Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about customers before October 2011 and the 500 Startups funding. It sounds like you managed to get some customers to resonate with your idea. Who were those first customers? How did you get to them and what specifically did they tell you about what they wanted to see in your general idea?

Zvi Band: Great question. A customer is someone who pays you money. We didn’t have any customers, but we did have people who said they would pay for it. We didn’t build any credit card systems but had a pricing page. People could actually see how much it cost. That helped us. They didn’t like what we built and that was okay, but they did like the idea that we were pursuing. They were able to come to us with their own pain points. For example, let’s say, we have a real estate agent using the product. >>>

Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about customer validation? How did you get this off the ground in terms of the early customers and customer input early on?

Ryan Caldwell: We had to take really good care of the end user, which is our largest concern. If we don’t take good care of the customer, we can’t take good care of the bank or the software providers. We had to make sure that we had solutions that the end users resonated with. That was one of our first concerns. We also had to have software that would help deliver value back to the financial institution to help them better serve the end user.

If the credit union or bank can better serve the end user, then they can not only protect that end user but also have a stronger relationship, which eventually will >>>

Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept of MX?

Ryan Caldwell: MX is addressing one of the core issues for mankind, which is people don’t have visibility into their finances. Finance is, in fact, a critical part of life for people. So much of the intangibles that we care about whether it’s family or health are directly correlated to financial flexibility and emergency funds that may or may not be available and to certain amounts of financial freedom.

If an individual throughout their life doesn’t have a solid grip or understanding of their finances, it can not only affect them in their early stages of their life, but the later stages can be truly terrifying as they enter into old age. If individuals didn’t have control of tier finances and didn’t have the ability to reflect on >>>

Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we at now?

Zvi Band: Around 2010. I had just been the CTO of an enterprise startup. I was consulting. I then tried starting my own projects. It was called Structo. Are you familiar with parse and convey and all these backend service tools?

Sramana Mitra: No.

Zvi Band: The whole idea is that it could be like a remote hosted database so that the developer wouldn’t need a database or a backend. They could build a mobile application or a web application and we would handle the backend. I tried it. It failed. Honestly, it didn’t fail because it was a bad idea. It failed because I >>>

Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after?

Ryan Caldwell: I went to do consulting. I wanted to be at the heart of San Francisco. I did consulting for companies like Microsoft and Visa in London and Singapore.

Sramana Mitra: What was the next major thing that you did after selling this company?

Ryan Caldwell: I gained some experience with large corporations and how they work. I owned about 90% of the company when I sold it, so it was a meaningful exit for me personally. I wanted to see how large companies work, how they made decisions, and what that side was like. >>>

Raising Funding on AngelList: Contactually CEO Zvi Band (Part 1)

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

Zvi has raised several rounds of financing on AngelList in the process of building Contactually. Among other things, his experience with the platform is interesting in this interview.

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

Zvi Band: I was born in Boston. I was mainly raised on the West Coast. Then my family moved to the DC area to follow my father’s career. I’ve been now a DC resident for the past 15 years. I would qualify myself as a builder. As a kid, I always had Legos in my hands. Legos turned into software and software turned into companies. >>>

Building a Fast Growing FinTech Company from Utah: MX CEO Ryan Caldwell (Part 1)

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

Ryan self-financed, with some seed money, a FinTech company selling to small financial institutions. Today, the company has delivered 185% y-o-y growth for five consecutive years.

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?

Ryan Caldwell: I was born in Berlin, Germany. My father was a lawyer in the military. He was stationed in Germany at that time. My older brother and I were both born in Germany.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for college? >>>

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