Love these two cents. It's early, but good to know we’re building some right muscles with things we’re doing today. We’ve embraced the PG mantra and have been putting in extra efforts to prospect/reach out to clients, win social proof, and do the things that don’t scale to bolster our automation and make our customers love us. We’ll keep that spirit strong as we grow.
Also completely agree with your point on prospecting clients proactively + early. As you know, there’s such a knowledge gap in this space that it doesn’t make sense to expect customers to show up on our doorstep with ads. Though we’re investing in content since we think there isn’t enough education out there for e.g. first-time fintech founders, we’ll keep outbound core to our DNA. Also appreciate the thoughtful feedback on our website, value-props, go-to market. Looking forward to connecting!
Finley sits in between debt investors and borrowers, but focused on the borrower side. We think that’s the key bottleneck to solve for since borrowers often have the bigger knowledge/technical gap. e.g. a fintech founder doesn't need capital markets expertise to discover a fantastic lending product. We do believe debt investors will be a major distribution source, since today debt investors often bear the burden of educating/managing first-time borrowers. Finley can take care of that for them.
We’re planning an API integration, but for our MVP have figured out regular data delivery processes with customers that work with their existing workflows (e.g. a cross-account s3 bucket). We’ve built pipelines from there to automate reports upon receiving that data.
Our vision is to power the end-to-end debt financing process. We’re focused today on post-close monitoring/reporting, but our next module will be exactly what you’re asking: the negotiation + close of that contract. We’re well aware of this pain-point: growing startups can’t afford the 6-9 months it takes to get their money (after already agreeing to partner with their debt investor!).
Fortunately there’s strong incentive alignment at this point to put that money to work. We also think our current reporting/monitoring work will be leveraged to streamline that process (a lot of reporting requirements come up during due diligence / negotiation). Finally, it’s a natural product extension since we’ll help you close your facility then can automate your reporting immediately upon close.
If I may, the final ingredient I'll add is that this problem is one where software not only automates but enhances the solution. As a company grows, they'll add additional credit facilities and explore other financing options (like forward flow arrangements). Each agreement/arrangement comes with their custom set of requirements on your various credit products, and the lack of a central data store creates all sort of internal process complexity.
Hey HN! We’re Kevin, Jeremy, and Josiah, and we’re in the current YC batch. We’re building Finley (https://www.finleycms.com), software that streamlines the debt capital raise and management process, starting with compliance monitoring and reporting.Debt capital is basically a corporate loan of over $20 million used to fund operations and growth. That’s a universal business need, so it’s not...
Nova is a fintech startup founded at Stanford. We are solving the problem of immigrant lending by connecting global credit reporting into a single, predictive cross-border credit database. We connect US lenders to our systems via API so that they can underwrite immigrants. In effect, we are the first and only platform that allows for financial identity to move around the world.
We are looking for an exceptional engineer to add to our team. You will have ownership of the integration of systems around the world and responsibility for deployment in order to address an important social problem of financial inclusion.
TO APPLY: http://bit.ly/2jrURl6