Building a money management SaaS without a coding background

When Ben Waterman started working in finance, he couldn't believe how analog money management still was.

He decided to build a single platform to view, manage and analyze multiple accounts. But he didn’t have a background in coding.

Here’s how he got started👇.

From running to running a business

I'm originally a professional athlete. I ran on the track for Great Britain. I missed out on running the 800m at the 2016 Olympics, so I had to go and get a real job.

I worked in finance for almost three years managing client money. I couldn’t believe how analog it all was. A lot of rich people were paying exorbitant fees and still doing a lot of their finances over the phone.

Growing up, all I cared about was sport. The closest thing you can get to sport in the professional world is starting a business. That attracted me more than financial gain.

I had a go at a sustainability startup, but that didn’t work out. I kept coming back to this idea of managing money. It was a gradual process of realizing I could tackle some of these systematic inefficiencies.

Starting in no-code

My co-founder Michael Magdongon and I wanted to build a super simple drag and drop platform for people to manage different assets. A Notion-style customizable dashboard where you could configure your own widgets and metrics.

Two years later and Strabo is now a place where you can sync up all of your accounts. You can connect bank accounts, brokerages, crypto property, pensions, loans, all that kind of stuff. You can have multiple logins for your family and for financial advisors.

We connect to 10, 000 financial institutions in 12 countries. We put it in one place, normalize it and provide an analytics layer on top.

I don’t have a technical coding background, so we started off in no-code. We built our MVP in Bubble and initially gave it to 150 friends to try out.

It now has a full tech stack: Node.js on the back end and React on the front end. We use a serverless architecture (Amazon Web Services).

Working with outside devs

Coming from a non-tech background, it’s frustrating sometimes not being able to immediately diagnose problems. We used developers to build our post-Bubble stack and it caused no end of headaches.

I would never start a software business again without having an iron-clad, concrete CTO who I would trust with my life. Outsourced developers are never going to put the same care into the product as you would. Now, we build everything in-house.

If you need to hire devs, be incredibly specific with the requirements and try to have someone in-house to work with them. Avoid agencies at all costs.

Getting to that first $1k MRR

We launched publicly in November to a waitlist of two and a half thousand. We currently have 1,100 monthly active users. They log on an average of 3 times a month. We're aiming for one a week.

Our MRR is just coming up to $1K, which is a very exciting milestone. We’re experimenting heavily with different revenue models.

The basic business model is a monthly subscription with a free tier and a bunch of premium features.

A lot of apps have a marginal cost of almost nil per user with services. For us, the cost of each user is quite high with all the APIs, so we need to be really conscious about how we scale and how we monetize new users.

We’re planning to make a few more premium features and we’re going to move into B2B.

Build B2C and B2B simultaneously

There's a bit of a trope that everyone's first startup is B2C because it’s glamorous. Then their second is B2B when they realize that's where the money is.

But we love building consumer products and I think at heart we always be consumer people.

With Strabo, we can basically build a B2B and B2C product at the same time, where we use financial advisors as a distribution channel. They can have a login and show clients essentially the same insights.

It’s more lucrative because we can charge a licensing fee. If we can pick up a couple of big clients, we could potentially cover all our B2C marketing costs.

SEO and social media

 When I started this, I thought marketing would be the easy bit. But the reality is the complete opposite.

The UK has an incredibly rich ecosystem of financial resources available for free, so competition is fierce. Plus, a lot of fintech apps have venture capital money they can burn.

We have some financing, but we don’t want to be in the business of raising loads of money.

Getting our first users was bloody hard work. We did some LinkedIn outreach at the beginning.  We did a lot of SEO early, which I’d recommend.

It's easier to convert people searching for your service because the intent is there.

We didn't really spend any money on paid marketing. Socials are something we’re experimenting with. Instagram and TikTok are very hard unless you have the money to put into video content. We found Twitter, SEO and a bit of LinkedIn to be best for us.

Keep going

Probably every other day I think about quitting. But it's a weird old game. Some days you wake up and feel so excited to start work and other days you feel very despondent. It's bloody hard and you just need to keep cracking on with it.

I'm used to dealing with failure because of my background in sport. When you're running track, then you're running against 7 other people. You lose a lot more than you win.

Similarly, the worst thing you can do is stay still. If you're moving, you’re learning what works and what doesn’t. You can iterate. Release stuff, build stuff, talk to people.

I get a lot of energy from calls with users. Nothing invigorates you more than being on a call with someone who says they love your product.

Getting our first 100 paying users was a big milestone. Getting to $1 million ARR would be a much bigger one. But beyond that, I think no goal you set will ever feel like enough.

Just launch

I think it’s important to keep launching. No one outside your team actually really cares when you launch. Just launch the thing. Once it’s out there you can improve it.

I don’t really like giving advice. I feel like I could give a talk called “how not to build a consumer startup” instead. But I do think it’s just so easy to get pulled in a lot of directions.

For the most part, just talk to users and write code and everything else is a waste of time. Not learning enough code myself is a bit of a regret. But you can make it work.

Meet other founders

We’ve found joining startup networks really useful. We’re part of Opus, a really accomplished group of founders with a WhatsApp chat and an office in a London WeWork we all share.

Having people to act as a sounding board is so important. Everyone sounds so bloody sure in this industry. It’s great to have a trustworthy group of people that you can lean on for honest feedback.

I’m always more than happy to help other people however I can with this stuff. If anyone wants to reach out they can find me on Indie Hackers here and on X here.

Freedom and flexibility

The reality of our company is that we’re dotted all over the place. I actually prefer in-person working. But being remote has advantages too. Our team has the flexibility to work the hours that they want and all over the world.

Alongside Strabo, I own on a leather-working interior design studio with my brother. And I’m building a cabin in the countryside to work from.

It’s great to have the freedom to do things like that alongside work.