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
Name
Description
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
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.
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)
Personal finance geeks
Prosumers of personal finance, often wanting the best tools to mash together into a custom setup for diverse (& edge case) needs
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
Data analysts
Analysts for startups & larger orgs who are tasked with understanding the revenue trends / needs / insights from financial data
Financial advisors
Paid advisors, such as certified financial planners, who manage a client’s wealth & help model their current & future plans
Development agencies
Software development agencies that build financial products for clients or for internal tooling
Frontend / mobile engineers
Frontend (JavaScript / mobile) developers who are often most focused on being design / UI engineers rather than backend/infra engineers
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)
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Get specific!
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
Persona
Bad alternative(s)
Pain
Pain / Intent Description
Where to find them
Product
Onboarding Journey
Growth loops
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
Hosted Database Pipeline
Venice Link
Unified API
Attribution
Recommendation Discount
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
Hosted Database Pipeline
Venice Link
Attribution
Recommendation Discount
There are no rows in this table
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