Are you an entrepreneur with a problem to solve, but do you really know how to do it?
If you don’t have a technical co-founder, you may need to learn some hard lessons before your product can be successful.
Lara Gilman is an experienced FinTech operator who has helped drive the adoption of mobile money in emerging markets, including market-leading M-PESA in Kenya. She saw first-hand the potential of smartphones to send money in a country where many people are still “unbanked.”
After identifying her niche, she decided to become an entrepreneur.
“One of the issues we came up with was international remittances. The economic spread of people who migrate is large, and families back home become heavily dependent on their income, especially as they start to enter the lower income brackets. ” Gilman said. Technology that solves mysteries Podcast.
“At that time, it was difficult to send small amounts of money.” [as the cost to do so was prohibitive]. So the idea was to combine the innovations happening in the payments stack with this specific problem of how to enable low-value remittances in an international context. ”
Her startup Yooz initially targeted remittances between the UK and India, but it never really took off and eventually had to shut down.
“We had great ideas and were able to actually do a lot of work. But one thing that was definitely missing in my skill set was how to actually build a technology product. I was wondering if it was.
“I was very good at thinking about customer propositions. We had a lot of experience in the mobile money space. We had strength in distribution…but we Neither was a technical co-founder.
“So when we worked with developers, there was a big gap in our knowledge about how to think about building these building blocks.”
Mr. Gilman is currently co-head of iwocaPay. iwocaPay is his fast-growing B2B payment product built within our star business loan platform iwoca. fintech 50 Last year’s ranking.
FinTech 50 – The UK’s most innovative financial technology creators in 2023
She now understands how to collaborate with technical teams to build successful products, but that wasn’t the case at Yooz. “I was really frustrated with the developers. The product wasn’t quite ready,” she explains.
“I was [then] I was lucky enough to be mentored by a CTO who taught me the hard truth – perhaps a little too late. – when he said, “That’s because you don’t understand.” I thought: “What do you mean?” I know exactly what I want. This is my spec and this is my wireframe. ”
“He gave me a really great analogy. He said, ‘You’re saying to the developer: This is my final product – let’s make it. You’re basically saying: I want that chair in my room.
“What you don’t give any sensitivity or thought or context to is where are the chairs now? How big are those chairs? Do they have to be moved across the hallway once? Will the chairs need to be moved a lot? Are the doors locked? Do you want them to be locked? How big are the people who will be using these chairs?
“These are decisions you don’t have to worry about, but they are necessary to make it happen.” [on your behalf] In some way, shape or form. Even though you weren’t working with them, didn’t give them any guidance, didn’t even realize they had to make a decision, I’m frustrated that they had to make a decision.
“I remember thinking, ‘If that was the problem and I had dug into it properly, I could have said I didn’t even need a chair at all!’
“You have to be very precise about the problem you’re actually trying to solve, what you actually need and why you need it, and then work with them on what that solution will look like. ”
In the podcast, Gilman talks about her approach to building iwocaPay from two people and borrowed talent to a team of 27 people. The best way for teams to collaborate. Her use of design sprints. A collection of tips for building technology products from scratch.
Regarding the need for open communication with technical teams, she added: “Learning how to do that was a real baptism of fire.
“Before I joined Yooz, I was working more on the strategic side. But when you start getting into the execution side and the building blocks, it’s just a different skill set.
“That experience definitely helped us with what we are currently working on at iwocaPay, and we are really grateful for that.”
Master the juggling act: How to overcome workload