Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Before you quit your day job, what was the timeframe between your coming up with this idea, deciding to start this company, and quitting your job?

Suuchi Ramesh: The idea took shape about 18 months before I quit my day job. By that time, Suuchi Inc became really tangible. It was in the second quarter of 2016 when we signed on our first few customers. I quit my day job at the end of 2016.

Bootstrapping with a Paycheck from New Jersey: Suuchi Ramesh, CEO of Suuchi (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

This is a wonderful bootstrapping with a paycheck story of a really smart, scrappy entrepreneur.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeff Zhou, CEO of Fig (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given the situation that there’s 30 million people unemployed in America, it will take them a while to find their way back into the workforce. What would your risk model do when you apply that to this category of people? Are they not going to qualify for credit or is there a way?

Jeff Zhou: There’s a piece of this that is really important. It’s that contextual information. Nonprofits are on the ground. They have all sorts of services – immigration assistance, housing assistance, job training, etc. You name it, there is a nonprofit that has services like that.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeff Zhou, CEO of Fig (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about what kind of heuristics you are using in doing the credit scoring for subprime.

Jeff Zhou: One area that people are interested in is alternative data sources like social media. This is an area that I think is very difficult to tie to credit behavior when you’re comparing it to actual credit behavior.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is your funding strategy? We talked about the $2.2 million round. What else have you done since then?

Rich Waldron: We’ve raised a total of $109 million now. We raised a $5 million bridge to a Series A. In 2016, we raised our Series A which was $14 million in March of 2018. Then last year, we did our Series B and Series C just under four months of each other.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Jeff Zhou, CEO of Fig (Part 1)

Jeff discusses subprime lending as the number of consumers needing loans escalate exponentially in this post-COVID world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as the company.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about your go-to market strategy. What has worked? What turned out to be the repeatable customer acquisition strategy?

Rich Waldron: For a long time, we were relying on partner referrals. To this day, they still make up a healthy portion of our go-to market. To really stand on your own feet, you need to control your own destiny in terms of customer acquisition.

Bootstrap First with Services from London, Raise Money Later: Rich Waldron, CEO of Tray.io (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you raised money, what did you have?

Rich Waldron: We raised a $2.2 million round in December of 2014. That was the first institutional check. Prior to that, we had some capital from the accelerators and we raised a small angel round off the back of that.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you have at this point when you were raising this $2.2 million?