Garry's Channel: An interview with Kai Stinchcombe, founder of True Link Financial

as as as her condition worsened, she was like really struggling to bank, which is just like like an inherent thing. Like if you can't remember what you did yesterday, that means you can't remember if you spent any money, which means your budget is always full. And and that's like every person with Alzheimer's will at some stage in their condition have that problem. But what happens when investors.

say something different? They say, we want you to be for everyone. It's a bigger TAM. I think that was one of the first counterintuitive things Kai learned the hard way. Just because an investor looks for a particular characteristic doesn't mean that is the only path to a big business.

Our source of strength in that we don't have to go out and try to be a better version of Chase than Chase is, which is like just really hard you're boiling the ocean. We have to find some some stuff that Chase overlooked, you know, Chase or whoever, everybody else in the banking system, which is like very easy when you find an underserved audience because most of their needs are overlooked.

Don't boil the ocean. There's a pro and a con to every decision. In this case, TrueLink selecting a specific underserved need meant they chose a problem space that was desperate for a fix, and that was a very smart move. As a specialist, you should see advantages.

in customer loyalty, in servicing costs. You should be able to command a premium relative to a generic provider. You should see a distribution advantage. There's like an intangible also which is it just feels really really good to be the best thing for somebody who doesn't have that otherwise.

Once you have a specific problem for a specific underserved customer,.

you've got to totally understand what is going on with that customer and satisfy them completely. The first thing we look for in anyone that we're thinking about hiring, especially for product candidates but across the company is humility just because like if you are going into this thinking you know all the answers, you've just never walked in every single set of shoes.

And it's like, in order to serve our population, have to know about qualifying for benefits. We have to know about checking into, you know, recovery center for, you know, for recovering from addiction. We have to understand checking out of recovery.

We have to understand like the role of an in home caregiver in shopping for groceries or what different types of residential facilities are available to people who need different levels of care. There's so much that we went in not understanding. But the payoff is huge. If you can find a scenario that makes a big difference, for TrueLink understanding.

recovery means also that it can play a big role in preventing drug relapse. If you didn't start with a specific kind of customer, you'd never make this kind of connection or that kind of value for that customer.

If you can prevent one such transaction, right, where it's like somebody's like late at night unexpectedly trying to get some cash out and somebody gets a text message and is able to figure out where their family member is and go like, you know, sort of talk them off a terrible situation.

You know, like, you know, there's people who are like, my god, you like saved my life, which is just a neat thing to be able to say,.

you know, as a as ultimately a financial services startup. That's what it looks like when you've solved a real problem. You can point to a concrete way in which nobody else will do that, and sometimes it's something so valuable it literally changes people's lives for the better. That's the bar. That's what we want.

One of the key learnings every fintech investor has had at this point is that cost of customer acquisition is king. But again, if you have a specific underserved audience,.

you can win big here. Especially if you're focused on an underserved audience because, you know, if you don't have a distribution advantage, you did it wrong, I guess. Like, you know, if if you are targeting the same customer everyone else is. Right? Where you're like, oh, like we want like affluent to income young professionals. And you're like, yep. So does so does literally everybody.

So that's going to be the most expensive customer to advertise to on the internet. And we're like, what if we want to go chase down a million people with Alzheimer's? Like who's advertising to that person? How do people get in front of them? Where are they hanging out? Who are they interacting with? Who do they trust?

And how do we build trust with the people that are trusted by that, you know, affected community? And that was super interesting and and I think we have, you know, some of the best I think we were the first neo bank to cross profitability.

The amazing thing about building products is that when you get the target customer right, that they're underserved and they have a real need and you can solve it, that's priceless. You can get in front of them for far less, and that means lifetime value LTV is super high, and cost of customer acquisition.

CAC is super low. If you think about like CAC and LTV, ultimately, it's it's a measure of how much value you're able to bring to the customer and how much they perceive that value and how much of it you capture. And the neat thing as a builder and as somebody who's had this problem in my own family, you know, several of the problems that we solve with different family members.

I think we provide actually so much more value than what we capture. It's like a a, you know, a product that literally, you know, has changed hundreds of thousands of people's lives over time and and excited to bring it to millions.

Low cost of customer acquisition, high lifetime value, low CAC, high LTV. If you've been following fintech at all in the past ten years, that is literally the only recipe that leads to success. I love bringing concrete examples of startups that illustrate exactly what you need to do in your startup to grow. TrueLink is changing lives,.

and they've built a profitable neo bank off of this mission. So if you're out there watching and you have you know somebody who has this problem, if you have this problem yourself, visit us, truelanefinancial. com.

We solve it. We do a really good job. We'd be delighted to help. That's it for this week. If you like this, click subscribe and hit the bell icon right now to make sure you see every video we make. All the world is changing by code and technology. What will your line of code be? I'll see you next time.