Insight
Brauer: Growth comes from fast product shipping over excessive research
“And I think you're constantly balancing this need for insights, but I fundamentally feel at every stage you grow through learning faster than your competitors, and you really have to protect the team from too much research in product market fit and actually sh…”
Assertion Supported
Brauer: Cashless and chip payment innovation started in Europe, not US
“At that stage, Scandinavia was really advanced in cashless payments, right? So it was way ahead of the U.S. Interesting. And the innovation in, like, card and chip technology, cashless payments, really happened in Europe and then came to North America, right? …”
Disclosure
GoHenry co-founder Brauer called customers regularly for nine of 12 years
“For nine years of the 12 years building the business, I had a workflow in constantly speaking to customers. On the phone. Always.”
Disclosure
GoHenry keeps customer support in-house due to kids and money sensitivity
“We did our own customer support and we still do to this day. We're dealing with two of the most emotional subjects of your life as a parent in a way, your children and money.”
Insight
Brauer: True willingness to pay is only proven by live conversions
“Willingness to pay ultimately comes down to And is best seen in, like, launching something, looking at your conversion rates and looking at your billing rates, you know, and the true willingness to pay, because that's where rubber hits the road.”
Insight
Brauer: Premium-priced features demand perfect craft over speed to market
“I would think about like, are we an apple? Like, are we apple? Are we a premium? Product that generates a premium price point. And that means we can't ever launch anything half ass. It has to be perfect. It has to be high end. And it's just going to take the t…”
Disclosure
Brauer: GoHenry committed to subscription model without doing prior research
“We knew we needed to be a subscription based business and we didn't do any research around that.”
Insight
Brauer: Fintech product encompasses money movement and support, not just features
“It just became very clear that in our business, product meant mobile. Product meant moving money as seamless as possible and as reliably as possible. Having amazing customer support and that product always meant, you know, not just feature sets, but also funne…”
Insight
Brauer: Subscription pricing keeps youth fintech from nudging unnecessary card spending
“Subscription- Would allow us to do right by customers, meaning that if we're, if the parent is paying us a fee, we could continue to invest in the product, but that we never have to nudge and drive a child to spend more than they should to get more interchange…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brauer: Early Facebook ads achieved 4x to 6x LTV:CAC for GoHenry
“Facebook could generate, like, easily a four to six X LTV to CAC, ok?”
Insight
Brauer: Fundraising and large B2B sales build the muscle needed for startup exits
“I didn't just know that you're going to build a muscle in fundraising. That's going to be, and you're going to build a muscle particularly for your portfolio companies who are doing big B to B deals, you know, seven figure deals. That muscle is the same muscle…”
Insight
Brauer: Founders must run operations as if pending acquisitions will never happen
“You have to run your business and operate day to day, month to month, like this is never happening, and you have to make decisions like it's never happening. You can't, and you, like, to engineer it, I think, is, is a really difficult thing, and I think your t…”
Disclosure
GoHenry: Early issuing bank partner deferred fees until company generated revenue
“They invested in us in the early days in the sense of allowing us to build out the product and get into market and then build revenue before, you know, they got paid.”
Assertion Supported
Brauer: UK regulations made interchange revenue negligible compared to US fintechs
“No, it's in Europe. It's kind of gone due to regulation anyway. In the U S it's still, you know, someone like chime will make a huge amount of money on interchange, but in the UK it was negligible. So we knew the business couldn't work anyway on interchange”
