Bad Alternatives & Positioning
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Bad Alternatives & Positioning

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5. Overall Thesis

An overall thesis will help you drive clarity in a one- or two-page format and ensure you and your team are all marching towards the same north star.

It should be:
A concise summary
Supported by the bad alternatives, personas, positioning, and growth channels you develop throughout the rest of this doc
Easy to comprehend & repeat back
e.g. tell it to other people and see if they can parrot back what you do and—most importantly—why; the mental model should be super quick & clear for your intended audience

🔮 Concise product pitch

⁠
Venice
⁠
is frictionless financial data for developers. Get a fully hosted Plaid integration in minutes. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can focus on building the future faster. Your customers will thank you.

🥸 Personas & Acquisition

(see all in
2. Personas
⁠
&
4. Growth Loops & Channels
⁠
)
Launch with:
Developers (GitHub + Hackernews)
Data analysts (Slack + reddit)

👉 Overarching thesis

We want to:
enable the frictionless movement of financial data & give back 1 billion years of happy, stable life to the working class.
enable a world where a million A/B tests can easily be performed to surface the very best finance products & user experiences.
Why?
Developers still have an enormous amount of friction to quickly build finance apps or tools (either for themselves, their users, or their internal teams).
Consumer finance apps have failed us all. The average % of income saved in the US is 2% (e.g. we hemorrhage 98% of every dollar earned).
Startup finance & data analysis teams still use manually updated spreadsheets as their tool of choice. This creates massive inefficiencies, costly mistakes, and causes companies to needlessly burn through capital.

👯 Initial analogs

(see all in
3. Positioning & Analogs
⁠
)
The backend for finance.
Segment/Airbyte for finance.

1️⃣ 2️⃣ 3️⃣ Scaffolds: how we get from A to Z

Build a data pipeline for enriched, normalized financial data that can be easily set up in 5 minutes or less
Work with no code & low code tools to be their primary supplier of financial data
e.g. for finance teams, personal finance geeks, fintech builders, etc.
Enable builders to:
quickly access financial data from consumers, across many disparate data sources & aggregators
quickly hook additional [Venice] products into that basic plumbing to achieve even more out-of-the-box functionality

🤬 What’s the pain this solves?

Customer voice
Building financial products from scratch is expensive, and technically very challenging. It adds a lot of upfront risk, expense, and wasted time to my business
I just want to focus on my core value proposition, and building a data engine is not one of them for now
Technical voice
Empower financial builders to minimize the time-to-achieve maximum customer value
Starting from the foundation (data layer), build an ecosystem of interrelated products to empower financial apps/services to build better user experiences, faster

📐 How much explicit, directly-linked pain is there?

⁠
⁠
⁠

🧀 What’s the wedge?

Expand
from: a data pipeline with a single data source
composed of:
90% developers
5% data analysts
3% finance teams
2% personal finance prosumers
to: a rich system of interconnected products to compose together into a fully-functioning financial ecosystem
composed of:
50% developers (who capture 60+% of the market for finance tools & apps)
20% data analysts
20% finance teams
8% personal finance prosumers
2% emerging or edge cases

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