Beginning my journey in the FinTech industry over twelve years ago, and now as CEO and co-founder of Pollen VC, a company that allows developers quicker access to their app store revenues, there have certainly been many twists and turns of start-up life along the way. My entire career has been characterized by moving into areas of business that interested me, but which I seemly knew nothing about. It was that curiosity and inherent desire to challenge existing thinking that gave rise to my co-founding of Pollen.
As a bond trader with UBS and leader of short credit trading for the company, I received my first taste of how technology could disrupt traditional financial services in 1998, when I helped UBS put its commercial paper business online. Naturally, there were many obstacles in implementing such major change at an organization of this size, but this was an early lesson to stay steadfast, and find ways around the inherent red tape of a large bank’s IT department.
Following my tenure at UBS, and nine hard years building a Fintech company in the self-service banking space, I decided to focus my attention on something I was actually interested in, and co-founded an interactive music company (Soniqplay) that provided an app for users to remix and share music. After a successful launch in the mobile app store, we saw great traction with users, however we were not receiving earned app store money back quickly enough to fuel our growth and acquire users to reach critical mass. The funding gap limited the amount of funds we were able to reserve for User Acquisition (UA) and promotion. Instead, we fell into the trap of so many bootstrapped app companies who cannot generate enough early revenue to survive.
After many conversations with other developers, and conversations with "traditional" invoice discounters, it became clear there was a gap in the market to provide additional liquidity into the app ecosystem to help developers, and the idea for Pollen’s Velocity Capital was formed. Instead of giving up, I decided to turn the company’s problem into a solution. I very quickly discovered there were many others facing the same issues that I had and that many would benefit from being able to access app store revenue more quickly to reinvest into their business.
Working with the team at Yuza, an incubator and creator of platform-based mobile ventures, I aligned myself with co-founders who like me, understood both traditional financial services and the mobile app space. Having spotted the disconnect between how traditional financial services providers operate, and the parameters of how digital marketplaces operate, we knew that fixing this problem was not going to be easy, so the need to be surrounded by top tier investors and advisors was paramount to getting the product launched and proving our initial traction.
Within 30 days of incorporating Pollen, we had closed our seed funding round with a range of top-tier investors. We ended up increasing the size of our seed round as we were oversubscribed and didn’t want to disappoint investors who we knew could be really helpful in helping us build our business. At that moment we knew that the opportunity ahead of us was huge. Taking the idea a step further, we started to align Pollen with leading advertising networks so that we could help developers reinvest their earned cash more easily back into their business more easily. No longer did developers need to use borrowed cash or credit cards to continue the momentum of their app -- they could now use their app store sales to directly fund their own user acquisition and growth.
When building a company or starting a new adventure, you cannot always listen when people tell you that it won’t work. If someone says that something is impossible, find out how to make it possible. As an entrepreneur, you cannot be afraid to challenge the status quo and be deterred from finding a better way of getting things done. However, don’t be naïve and think that your product alone is not capable of improvement. You must always be on the lookout for ways to differentiate yourself from the competition and to create a unique brand identity, and delight your customers.
All new ventures are difficult and require extra time and attention, but as an entrepreneur, you likely know that already. It is imperative to stay focused on your goal and to do what is necessary to achieve your objectives. If you see a problem, fix it. If you do not know how, ask questions and find the people who do. Starting Pollen has been hard work but tremendous fun, and rewarding to have created a business in a new sector which came from problem we had personally had that we felt needed to be solved.
Image Credit: Megustadesign/Shutterstock