By Tobias Neale, Head of Delivery at Contis.
The first four weeks in business are crucial in any industry – but FinTech moves faster than most.
That’s why it’s so important to do the right things when you’re starting out – and try to avoid as many common mistakes as you can.
At Contis, we work with lots of different types of business to help turn their ideas into a workable product they can get into the hands of potential customers quickly. And we’ve learned a few things along the way.
So here I’ve put together some of those tips and tricks, to try to help startups deliver a successful run in those crucial early days.
Start with a good idea
It sounds simple, but this is undoubtedly the hardest part – so it’s important to have a really clear idea in your head about what you want to build before you get started.
Founding a business with the vague notion that you’d quite like to be in finance won’t do.
Spending time thinking, brainstorming, and getting feedback from family and friends is essential – before you start building it.
The rest of this blog will focus on the four-week implementation phase – by which time, your idea should already exist (in your mind, at least).
It’s important to note that none of the steps below will do you much good if you don’t know exactly what it is you’re trying to create.
Be really good at one thing
Once you’ve got the USP you believe is going to set you up for success – you need to focus single-mindedly on excelling at it.
The biggest mistake people make is changing ideas within the first few weeks. That’s where they always fail.
You need to come with a rounded idea and stick to it. And yes, you will tweak it and change it, but you should only be doing that when you’ve done some testing.
The successful launches we’ve seen with FinTechs are around one specific USP, not ten different things.
Once you’re really good at one thing, you can become really good at two things, and then three, and so on.
But if you try and be really good at ten things straight away, you’re probably going to be bad at all of them.
Be realistic about what you can achieve
Dreaming big is awesome – it’s what drives entrepreneurs forward. But in the early stages it’s also important to manage your own expectations.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. So think carefully about your targets, to make sure you don’t set yourself up for a fall.
Plan your time and your resources in order to achieve what is physically possible – not what you would like to in an ideal world.
Remember the first four weeks should be a stepping stone
You should use the early stage as a gateway to greatness, rather than an end in itself.
If you’ve built something in four weeks that you think you’re going to be happy within 12 months, you’re probably doing something wrong. Because if you’re in exactly the same place 12 months on, you’re likely to fail.
Don’t be afraid to use four weeks as the stepping stone that allows you to move money and issue a visa card.
Then following that, your next eight weeks can be something a bit fancier.
Find out about your regulations
You need to do your due diligence when it comes to checking out what the regulated space looks like. It’s an area people often forget – but doing so can kill off an idea before it’s even started.
In finance – from e-money, to banking licences, or lending licences – wherever money is involved, it’s regulated. And I think people often forget that actually there’s red tape with that.
We do our best to manage it – but it exists, and you can’t just do whatever you want without checking.
Research around regulation is crucial in your early days.
Consider pre-configured options
Pre-configured systems – like our fast-track partnership with Visa – are a great way to get your idea up and running quickly.
Things that usually take time and effort to create can be set up in a few weeks – which leaves you time to work on the real differentiators for your business.
At Contis, when we start a build as part of our full offering, we tend to spend weeks with a client going through their idea.
But where fast-track comes in is that we’ve said ‘these are the basic building blocks that you need. You don’t have to use them all – but we’ll open them up for you to use however you want.’
That means we don’t have the same setup time as we would with a full implementation, because it’s all pre-configured and ready to go.
Of course, the advantage of making a bespoke build is that we can do pretty much anything you want us to do. Whereas with fast-track it’s essentially the standards we think everybody will want, with a few extras.
But that means it’s a great system for startups who want to be agile and get going quickly.
