So I think we want to allow people to be in a better place and empower them with their own data and financials to make decisions, to be able to grow and be successful. And when it comes to your competitive landscape or the competitive landscape, do you view it as platforms like Bench, for example, or do you view it more as the local mom and pop bookkeeper? Is that the real competitor and getting them to move over to a platformer? How do you think about the competitive landscape? Yeah. I mean, I think for me, there's obviously a lot of software players and traditional vendors out there. I think everybody's got their own challenges in the cases of local providers, not being engineers or having an engineering mindset. We're working on AI and we have a whole AI engineering team. We started that five years ago, actually built our first model called Prometheus. So I don't know, man, if you're in a accounting firm or a regular bookkeeping firm or some kind of finance firm, you're not working on AI, you're at huge disadvantage. And same goes, if you're a single product company, I mean, I think you see now, there's a lot of great companies out there like Dropbox and stuff and they're public companies and obviously they're earning a ton of revenue. But you know, it's sort of like kind of limiting in the sense that if it's just one product, you probably don't have, I'm going to say the longstanding power to be like a phenomenal public company or super, I'm going to say life changing company. If we look at that big master plan that you have and that vision that you have, what's the key to success? What are you going to have to really nail to make that happen? I think it goes back through those three pillars, you know, like just having a great vision, being a great recruiter, and then executing like crazy. What keeps you up at night, maybe a better way to ask that as you think about making this vision reality, what are you not necessarily losing sleep over? But what's top of mind? Speed. I only worry about speed. How do you go fast? Yeah. How do you go faster? You're always setting new records. You want to break those records and you want to go faster. How do you maintain that speed as the organization grows? I was just speaking with a founder earlier today and we were talking about how in the early days, it's so easy to move fast because it's small, it's lean, you have a lot of momentum and just going from zero to one, it's a lot easier. How do you maintain that speed and maintain that pace when you have a company that just keeps growing and growing and getting bigger and bigger? Yeah. I think some products will be challenging like for us, obviously AI, SaaS, FinTech, you know, if it was just AI and SaaS, you'd go super fast, super, super fast. But the minute you throw in some FinTech stuff, right, that's complexity and regulatory stuff and compliance things and you just got to be mindful of that, that speed in its right place is a good way to be, but for certain things you can only go so fast, right? So that's sort of like the balance. Yeah. We're not just a software company, we're also a FinTech company and you can go as fast as you can with those two things. If it was just software, you can go really fast. But I think a world is just software, it's probably not that exciting. How do you think about your market category? In five years from today, is it going to be the world's leading number one finance automation platform or how are you going to talk about that platform and that category in the future? Yeah, I mean, I think just have a vision that's coming together, a platform of platforms. So yeah, I would say so. How do you build thought leadership with your target segments that you're after? Are you doing a lot of podcasts like this? Are you doing ghostwriting? Are you doing a lot of media? I mean, what's the thought leadership playbook look like? Yeah, I mean, I think for us, just telling the story and the vision of how we see the world improving for SMBs and being able to create tools and beautiful software and simplicity, I think that's the key for us. And then how we do that is, yeah, I would say podcasts like this are definitely helpful and we probably should do more there. So I think that's an area that we want to invest more in. What about growth? Obviously, you're a private company, you don't have to share anything that you're not comfortable with, but can you tease us with the type of growth and adoption that you're seeing? Yeah, I mean, I think for us, we're certainly talking to at least a thousand new businesses a month that are interested in working with us. That's exciting because I could tell you when we first started, we were very lucky if we had 20 or 30 companies to talk to like a month. Wow. What about fundraising? So as I mentioned in the intro, over 110 million has been raised to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey and just, of course, all the other startups that you've started? Yeah, I mean, I think as founder, sometimes you think of this as rounds and you think of putting investors in these different buckets and the truth is you probably should be thinking that an investor could be any round investor, because you don't know if they're going to go to another fund, start their own fund or move up between funds, whether it's an early stage growth fund. And you should just be thinking about setting like targets, your vision and then executing and then being able to go back and tell that story and say, hey, remember I told you we were going to do this? Well, look, we're actually doing it. Here's what that looks like. I think that's sort of like, I'm going to say my secret for fundraising, right? And outside of fundraising, let's just imagine that you're speaking with a founder. They're trying to bring technology to market in a similar space. So they're in the fintech space. What would be the number one piece of advice that you have to give them to increase their chances of success? Yeah, I probably just wouldn't start in fintech. I'd probably start with some kind of software and then figure out how to layer fintech in just because fintech, it's very costly and takes a lot of time, rightfully so, right? There's a lot of rules there. So I think if you start with some kind of software that you can layer on fintech later, that's really great. What you really should be focused on is ways of getting customers. If you can figure out how to get customers, you know, pipeline, I'm going to see pipeline over everything, then you can build something long term. Amazing. Love the advice. All right, man, we are up on time. So we're going to wrap here before we do. If there's founders who are listening in that want to follow on with your journey, where should they go? I think our websites are a good spot and then just find me up on LinkedIn, I'm there all the time. Awesome. Thanks so much for taking the time. All right, great. Appreciate you, Brad. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontlines Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast and for the latest episodes, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode. [MUSIC]
