Building the world’s first savings account for travel: Week 37
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What we did
This week we focused on growing our community. Creating a following, people who are interested in both our product and us, is so important to stand out in the din of hundreds of consumer technology startups launching in the London ecosystem. It is not an easy task!
On Wednesday we finalised our waitlist interaction. Rather than simply collecting details with a generic ‘Get Early Access’ offer, we’ve tried to build an interaction which gets users excited about future trips. Users answer 6 questions to get their travel style, and then receive some personalised travel inspiration. Most importantly, they have the option to share their result and the quiz with their travel companions.
On Tuesday we ran our first #TravelTuesday meetup, our new series of events for trip inspiration. In the morning we busied ourselves with logistics and last minute marketing (apologies if you received a lot of reminder emails!), and in the afternoon we deliberately rested. Running an event well is taxing, and we wanted to ensure that we were fresh for our community.
Right before the event, I had the same feeling as before my childhood birthday parties. We had a guest list of 70 people..who would come? Thankfully childhood fears were not realised, 40 of our community members came through the doors!
During the evening we had presentations on:
- Scaling mountains by Marie from Three Peaks Africa (check out her latest fundraising campaign here)
- Urban adventures by Fred from MyAdventureHub
- Long weekend trips by Hui from KoalaGo Travel
- The other side of Machu Picchu from yours truly
Check out the video below to see how it went!
On the technical side, Mark joined us at TechHub on Wednesday. We are almost finished with the bank account integration (some specification of permissions remains), and will be moving on to developing the ‘set up my savings plan’ journey next week. It was a pleasure to have Mark in the office with us; simple things like having lunch together as a team are a real joy.
On Thursday, Oli and I attended FinTech Insiders After Dark, a live podcast recording. I was inspired by the event. Before joining Moneycado I’d given little thought to the mechanics behind banking, now I am starting to see the breadth and passion within the fintech community. It makes me so excited to grow my fintech knowledge!
What we will do next
Next week we will be:
- Driving traffic to our waitlist with influencer engagement and some ‘shoe leather’ marketing;
- Finishing the ‘savings plan’ logic; and
- Creating demos of some other features to get customer feedback on them.
Problems we are facing
- Growing our waitlist to 1000 by 1 September (830 to go…);
- Meeting potential early team members. If you’ve been reading and think you can contribute, now’s the time to get in touch!
Thanks to
- Jono and Rebecca for helping behind the scenes at the event; and
- Fred, Marie and Hui for sharing their travel businesses with our community.
Until next week!
Matt
