HackerNoon: What is your company in 2–5 words?
Stephen Chen: Your Financial Confidence Platform.
Why is now the time for your company to exist?
There is growing awareness that financial wellness and making good financial choices over your lifetime can change your life (and your family’s life). Just like we have learned that being physically & mentally healthy requires good diet, exercise, sleep and stress management; we’re learning that saving, investing and understanding our own behavior are key to financial wellness.
Building wealth and financial security is simple but not easy — we are working on making it accessible to anyone through free / low cost software, classes, coaching and a community.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
Everyone at Boldin (formerly NewRetirement) is purpose driven. We see how complex it is for people to be able to make confident decisions about their money — it’s a huge social problem. Our team is deeply invested in listening to our large and growing community.
Driven by their feedback, we’ve created a financial planning platform, built from the ground up to put the power of planning in everyone’s hands. In building for them, we’ve created a product that’s truly aligned with their needs. Part of delivering on our customer-first approach has been disrupting traditional financial service models. Instead of unexpected fees based on transactions and assets, our customers pay a small, fixed, transparent price for a subscription to our platform.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
Working on fixing the climate. I see our work as a way to help do that indirectly, since many people want to solve big problems like this but feel locked in their current careers since they have low financial confidence in whether they can take risks like retiring or transitioning to a more fulfilling career. We want to unlock the potential of our community by helping them get financially confident.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?
Because we have a mission to help people, our key success metric is monthly active users - people who access our platform to find financial confidence, regardless of if they are paying us or not.
In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?
We offer a financial planning platform and services that enable anyone to build their own financial plan and gain financial confidence. We help people get organized, assess their financial strengths and weaknesses, make better financial decisions, and stay on track to the life they want (now and into the future).
Consumers can invite coaches and advisors to work with them. They can also take classes or participate in our community. The platform can also be white labeled by 3rd party advisors, employers, or financial services providers who want to scale financial planning.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
Our numbers are up and to the right, but I love it when people I know tell me that they discovered our product and are getting value from it. I've had old high school friends reach out and tell me that they are retiring early because of our product. And, last week I was in the grocery store and a friend from when my kids were in elementary school came up and told me how much value they are getting from Boldin. I imagine it's like hearing your song on the radio.
Where do you think your growth will be next year?
In terms of revenue and users, we anticipate our growth to be better than 100% this year. We are also focused on continuing to grow the value we provide to end users.
Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.
We distribute our tools direct to consumer, through the workplace, and via financial advisors. Our first paying customer was 5 years ago, I believe they are still on the platform. For workplace, it was Nationwide Insurance. And, for advisors it was a doctor from Kaiser Permanente. We are trying to get to $10M ARR this year.
What’s your biggest threat?
Getting flamed on Hackernoon :-) jk - someone else beats us to scaling via AI or a cyber attack.