Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So what happens after this beer thing closes?

Ryan Rosett: Then I went into real estate development. I was probably 25 or 26 at this time.

Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 1)

Ryan has bootstrapped a FinTech small business lending business from Michigan, raised Private Equity funding to scale, and then bought the PE stake back through a Management Buy-out. Excellent case study!

Sramana Mitra: All right, Ryan, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: When you raised the credit capital, you got four term sheets from the credit capital side. How many customers or SMBs were on your platform?

Felix Rodriguez: A little over 500.

Sramana Mitra: And what was the total amount of transactions that you were seeing on that?

Felix Rodriguez: Half a billion a year in transactions.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re talking about is there are certain categories of businesses that are not bootstrappable.

Felix Rodriguez: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Being a FinTech company as a lender is not necessarily a bootstrappable business.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: And in those four months, what kind of metrics did you have to show to be able to raise the series?

Felix Rodriguez: I’ll never forget how the numbers went. In the first month, our revenue was $4K. Then it was $16K, $40K, and then $80K. It was really a driver of if I spend more on ads, I’d get more customers. I was building a partner network to be able to convert those bookings into actual customers that actually use the service.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. What were the other startups that you were working on at this point?

Felix Rodriguez: Immediately after that, we were thinking that for this company that has over 50 people, what could I and a couple of other engineers build that’s more automated. We were really passionate about automation. I think people call it AI now. But we were thinking about how could we automate the publishing business. We had a website business where we had a bunch of web designers. So, in order to get traffic on the web, you have to put content, right? And Google was starting to really take off.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 1)

Felix has done nine ventures and sold several of them. He is currently building a venture-funded,
AI-enabled FinTech venture. Really intelligent, scrappy maneuvering in various alleys of online entrepreneurship.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech

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

In this case study, Cognaize Founder Vahe Andonians talks a lot about bootstrapping – bootstrapping to exit, bootstrapping with services, so on. You will also learn a nifty way of building domain knowledge on top of horizontal AI expertise. This is a valuable and extremely interesting way of building AI companies for entrepreneurs to consider.

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

Vahe Andonians: I was born in Iran. When I was a couple of weeks old, we moved to the United States. Then my parents moved to Austria. I grew up in Austria. I studied there. I studied high-frequency technology. I did my first job there. From there, we went to Germany. I’ve lived in Germany now for 12 years.

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