What does it take to launch a financial product to market in as little as 3 weeks?
We started Productfy with a big hairy audacious goal: “What would it take to launch a financial product to market in 3 weeks?”
In the early days of fintech, I was just another eager developer looking to innovate in fintech. I joined a company called Motif Investing, an early millennial-focused investment platform looking to disrupt the traditional retail investing paradigm.
With over $100M raised, we quickly found ourselves spending more and more time and resources on undifferentiated features to build the underlying infrastructure for our core application. We spent over 13 months on a complete end-to-end transactional brokerage platform, doing compliance, integrations, and endless data workflows before we came up for air and even started to work on our key differentiators.
The same was true of healthcare and insurtech, where you are in highly regulated industries that many first-time entrepreneurs find challenging to go to market because of the inherent domain and technical expertise involved in stitching together an underlying ‘operating system’ in order to truly innovate.
With Productfy, the mission is to democratize fintech innovation…for good. The FinTech entrepreneurs that we talk to see the market and the opportunity in fundamentally different ways. Their thesis isn’t necessarily just monetizing in a different way — they’re looking to upend the entire paradigm for a new generation of consumers and businesses. We’re talking about companies that want to disrupt predatory practices around payday lending for underserved groups, applications that are targeted towards women or people of color that incorporate relevant psychosocial factors into the user experience, and products that make it easier for 1099 workers to be part of the mainstream economy. What we are witnessing are FinTech entrepreneurs that fundamentally want to change the way we relate to money with the belief that our current economic system is far behind the zeitgeist.
Productfy’s fintech operating system exists for these innovators who will be the next change agents for our financial system. It is these folks whom we want to level the playing field for, enabling them to launch a financial product to market in as little as three weeks.
How will we get there? With the right bank, data, fintech partners, and investors.
Robinhood famously pounded on the doors of 75 VCs before Marc Andreessen saw the vision and funded their risk capital to get regulatory approval in order to go to market. As a 500 Startups portfolio company and Envestnet Yodlee graduate, we are incredibly lucky, grateful, and excited to announce Point72 as our newest investor. They are fintech-focused builders with an operating team that has a clear product-oriented vision for how the new fintech operating system will come together. We are also ecstatic to bring on Yodlee as a strategic investor to bring the largest financial data network to our fintech innovators as a service.
In addition to our strategic backers, we are incredibly excited to be partnering with Marqeta, Equifax and Avidia Bank to provide one of the fastest and easiest onramps to success for payments, banking, and card issuance.
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes for the last 24 months, and in that time we’ve figured out how to quickly and securely launch a financial product to market in as little as 3 weeks. I’m incredibly excited to start my journey with the partners, backers, and founding team members we have in place, and look forward to sharing more updates as we make progress towards changing the way financial products are built…for good.
Connect with me at duy@productfy.io.
