Bootstrapping a fintech product to $108k MRR by limiting it to a small market

36-year-old Sumit Kumar is bringing in $108k MRR with his fintech product, Parqet, and it's only available in three countries.

He got here by niching down hard until he was the biggest fish in a small pond, then thwarting his VC-backed competitors' marketing efforts, one by one.

I caught up with him to understand how he did it. Here's what he had to say. 

Quitting his dream job

I started coding Parqet in from my couch in December, 2019. I was the Head of Engineering at a German car-sharing company, building on nights and weekends.

Then, I got an offer from Stripe, which is my #1 choice for an employer globally. I couldn't pass it up. I became a Solutions Architect at Stripe, so high-level technical work and good insights into B2B Sales.

I eventually left my dream job, though, to pursue Parqet. I wanted freedom in multiple dimensions of my daily life that only entrepreneurship could enable.

Monetizing a fintech product

Parqet is a portfolio tracker focused on the DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) market. It aggregates, analyzes, and visualizes investment portfolios of mainly retail investors. So, whoever invests in stocks, ETFs, crypto, other securities, precious metals, or holds cash can use Parqet to get an overview and deep insights into their net worth.

Our MRR is close to €100k.

It's a fintech product, but I have no background in finance. I had to study up and learn how to calculate portfolio performances and things like that. I had no idea about any of that before starting Parqet.

We opted for a freemium model — a free basic version with deeper analysis starting at €10/mo. The subscriptions of our B2C customers are the main source of revenue.

A freemium model is great when users need a bit of time to see the benefit of your product, or maybe only need your product after they’ve progressed along their journey.

For example, a student investing 10€/mo in an ETF does not get a lot of value out of Parqet. But they can start for free, and once their portfolio becomes more complex and they grow their net worth, Parqet can offer a lot more value to them. That's when we convert them to a paid user.

So for us, the freemium model is both marketing and an early entry point for our future paying users.

Focusing on bootstrapping

I built Parqet because I had the problem myself. I invested in stocks, used multiple brokers, and had no overview. There were existing tools doing this, but they were quite cumbersome to set up and not pretty to look at.

I only spent about $100/per month in the first five months. But I poured every free minute into it. In the MVP phase, it wasn’t that difficult. I just worked evenings and weekends. Six months later, however, right after the MVP, things changed. User count went into the thousands, my first baby was born, and I still worked at Stripe full-time.

Single-minded burnout

I really had to focus. Baby, startup, job — nothing else. No sports, no friends, no video games, no Netflix, nothing.

I woke up and worked on Parqet from 6am to 9am. Then I did my 9-to-5. I answered customer emails for my startup during lunch. Then back to work. And at 6pm, I'd start working on Parqet until about 1am.

It was all work. Every minute. And it was brutal, especially when the baby came.

Two years in, I burned out. I couldn’t do it anymore. If you look at my YouTube videos from back then, I looked sick. This hustle time is necessary IMHO, but one can only do that for so long.

So I quit my job. After that, my life changed for the better — better than ever.

I was employee #5 at my own company when I made the switch. We were around €20k MRR with thousands of customers. It was already a full-time job before I went full time, but I stayed that long because I wanted to reinvest Parqet's revenue as much as possible. I didn't want to take a salary, I wanted to grow it and buy more data sources.

Building in public

I built Parqet in public, livestreaming late-night coding sessions, marketing strategies, and outage recoveries. There are hours and hours on YouTube with me building it, fixing stuff, and sharing my thoughts.

I learned a ton from other indie hackers sharing their journey and I guess I hoped I could help or motivate someone else too.

Overall, our transparency has been a big advantage. It helped us to build trust and a strong relationship with users. And we created an awesome community.

Everyone knows what we’re doing, why we're doing it, and what our business model is. Every Friday, I do a livestream, give users a preview of what we’re working on, and answer any questions they might have.

Especially in finance, trust is important.

That said, it didn't really help with user acquisition. But it definitely helped in building a team. Most of the team followed me on my journey in some way or another and chose to join when an opportunity opened up.

Building in public is worth doing when you start out. However, after about €50k MRR, this advantage is overshadowed by the competitive insights you’re giving to copycats. That’s why you see most public builders closing off their info at some point around that mark.

The risk of copycats to bootstrappers

The public nature of Parqet and its success quickly spawned competitors, including venture-backed competitors where we were at a huge disadvantage, cash-wise. We have way less marketing prowess and reach.

However, thanks to my amazing team, we managed to keep up and still are the number #1 portfolio tracker in DACH.

We mainly did two things:

1. Focused on our core unique selling proposition. We knew what worked for us and doubled down on it.

2. Tried to counter their marketing efforts. When we saw marketing efforts done by competitors, we tried to capture that target audience before they did by working with influencers, news outlets, discounts, community features, and things like that.

The goal was basically to reduce the competitor's marketing yield.

Additionally, we invested in long-term customer acquisition channels like SEO, YouTube, and an email list. That means we can always acquire new users, even if ad spaces in social networks are filled with competitors.

Bootstrapping a fintech product

We could stop bootstrapping and get funded, of course. We've received heavy VC interest, so people ask me why I haven't taken it all the time.

But bootstrapping has been an advantage. In 2022, when VC money dried up and valuations came down, all our competitors needed to change strategies from growth-at-all-costs to profitability. While they were busy doing that and fighting for new investors, we just continued what we were already doing.

Bootstrapping and profitability means we can focus on what matters and build for the long term. We are in control of our own destiny.

I would recommend everyone to bootstrap as long as possible and only raise VC when there’s a clear path for growth, ideally after already achieving product-market fit.

I can’t say if I will ever take VC cash. There are scenarios where financing would make sense; however, VC cash is just one option. There are others and I will explore them if we need to. But for now, staying independent, no deadlines, and working on what we think is valuable is a freedom I will not give up just for a check. 

Product-led growth

Marketing and sales are underrated. And that's the reason that most indie hackers fail. Marketing is how you grow — not features.

But I knew marketing would be my biggest weakness so I tried to build the marketing into the product.

I did this by letting users share their portfolios publicly. So users and influencers started to use Parqet to share portfolios in conversations about stocks, strategies, performance, etc.

That gave us lots of guest traffic with people looking at other portfolios. The bet was that they would see this and think, "Huh, I want my portfolios visualized like this too." The bet paid off.

The first two years, our growth was entirely through that growth loop and word of mouth, with a few reddit posts and livestreams along the way. Now we do YouTube, SEO, paid ads, affiliate marketing - everything. 

Pieter Levels describes this well in his MAKE book.

Organic growth

We started a YouTube channel where we discuss portfolios, markets, and give insights into Parqet as a company. It’s growing well. It isn't giving us viral growth, but it’s fantastic and continuously brings in new users.

We also started serious programmatic SEO with pages for stocks, ETFs, dividends, etc. It's a great channel for guest traffic - some of which converts to users.

Affiliate marketing was also a natural progression for us, as many influencers used Parqet anyway. So we started paying them a revenue cut for referring users that convert to paid plans. It has worked very well for us.

Organic channels like these are a huge advantage because we can continue to use them without the need for a large budget. Yes, it takes longer, but after three years, the traffic that comes in would be insane to get via paid channels. I'd get into more specifics, but I can't, due to the aforementioned copycats.

Especially for bootstrappers, investing in long-term channels is worth it!

Audience doesn't matter

I had no following when I started. Anyone who thinks you need a following to successfully grow a business is wrong.

I shared my journey of building Parqet and with time, my following grew. However, the audience of my Twitter account consists of other founders/makers/builders/techies. The overlap with Parqet's target audience is very small so Twitter has never been a customer acquisition channel for us.

Niche down hard

Focus is important for bootstrappers. We need to build for a niche first and can expand later.

That's why Parqet is only available in the German language. It’s part of our laser focus.

Investing is a highly local topic. We need to support local banks, currencies, languages, tax systems, performance calculations (yes, they differ per country), stock systems, localized marketing, localized customer support, etc. As long as there is opportunity for us in the German-speaking markets, we will go for them.

Once we expand into new markets, it will be a big investment for us to do that properly. Translating it into English is not enough. We need to do all of the things mentioned above.

Our laser focus means that, for the German market, we are the best solution. No competitor from other countries is able to provide the level of detail that we have for DACH countries.

Parting advice

So that's my advice for indie hackers: FOCUS.

Focus on the main things that drive your business forward. Nobody cares about your logo, your product name, or your business cards. And that new feature probably isn't going to help.

More often than not, your focus should be on marketing — even before the product is built.

You can follow me on X and Youtube, or check out Parqet.