Bad Alternatives & Positioning
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Bad Alternatives & Positioning

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2. Personas

Who would drink your kool-aid, and why?

You should be very selective in who you try to acquire and when/how, but at least enumerate all the various types of people / teams / products who might use your product and why (informed by their bad alternatives) before narrowing down.
Who: Types of customers who'd buy what you're selling
0
Name
Description
1
No code startups
Startups who are building no-code and low-code products and want to delegate financial data sources & infrastructure to someone else so they can de-risk other parts of their business
2
Non-technical fintech founders
Founders of fintech companies who don’t know how to code (and don’t want to learn to code). Some may have rudimentary SQL skills, almost all are comfortable with spreadsheets.
3
Startup finance teams
Early-stage startup team members who manage the finances, such as a controller (but often times much less qualified, such as a cofounder)
4
Personal finance geeks
Prosumers of personal finance, often wanting the best tools to mash together into a custom setup for diverse (& edge case) needs
5
Heads of family finances
The one person in every family who suffers through finances so everyone else in the family doesn’t have to; not necessarily the breadwinner or a certain gender
6
Data analysts
Analysts for startups & larger orgs who are tasked with understanding the revenue trends / needs / insights from financial data
7
Financial advisors
Paid advisors, such as certified financial planners, who manage a client’s wealth & help model their current & future plans
8
Development agencies
Software development agencies that build financial products for clients or for internal tooling
9
Frontend / mobile engineers
Frontend (JavaScript / mobile) developers who are often most focused on being design / UI engineers rather than backend/infra engineers
10
Solutions engineers
Slightly (or very) technical support agents who help clients solve problems they have with a given tool (such as Coda’s support engineers, or Supabase’s expert partnerships)
There are no rows in this table
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Get specific!

How exactly would you acquire each of these people, and even beyond that... how would you onboard them?
How do you maximize their value and minimize the time-to-first-wow with exceptional onboarding?
Which growth loops could you use on them to grow your company or reinforce the value you’re providing?
The examples below are basic, but the more specific you can get the faster you’ll be at acquiring new users. Treat these as A/B tests and iterate quickly, going from one growth loop to the next to see which ones work and which don’t! Even the most successful startups had numerous false starts.
Personas: Who they are & how you acquire them
0
Persona
Bad alternative(s)
Pain
Pain / Intent Description
Where to find them
Product
Onboarding Journey
Growth loops
1
No code startups who want rich financial data across many sources, but who don’t want to maintain it themselves
Implementing <Plaid, Yodlee, etc> yourself
5
Believes this product is the best solution & is ready to pay for it
Founder-to-founder sales
YC community
Open source / GitHub
Development agencies
No code communities
No code influencers / bloggers / Twitter
No code tool searches
Fintech Slack/discord for founders & PMs
VC communities & tools (discount)
Hacker News
Product Hunt
Finfluencers
Blog posts
Plaid dev conference & similar
Incorporation / bank bundles
Hosted Database Pipeline
Venice Link
Unified API
Oauth into Venice to create a new user (or link to an existing one) from their customer
Without needing to go through any sort of signup process on Venice
Their customer can then connect bank accounts and stream data in (to their internal data stores) or use commands like /venice in a native way
Congratulate them on their new financial superpowers
Their customers can also go directly to Venice website after to add other destinations as their source-of-truth

Attribution
Recommendation Discount
2
Non-technical founders who want to create a personal finance MVP to get funding or early users, but don’t know how to code
Learn how to code
5
Believes this product is the best solution & is ready to pay for it
Development agencies
No code communities
No code influencers / bloggers / Twitter
No code tool searches
Fintech Slack/discord for founders & PMs
VC communities & tools (discount)
Hacker News
Product Hunt
Finfluencers
Blog posts
Plaid dev conference & similar
Incorporation / bank bundles
Hosted Database Pipeline
Venice Link
Read about use cases / search for pains that speak to them
Create account after seeing the value
Connect Venice to their no-code tool (e.g. via database URL)
Connect a bank etc to feed data into the db
See data flowing in, normalized & ready to use
See that they can add additional data sources to flow into the db
See last sync & any errors / diagnostics
Congratulate them on how much time they just saved (& other benefits)
Attribution
Recommendation Discount
There are no rows in this table
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