How Founder Stack can help early-stage Fintech startups surpass their challenges and go to the market

The Founder Stack programme by Accel is now launching its second cohort for Consumer Tech startups, and is calling applications for the same. The applications close before 20th October, 2020.

Over the years, we at the Accel community have backed companies like Acko, JusPay, Rupeek, FalconX, Coverfox, Indifi among many others in the financial technology space. 

Over time, we were able to build ourselves a credible network of subject-matter experts, operators that came with high levels of contextual insights and learning.

Now, with this Founder Stack programme, we would like to open this pool of learnings and network to early-stage Fintech founders.

Some of the segments that our community portfolio operated in  include insurance technology, lending technology, brokering, trade financing, mobile payments and cryptocurrency trading.

‍Our program is curated to help you answer the common questions faced by Edu-tech founders. 

After doing our research and due diligence, our community has identified a set of a few core problems and bottlenecks Fintech startup founders face during the first 500 days of their business. Some of these problem statements and the subsequent observations include:

• Most founders in Fintech end up conducting pitch interviews rather than objective-based interviews. A simple shift in this approach can help founders save multiple rounds of iterations.
  

Are founders well-versed with how to go about talking right with both potential and existing customers alike?

• Not all Fintech companies will need a mammoth number of 100 million users to become really large companies. Most of them can make do with only a million customers.
  

How can this gap be bridged appropriately to give the founders a sharper edge towards customer segmentation?

• While going from almost impractical to an exciting set of CACs, Fintech founders would want to experiment enough to identify accurate channels of reaching out to customers.
  

How can this entire process be streamlined internally with the necessary research and planning?

• Coming to the business model, Fintech founders build products typically to solve customer problems but not business models. The general tendency can be to underestimate the hardships of building a good risk-model, especially when something like lending is involved. 

How can early-stage founders develop prospective solutions and identify the value proposition, by better planning within the ideation stage of the product itself?

• Early stage founders fall under a lot of assumptions when it comes to compliances and regulations. An F2F with any experienced person in this space can give the founders the necessary knowledge on the necessary regulatory and compliance requirements.

For their target market segment, how can founders identify the key subjects they have to touch upon in compliance and regulations?

• Usually, getting the right banking and lending partners on-board is tough. This element needs more education and experience on navigating the right way with these partners.

How can founders build the right attitude towards building better relationships with BFSI companies

How FS can help Fintech founders

The programme will have over 30 coaches from across the industry who are proven entrepreneurs and subject matter experts, that have seen tens of thousands of consumers using their products.

The programme also provides access to the portfolio founders and operators from within the Accel Community. These coaches have agreed to spend time with the participants, and offer their support to the founding teams as part of the cohort.

The duration of the program is 12 weeks, and we intend to facilitate a maximum of 10 founding teams in this cohort.

Download the programme details here.

The shortlisted teams of the cohort will have access to four types of sessions -

• Sounding boards, Private roundtables on the Tuesdays of every week
  

• Masterclasses and Founder sessions on the Thursdays of every week.

On the other days, the founding teams get to interact with the coaches on seperate AMA blocks, community nights and dinners, and category-specific discussions.

The goal at Founder Stack is to help these teams in their pre product-market fit stage, with everything they would need to go to the market.

The approach is derived down through the various layers of Founder Stack -

• Market Research Layer
• Product Layer
• User Growth Layer
• Presentation Layer
  

Some noted Fintech coaches and experts in this programme include:

• Kunal Shah (of Freecharge and CRED)
• Sumit Maniyar (of Rupeek),
• Deepak Abbot (of India Gold), 
• Pravin Jadhav (ex-Freecharge, ex-Paytm money), 
• Manu Prasad (of Scripbox), 
• Sushma Abburi (of Moneyview),
• Aniketh Thakkar 
• Varun Dua (of Acko).
  
  

If you are a Fintech startup founder trying to build products around payments, lending, e-wallets and all things finance and its intersection with technology, visit here.

How can you join ?

Applications are currently open for founders to be part of the life long community. Deadline for the applications is October 20th, 2020 

Please check www.seedtoscale.com/consumer to get more details.

Related Articles:

1. What can you expect from 10 Weeks of Founder Stack for SaaS Startups?
2. How is the Founder Stack Program designed for Consumer Tech startups to become growth ready?

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