rThe #1 Myth About Marketing Your Fintech Startup with Juan Andrade
As a founder juggling multiple roles, you’ve probably got your list of who you want to hire to support you. And without marketing expertise, you may feel like you need to hire a marketer — stat.
Juan Andrade, founder of _rebank, is of the opposite view. Instead of hiring a marketer or outsourcing his content creation, he decided to do it internally.
Juan’s platform helps companies cut spend by syncing their finance apps. After listening to countless customer conversations where the same questions came up, he and his team decided to create some content to answer those questions.
It took some trial and error, but finally _rebank launched the Finance for Founders guide on Product Hunt — and the guide has since been downloaded over 2,000 times.
Juan is a strong believer in keeping the marketing function close to the founder. “When you’re the founder, you have to figure out product-market fit,” said Juan. “Don’t hand this off to someone else.”
So if you don’t need a marketer, what DO you need?
The willingness to learn.
If you don’t know anything about marketing, pick up a few books or take advantage of online resources that will teach you. There’s plenty of information available, but you have to be willing to jump in and learn for yourself — the sooner, the better. A couple of resources that really helped Juan were Reforge and Startup Core Strengths.
Juan recommends trying at least one experiment per week so you’re continuously putting what you learn into practice. That might be difficult if you’re working entirely on your own, but even with a small team of two or three people, it’s doable as long as you continue to learn as you go.
That’s why Juan prefers his company’s experimental approach to working with seasoned marketers who are set in their areas of expertise: because it allows him to discover for himself what does and doesn’t work.
A cross-functional team.
Your team doesn’t have to be experienced in marketing to be successful. In fact, Juan’s team is made up of an accountant, a data scientist, an astrophysicist, and himself — not one of them had any kind of marketing experience when they started.
With a diverse, cross-functional team, you can divide up the work and tackle it from multiple angles at once. “Every week, we run two to four experiments on every single channel,” Juan explained. “As we learn, we narrow that down to the four or five different channels that seem to win for us.”
Instead of relying on one person or marketing method, let each team member play to their own strengths as you learn what channels and strategies tend to produce the best results.
A process for experimentation.
When experimenting with marketing, a repeatable experimentation process is key. According to Juan, that process should have a few basic parts:
A hypothesis (e.g., “A will cause B, because C”)
A rough action plan
A desired outcome (e.g., increased number of downloads, impressions, signups, etc.)
Organize your experiments into cycles that take place every few weeks so you have time to plan, implement, and review. Then incorporate your learnings from each experiment into the next cycle.
“As long as you have the right process, you will continue to evolve the success of each initiative,” Juan said. So don’t worry about hitting a ceiling or not reaching your growth targets — just focus on continuously learning, growing, and improving based on the results of each experiment.
Want to learn more? Check out Juan’s full podcast episode, Experimental Marketing with Juan Andrade, on Scrappy Fintech Marketing.
