Agree. Focussing on financials pushes a sales first attitude over a raise money attitude which I feel more early-stage startups need.
Doing sales before you have a product is uncomfortable and frustrating at times, but it is the best way to know what to build and for whom you are building.
He is only thinking about the market here.
And if he is looking to make cash then that is always the right way to go.
If the wave is getting bigger, the earlier you catch it the better.
I agree with both of you.
Yes, it covers what most people in the space already know, but these things must be reiterated to the public. For every ICO hype article, a piece like this should exist.
No MVP.
No talking to users.
No strategy.
No surprise they failed.
MVP - build an app with parent login, child login and a points system for chores.
Talk to users (parents) by having chat in the app.
Find how to acquire users cheap, retain them, and make them pay. Go for a bank partnership when it is a compelling business proposition. Banks like money, not startups with no profits and no users.
No, this is probably the only thing they did right. Getting early traction is important for many reasons.
- It gives you an opportunity to get early feedback from people interested in your product. If you can get an email you can talk to your users.
- It gives you some early KPIs and a limited, but important understanding of acquisition channels. If you can't find any one who is interested in your product as a concept, how will you get users?
- It motivates companies to get products out earlier.
- It helps when talking to investors to mention that you have 1,000 people on a waiting list.
I agree though, you always need to get the product to market.
I did not say they were not innovative at all. I said they were slow to innovate. This is being proven by the speed at which fintech startups are unbundling banking services into individual products.
Zopa, Nutmeg, Transferwise could have been built by banks. But they were not.
> Instant, Free transfers, including from one bank to another. Even on weekends & holidays.
- Paypal in 1999?
> APIs currently available (under the UK open banking government guidelines)
Yodlee supplies APIs already.
> they already have roughly £15k in the bank from Acq Bank revenue from Mastercard.
Really? Mondo are currently paying for the prepaid cards, and more to load them through the app. This is probably around 2% ? So 20k cost for this? Maybe I am wrong, but I can't see how else the card gets loaded by a free payment.
You are right, the barclays accelerator is great. And similar incubators and schemes are opening up.
I still think it's pretty clear that innovation is coming from the outside.
This news is important for banking in the UK for the following reasons:
- UK banks are slow to innovate and people (especially younger generation) are getting annoyed. People want a bank that is digitally strong, Mondo's 30k waiting list proves this.
- Banks will become more like platforms. Number26's partnership with TransferWise is an example of this beginning. See Clayton Christensen illustrate this https://youtu.be/oCKZwrfysbM?t=1h19m28s
- The UK is trying to make banking more competitive (last 5 years has had applications for more than 5 new banks, before this there was 1 new bank in 150 years). This policy is working.
What remains to be seen is whether Mondo will make money in the way a traditional bank does.
IMO the biggest challenge for a new banks is customer acquistion, and it looks like Mondo has a pretty good handle on this.
Completely agree. I have tried to use tumblr on so many occassions, but have poked around for a while, become overwhelmed and gone back to reddit or similar..
PSD2 / XS2A are forcing the big UK banks to offer APIs. This is good, but will mean a current account will essentially stay the same, and startups will build the services around this.
Mondo is already setup perfectly for this and has the early advantage, but startups build for users, and the users are with the big banks. I expect challenger banks to challenge, but in 10 years the big banks will have some incredible integrations which have been gifted to their customers , making them stay.