Are you a fintech startup looking to launch a new product? CEO of Fuel Finance.

Summary

 In this conversation, Alyona Mysko discusses her journey in finance and the motivation behind building a financial management product. She shares her early interest in math and economics, as well as the inspiration she received from professors and corporate finance professionals. Alyona emphasizes the importance of making finance accessible and easy to understand for both financial and non-financial people. She also highlights the current demand for financial management solutions and the company's evolution from offering services to building a product.

Takeaways

1. Alyona's passion for finance and her background in managing finance led her to build a financial management product.
2. The company's goal is to make finance accessible and easy to understand for both financial and non-financial people.
3. There is a high demand for financial management solutions, especially during periods of financial downturn.
4. The company started by offering services in financial management and evolved to build a product based on customer needs.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:18 Who Is Alyona Mysko
03:40 What is Fuel Finance
06:52 How to validate idea and how much time it takes
10:20 First time founder guide on hiring people
16:50 What's the metric to identify product success
18:55 What is revenue per employee
21:23 How first time found raise venture capital and what are the strategies
25:25 How to look right investor
26:06 What is the right way to write PITCH DECK
30:50 What is Goto Market strategy
31:58 How to lead a team as a leader
36:50 Learning points for first time founders
39:03 Enterpreunership, Fin Tech and Startup trends in 2024
41:22 Fuel finance launches
42:26 Recent Guest Question for Alyona Mysko
43:16 Conclusion

Connect with Mudassir

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Transcript

Mudassir (00:03.24)
Okay, so it's already started. Yes, let me see the upload.

Alyona Mysko (00:04.458)
It's already started, I think.

Mudassir (00:11.364)
Is it uploading? Okay, so it's uploading on my side. And I think it's uploading on your side. Cool. We're cool. Awesome. I don't know if you know her, there's a company called New Homes Mate. What's the name of the person? Sophia. Yeah, she was on the podcast and, the moment we start the podcast, and every single thing is like, we just cannot upload. I was like, what the heck?

Alyona Mysko (00:19.038)
Yeah, I see the records.

Alyona Mysko (00:27.666)
Yeah, I know. Yes.

Mudassir (00:39.224)
I'm so sorry for that. I just wasted like 30 minutes of her, and we just rescheduled, so she was super nice as well. So we're gonna do it again in the next couple of days, okay? All right. Please do a clap for me, Alena, and then we can start.

Alyona Mysko (00:48.155)
Yeah. Okay.

Alyona Mysko (00:55.457)
Hahaha

Mudassir (00:55.5)
Awesome. Thank you so much for that. That was one good clap. OK, so let me pull up the questionnaire so I don't ask anything that we haven't planned. All right, ready when you are. Cool, should we start?

Alyona Mysko (00:58.732)
Hahaha

Alyona Mysko (01:14.634)
Yeah, let's start.

Mudassir (01:16.236)
Awesome. Okay, so the question is here. All right, rolling now. Hey, Alena, welcome to the show. Okay, hey, Alena, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Alyona Mysko (01:29.878)
Hey, hey, nice to meet you and thanks for inviting me. I'm doing great, how are you?

Mudassir (01:35.916)
Awesome. Having a broken foot but you know feeling like a time of my life. So yeah that's how I am. All right. So every single time there's anybody that I've ever had a privilege of hosting on the podcast I ask them one particular question and the reason why I ask them is because I believe there are some efforts where some of the past the stories whatever has happened to us. What is the earliest context you have of your life?

how you become the Alena that we are hosting today. So what's your story?

Alyona Mysko (02:11.451)
That's a very good question, I should say. What's the story behind? I think that maybe the story even started much, much earlier, because I was always interested in chess, in maths, so I think it was my passion all the time, as I remember myself.

But on the other hand, I was like pretty creative person. So I liked painting, playing saxophone, so different things. And I think, like, maybe like from my early, early age, something from school age or something like that. So I started to interest more in math and I was thinking like how to implement something like from math in a more practical way, how I can use it like

in my life, in my career, and I started to be interested in economics, firstly, in microeconomics. And I think that was the point how I have started all this long journey with finance. And yeah, I think so after that, I met many great professors already later who were mostly in corporate finance.

And I think that they inspired me a lot because they were so passionate all the time about what they're doing, like reading different books all the time, recommending and giving their practical advices because some of them were entrepreneurs and they shared like just their personal stories like of managing finance or managing real business. And I think that's maybe the point when everything has started. And already after that was like Big Four, PWC.

and being an auditor and after that, like trying to understand corporate finance from practical way more and more. So I think that's how everything has started.

Mudassir (04:14.764)
Awesome. Just so you know, I turned on the low data mode because it was stucking, but the recording is gonna go smooth, your video is gonna go smooth. So yeah, we're still recording the video. So just so you know, don't feel like it's an audio only one. Okay, all right, so coming back. So the first, very first question, and before I ask you the first question that I have in mind, I just want to share the goal that I have for this particular interview, for this particular podcast.

Alyona Mysko (04:24.974)
Okay.

Okay, great.

Alyona Mysko (04:31.574)
Okay.

Mudassir (04:44.336)
So I want this to be somewhat of a master class for any first time founder, second time founder who are just starting out the business, more so a venture backed business because they have this cool idea, literally don't know what's coming ahead of them. So that's the idea. So I'm gonna ask you very basic questions, very first time founder-ish question, very early stage. Okay, so my first question to you is, which is asked by a very close VC friend of mine, very happy to call him a friend.

and he asked me this question back in the day. So, for fuel finance, why you guys, why this problem, why the solution that you have built is a solution, and why now? So if you can start us with that.

Alyona Mysko (05:26.577)
Mm-hmm.

I think why I feel finance is because I have passion to finance. So I don't know, like we have like this even more so inside our team that we want to make finance sexy. So I think that's like our key goal and the product that we built it just the way how we want to do that. And I think mostly we are focusing like we have.

like this, I have huge background in finance, in managing finance, being fractional CFR and being full-time CFR. And I should say that the problem that I saw and that many actually founders, sorry, they are not financially treat. And I should say that because of that, they do many mistakes and it's very painful.

And I believe that just fixing this problem with financial management, they can do much, much better and they can have better financial results, better growth, hire more people, and have less sleepless nights and also doing great job with increasing world GDP. So that's our huge mission to help these companies avoid financial mistakes. And actually,

That's the reason and the product that we built. So the key goal, first of all, to build a product that will be pretty, pretty easy, not just for financial people, but also for non-financial people. So that's a, I know that they want just one solution, one dashboard with everything. Everything is explained in a very easy way and just, you know, click several buttons and get this like clear understanding what is going on. So that's actually what we are building. And.

Alyona Mysko (07:15.186)
On the other hand, I believe why now is a great time because actually we were expecting that like 2023, what the periods of financial downturn, but and we saw some part of that when valuation dropped down and but also expect that this year can be even harder for many entrepreneurs. And we saw like

this among our customers previous year, when they started to think about financial management, that they need to increase their runway, they need to work with their expenses, they need to go deep with their finance. And that's why I think now is a very good period of time to build this product, because it will be high demand for great solutions in financial management that can make easier life for all entrepreneurs.

Mudassir (08:07.352)
All right, fair enough. OK, so let's start from the very beginning. How much time did you guys spend on validating the idea, finding the product market rate, working with potential customers? And what exactly was the notorious aha moment for you guys? When did you figure out you guys are onto something pretty big?

Alyona Mysko (08:30.558)
I think that our story, so we had started even from just services in financial management, and I was also a mentor in different accelerators. I think I had more than 3,000 students or something like that. That's how I figure out what customers really need, what entrepreneurs need.

And during the first year, so we started with different services, but after that, we understood very quickly that all companies, they need like this first time set up of financial system. They all the time ask.

Alyona Mysko (09:29.928)
small medium enterprises, which is profitable. So it depends. And based on this, all different cases, they can have their best practice tailored for them, specific business model and specific financial solution. So when we understood that, so we started like, was doing MVP with no code, just like, you know, like having Google sheets and trying to code things in Google sheets.

Mudassir (09:46.53)
Okay.

Alyona Mysko (09:57.284)
And when we started, so I remember how we had our first customer was this product. So my friend, another financial guy made an intro with one startup. It was PatCube. They like actually they do pet cameras and they needed like some solution for their financial management. So they were already like not a small startup, I think that they were already at series A.

Mudassir (10:12.572)
Mm-hmm.

Alyona Mysko (10:25.328)
And they need some solution because they have hardware, product, and it's very complicated because you need to track this daily unit economics and many different factors actually can impact your final profit, your final runway burn rate, everything. And we decided with one of the founders who was CEO at that period of time, so we decided we'll test our product. So we said,

Hey guys, we have this like Google shit system. We don't know how it works, but we think that it will work good for your company. So let's try it. And we started to work with them. And actually we implemented the system, which was like not ideal at all, but we connected all executive team members, all team actually were connected to outputs, to KPIs, to plan actual analysis, to unit economics on a daily basis. We connected like different sources to Google shit system.

And I think in five months, they started to be profitable. And it was like their goal also. And I think that the huge impact was like done by this system, that everyone had like clear understanding what is going on, how their decisions like impacts their financial results. And it was like full transparency in the team. And that's like...

how everything has started because after that, Yaroslav who was CEO and also one of co-founders in PathCube, he joined Fuel Finance as an advisor. And after that later, he joined as a co-founder because he was so impressed and he said, hey guys, you need to do that like for all other companies.

So it was like so huge headache for me and for all our team, like for a long period of time and they finally fixed it. So that's like how everything has started. And yes, already like two years we're building this product together so I think it's even more than two years.

Mudassir (12:22.672)
Awesome.

Mudassir (12:27.568)
Great. Yeah, no, I'm fine. Okay, so I was like, because your voice was dropping, so I was like waiting for you to just finish a sentence, but okay, cool.

Alyona Mysko (12:36.236)
Okay.

Mudassir (12:39.964)
pretty good at editing, no problem. So rolling back again. Okay, so can you just walk us through the very early days of the, I know you've already given some insight onto that, like you guys got the co-founders, stuff like that, but when you started out early on, who were the first five hires that you guys made, and what was the scene behind hiring those first five hires? And the reason why I ask you this question is because a lot of the first-time founders,

I think, I don't know if that's right or not, but generally people have this sort of an idea like, okay, if we got a product we need to hire a CFO, we need to hire a salesperson, an executive salesperson, we need to hire, I don't know, VP of product or something like that. So I wanna understand from your perspective because you guys have done that successfully. Like what were your first five hires and what was the rationale behind hiring those people?

Alyona Mysko (13:37.64)
Yeah, I think that our first, so when we have started, we already had team members. So actually, we already had, I think, we had five or six team members. And we have developers, mostly Google shit developers. So it's like some specific way of developers, like type of developers. But we had two of them when we just have started.

Mudassir (13:59.205)
Okay.

Alyona Mysko (14:02.988)
And also, I think I was responsible for sales and marketing. And we have some financial people in our team, but these financial people were not like, were not in like, with a purpose to manage our finance. And they were financial experts. So just like with collaboration, with this like small team, we have several financial experts, we have several developers, we like.

Combine the things together with best practice and knowledge of financial people to implement it in the system. So I think that were our first hirings. And I should say, actually there is no need to hire too much people because I think after fundraising, I saw that thing many times in many companies when you just raise your money and you feel pretty comfortable when you see this amount on your banking account.

you start to hire people very quickly. And you start like, it's like even growing, I don't know like how it's like possible, but it's growing somehow very fast and faster than your lead generation, faster than your revenue. And I should say that maybe in some cases you started to think, oh my gosh, so I need to hire a specific person for these tasks. But I should say that it's like I was...

Mudassir (14:58.76)
Yep.

Alyona Mysko (15:21.952)
very long period of time, the person who was responsible for finance, for sales, for marketing, my co-founder was responsible for product development, for product strategy. And I should say, there is no need to hire this high-level people for the first steps, especially, I should say, about C4, so you don't need C4 earlier than you have maybe.

$20 million annual revenue. So maybe you need like financial manager or financial planning and analysis manager or just accountant at the first step. You don't need like this like full-time CFO person because there is like actually like this high level people they are responsible for very complicated things. Like they are responsible for some strategist, risk mitigation, I don't know, understanding, like analyzing and building very complicated financial models.

there is no need for all this stuff when you just start. I think that the most important is to sell. The one lesson that I learned that sell first, then build. I think that's a very basic rule, but very important because we always ask ourselves what minimum viable product we can build and sell it already and then understand if we have product market fit with that without investing too much

If we can sell it with MVP and we can get very good feedback from customers and users who will use it. And after that, so we can use this feedback to build this product better because we can think about many different features. Like, oh, let's do that. I think it's like all the time our discussion with Michael founder because he's not the first time founder and I'm the first time founder.

And all the time I'm thinking, oh, let's do that. Let's do that in this financial product. And all the time I want to build like, you know, like the best financial product that I can imagine. And all the time he says me like, Alena, we should be focused on sell. Let's sell that and ask our customers if they need that. So I think it's actually like very good point. So maybe like sales team, like going back. I was responsible for sales, but I think that on the first, like first period of time founder, like.

Mudassir (17:31.867)
Yeah.

Alyona Mysko (17:42.416)
is the best person to sell. And maybe I should say that, I don't know, I think it was a great team that we had on the start. It was more than enough to build this product as this product. And after that, we already, I think, the next person that we hired was we started to hire more developers. We just hired, actually, product manager just several months ago. So before that, we were both responsible for product development with MicroFounder.

Mudassir (18:08.258)
Okay.

Alyona Mysko (18:12.664)
And one year, maybe something like one year and a half, we hired our head of sales. And just like six months ago, we hired marketing managers. So before that, we were like growing with our own efforts with like not very many team members.

Mudassir (18:24.352)
Okay.

Mudassir (18:35.928)
Yeah, that's a very good point that you raise, actually, is do not hire people if you don't absolutely need it. And I've seen that many, many times, especially in the CPG world and now also in the B2B SaaS world as well, because two of the world that I'm really accustomed to, a lot of the time what happens is the moment people raise it out, there's a hiring spree out there. So I think the early focus should be on selling.

as much as you can and getting the feedback and fixing the product so you can just go kind of, you can get on a better trajectory I think. I think that's what it should be.

Alyona Mysko (19:15.357)
Yeah, that's true. I think that it's maybe some strange way on the market how companies, how other people see companies and they think that if they raised money or if they have gross number of team members, they are doing great. But actually, so I think they're all just two very important metrics.

Mudassir (19:18.872)
Okay. Okay, so.

Mudassir (19:25.028)
Mm-hmm.

Mudassir (19:41.372)
Thank you.

Alyona Mysko (19:42.496)
how customers love your product and what is your revenue and how many customers you have. So I think this is much more important than how much money you raised and how many employees you have. So maybe it's just some strange situation in the market that everyone wants to see some other metrics.

Mudassir (20:00.857)
Yeah.

Mudassir (20:04.736)
Yeah, I had a mentor who once taught me this thing that number of customers, money in the bank account, two of the most important metrics that can supersede everything, like literally everything. All right, so because you mentioned metrics and you also touched the fundraising part a little bit, so I just want to pivot it towards that. So what were the core metrics or matrices that you guys were tracking from the beginning to evaluate the traction and engagement from the product standpoint?

Alyona Mysko (20:11.625)
Yeah.

Alyona Mysko (20:15.317)
Yeah.

Alyona Mysko (20:34.888)
So we have like, we use our own product for ourselves and we have our like SAS dashboard because we have SAS business model. But actually what are important parts, so we always track revenue, months over months growth, year over year growth, number of customers, churn rate, growth margin. So growth margin is like also very important. So how are you doing?

is it's like the first level of profitability in your profit and loss statement. We also track all the time burn rate, runway. And also we track cash balance and changes in cash balance. Sometimes like per quarter and sometimes on a monthly basis, I try to track and compare like.

dynamic of revenue growth, with number of employees growth, and with expenses growth. So what is faster? So in my case, like revenue should be always faster. And sometimes I also track revenue per employee dynamic in comparison with just revenue dynamics. So I think it's like several like additional metrics. But like, we actually track a lot. I should say that it's just like...

I think I named maybe like 10% of everything that we track. So we have like very data driven company and we collect all data from the first days because we use this data for our, for building predictions. And we also use this data for experiments. So when we run different experiments, when we make different like assumptions, what we can get from these experiments, when we try to analyze like return investment.

Mudassir (21:53.453)
Yeah.

Mudassir (21:57.916)
Mm-hmm.

Alyona Mysko (22:22.12)
for these experiments and prioritize them. So we use all this data for previous periods. So it's just like on a high level. So what is important from what I start like my daily weekly understanding where we are.

Mudassir (22:37.724)
Okay, awesome. So one metric that you mentioned, and I read a book I think a few years ago when I was starting my own companies, which is called Revenue Per Employee, and that's a very, very important metric to track. So for most of the listeners, because this is not a very widely spoken term, that is one, and two, because not a lot of content is being produced on financial education. So if you can please explain us again, in a layman's word.

what's the revenue per employee is and why that one time is pretty important.

Alyona Mysko (23:10.516)
Yeah, so I think even some of the founders from Stripe wrote Twitter posts about that. So what is it? So you have your annual revenue, for example, gross revenue or monthly revenue. And you can see that this dynamic,

Mudassir (23:19.8)
Yep.

Alyona Mysko (23:33.196)
of growth, for example, of this month's annual revenue can be, I don't know, like months or months can be like 20% and you're doing great. But on the other hand, you also like we discuss this question that you always start to hire too many people. And that's like one of the points how we can understand if you're hiring like too many people in your team, because for example, you can compare this month or month's revenue growth and you can

like your monthly revenue, and divide by number of employees that you have in your team. And it will be your revenue per employee. And you can compare this revenue per employee months over months growth in comparison with your revenue growth. And for example, if it's like usual, it can be much, much lower because you hire too many people and efficiency. So it's like one of the signals that maybe efficiency of your business model is not the case. So.

you're growing with revenue, but you're growing very fast with your hiring and expenses. And we know that payroll is the most significant part in the companies in their profit and loss statement. So that's one of the points. And actually, sometimes, we are now doing our strategic session, and we are doing credit for previous year. So I also started to compare not just revenue per employee, but I started to compare revenue.

and expenses per employee. So it's also interesting to compare the things and also to see annual dynamics of what is growing faster, like your expenses or your revenue. So there are plenty of things, but revenue per employee is pretty easy. So just divide monthly revenue by the number of monthly employees that you have. So that's all. And you can see how you're doing.

Mudassir (25:20.301)
Okay.

Mudassir (25:25.196)
Okay, cool.

Mudassir (25:29.176)
All right, great. I just want to pivot a little bit towards specifically fundraising, because we talk a lot about venture-backed startups and exits and scales and things of growth and stuff like that. So a few questions on top of that. Question number one is, how much did you guys raise in total? And what was the strategy behind choosing a specific investor? Because when we were doing some research, I think I did come across, what's the founder of the Bolt?

I think he's one of the biggest investor in your multiple rounds. So yeah, just talk to us about how much you guys raise in total, what was the exact strategy behind choosing one investor and not the other investor. So what you guys had in mind.

Alyona Mysko (26:15.636)
Yeah, so we raised one million. So it was our first, one million dollars. It was our first fundraising and it was our seed fundraising. Before that we were bootstrapping. And so that's actually, it was our very strong point when we entered fundraising because we were profitable. And I should say that it was like the point that we wanted to raise money.

Mudassir (26:25.008)
Mm-hmm.

Mudassir (26:36.105)
Mm-hmm.

Alyona Mysko (26:42.348)
to invest in sales marketing and product development and growing faster as we had before. So that's why it was a very strong point and we were in a position when we wanted to have people who can bring value to us. And how we decided about this strategy? So actually we understood that we want to have angel investors who have...

First of all, our background of building companies before, maybe like the people who also built B2B or just SaaS companies, because we have not just like Marcus from Bolt, we also have John from Sandbirds, they are building B2B, I think it's not in SaaS, but yeah, so it's also very huge company. And on the other hand, so it was just...

Like we understood all the time after discussion and after calls with investors. Because I, so we had the strategy, so we had the list of investors. After that, I also did research, just was LinkedIn and I already shared the stories many times that we used also, higher risk, it's like HR software.

Mudassir (27:55.834)
Yep.

Alyona Mysko (27:58.304)
but you can just search in LinkedIn for specific profiles. So we were looking for people with background in FinTech, in B2B SaaS, and specific investors from VC companies, not just VC, but specific partners. And we did this cold reach out to them also. So we had warm intros, and we also did this cold reach out. And we are focusing.

So I actually discovered every person, every partner, so what background he has, what companies he invested in. So I'm trying to understand if there will be value for us from this communication. And I should say that maybe, to be honest, maybe first calls.

I'm so smart now, but when we just started our fundraising, I was very nervous because it was my first fundraising. And I wanted to be good for every investor. But I think after the first 30 calls, I understood that it's both sides' partnership. And I understood that during the call, I...

want to get value from these investors. And I started to analyze like what questions they asked me, if this question is valuable for me or not, because I think with good investors, like what I discovered, so, with good investors, even after the first call, you think, oh my gosh, he asked me so many great questions, we should think about that in our company. And you like, after this calls, you just go and like you already improve your company. So.

Mudassir (29:16.86)
Mm-hmm.

Mudassir (29:33.385)
Mm.

Alyona Mysko (29:38.088)
I think that's maybe the key, my key insight about fundraising, that it's very important. And I should say that even after when you have good communication with these investors and you see that they are very supportive, they bring you new customers, they help you with mentors, advisors, with their recommendations, with their experience. So it's very, very valuable.

Mudassir (30:06.84)
Awesome. So I think one thing that you mentioned that I would like to, you know, emphasize that, emphasize on that is because you guys were like bootstrapping and you were not like running out of cash. So you were very strong financially and you had a very clear objective in mind. This is what we need to do. This is the amount that we can erase. This is the amount, this is the percentage we're going to give out. This is the type of investors we're going to be going to have on the board. It's just not like anybody who can write

half a million dollar check, that you guys were like not looking for that. And I think that is one of the very key takeaways here is like look out for the right investors, look out for the right time, and then look out for the right amount of money that you need to raise, right?

Alyona Mysko (30:48.22)
Yeah, yeah, that's true. So actually, so there are like plenty of different points because it was so it was much easier to raise because also Michael founder he used to be involved in fundraising for six years in his previous company. And on the other hand, we also had very significant growth months over months. And during the period when we raised we were bootstrapping so many different like, I think,

Mudassir (30:55.726)
Mm-hmm.

Alyona Mysko (31:17.544)
many different points were in that period of time. And I think it was very good time because it was before valuation dropped down significantly. So it was like directly before, I think one month before we closed our fundraising and already in the months after that, so valuation were dropped down. So I think it was like many points and it was like just the best time for that fundraising.

Mudassir (31:28.036)
Yeah.

Mudassir (31:43.768)
Yeah, but also, you know, on another note, I think good companies are still raising decent amount of money at a decent valuation, even in this market. It's tougher now, but still raising a lot of money. It's the absurd type of ideas in companies that are not getting funded. So that is my takeaway on that. Okay, so the next thing that I wanna ask you is, tell us about the pitch deck that you guys had created. How much time did you invest on that?

Alyona Mysko (32:03.521)
Yeah.

Mudassir (32:14.528)
What was the pitching, entire pitching practice? Like how many investors did you guys, like in total meet? And how did you guys pitch them? And yeah, just like the whole story of the pitch deck, like how did you guys create that? Did you seek out some third party services for that? So if you can please go down one level deeper and just tell us about the whole pitching process because

That's a very important thing.

Alyona Mysko (32:43.772)
Yeah, so I think you even can find on Business Insider our pitch deck. So we published it. So it's open for everyone. And yeah, so I will share it with you. So with this pitch deck, so everything has started, I think one month before fundraising. So we did our first like, I think first slides. So we understood what will be the structure. So

Mudassir (32:52.492)
Okay. Oh, we're definitely going to link that in the show notes, so everybody can, yeah. Okay.

Alyona Mysko (33:11.156)
And after that, so we started, so we scheduled, I think, 30 calls with other founders, with our friends, who already raised money, who have bigger companies on higher series. And we asked, so I had 30 minute call with every founder, and I asked their feedback for this pitch deck, for my pitch, what can you do better? And we also had several friends who are just, I think,

professors from Berkeley and Stanford. And they also gave feedback about how to pitch, how to do it better, so how to understand what are your strong points, and actually how to build even this pitch. And actually it was a huge help before, and this one month of preparation. And I think that every call that we had with other founders, we did some changes in Pitch Deck.

And after that, so after we did these changes, we also asked these founders to make intro with their investors. And after that, so I think we changed Beach Deck all the time because we always had updates with our revenue. We also, after every call with investor, we updated all the time. So I think we updated it every week during fundraising. So we had some updates.

But I think there is no huge deal about pitch deck. I think it's even more important how you pitch, how are you confident with your idea, how you're passionate with your idea. And we also had the list of specific questions, like what investor can ask about, like size of the market, what is your go-to-market strategy, how many customers you have, all numbers they can ask us.

all questions about the product. So how we want to build this product, what we have now, what are our strong points. One of the investors like asked us also to prepare, for example, before and after. So feedback from our customers, what has changed in their like work with us, or what they see how our product, what, how our product like works for them. So.

Alyona Mysko (35:32.668)
I think we were prepared with this list of questions, with this number of pitchers, when we trained with other founders, with different iterations of pitch deck. And even I saw like there are already plenty of different tools when you can train like your pitch, AI tools and they can give you feedback. I think I tested even like one of them when we raised. So it all-

Mudassir (35:59.14)
Do they actually work?

Mudassir (36:05.732)
the tools that you're mentioning, do they actually work or they're just like, yeah, just AI thing. A lot of them are not working.

Alyona Mysko (36:09.83)
Yeah, yeah.

A lot of them not working, but actually, so I just asked like my friends founders to share their pitch decks. I was listening different pitchers on YouTube of other founders. So I tried like, you know, to do this job, like before fundraising. And actually, we spent, I think, something like one month on this preparation.

Mudassir (36:39.9)
Okay, okay, great. So one question, one thing I wanna ask you before I pivot to something else. You mentioned, one thing that you guys were mentioning in the pitch deck was your go-to market strategy. So what was your go-to market strategy?

Alyona Mysko (36:55.656)
Actually, we had already some first signals of good channels for us. So at that period of time, everything has changed for the last year. But in that period of time, we understood that financial workshops was our strategy, partnership with VC funds was our strategy.

Already content creation in some way was also there. And I think that's all for that period of time. So actually like, yeah. And we did outbound also already, you know, when we fundraising. This I think four were our core strategy. And some of these points actually still are. So some of these channels.

But many things have changed. So we just saw that we did more than maybe 50 experiments during previous year with different channels. So we are testing.

Mudassir (38:05.433)
Yeah, that's very important. Okay, great. So, anyone have one last question before I wanna ask some of the audience question that we have for you.

Mudassir (38:16.44)
How big the team is now? And the other question is, how have your leadership thought process has evolved, leadership thought process has evolved from being doing everything to now hiring people and training them and delegating them, and then focusing more on the growth side. So yeah, how that has changed.

Alyona Mysko (38:38.388)
I think that changed a lot. So we have now 32 team members in 12 countries. And yeah, I was also surprised. I just saw this new information yesterday and I was like, oh my gosh, 12 countries, 32 team members. And actually, so I was very long period of time, as you think, as many founders responsible for many things. So I was wearing different hats.

Mudassir (38:45.084)
Okay. Oh wow, amazing.

Alyona Mysko (39:06.924)
being like head of sales, being head of marketing, being like head of product. But after that, so previous year, I understood that like hire the best people is the best what I can do after fundraising. And I want to hire smarter people than me for specific roles. And I think that like, when you stop, like where this hat of doing everything, so.

and you hire really great people, the next challenge to understand what you can bring to these people. If they're already so great and they have good results with their previous experience, so how can I manage them? So how can I help them to develop to be better? And in that way, I think that it's maybe the main question for every CEO. So how you can grow just like when you're

team members are growing. And I started to think about this question and I started to analyze like, okay, how I do one-on-ones? Like I do them on a weekly basis, but how I can do them better. So what, and one point that I understood just to ask more questions, not providing solutions, not providing your thoughts, just ask many, many questions.

and it really helps in developing people and it works great. On the other hand, I understood that having this high-level win goals for the team and providing them that we are going that way, so we should be there in the end of the year. And after that, every team member in our executive team, they are preparing their thoughts, their strategy, how we should do this product with...

Mudassir (40:50.67)
Yeah.

Alyona Mysko (40:59.092)
sales is marketing to be in that place in the end of the year. And we have like, we have this management system inside our team. So we have this dashboard with all high level goals with all metrics, with all plan actual results on a monthly basis, where we track how we are doing. And we also have like, we also have now we implemented, I think maybe some four months ago, we implemented.

a specific notion page with all experiments that we do in our team and with the progress of these experiments, because I think that when you don't know, like when you're not sure about different things in products, in marketing, the best you can do is to run as many experiments that you can. And we are trying to track now, like, how we fast with this experiment. So the more experiments we make,

the more understanding we have about our customers, about lead generation, about sales. So the first step will be with final understanding what we should do and what we shouldn't do. So I think that like my job as a CEO now to hire best people, create management system, create communication system, create one-on-one, be more culture for...

Mudassir (42:06.794)
Mm-hmm.

Alyona Mysko (42:21.676)
team members, create different frameworks for them. So something that will help them to think in different ways. So for example, create framework, how we choose priorities in the team. So, but to create this framework, you should do like research. You should like understand many different things to provide the best frameworks for these people. So on a high level. And I think that's defining the strategy and...

how we can achieve these goals and find these points when people are not doing great and track this point and also have this high level of excellence in the team, be attentive to details. And I think that's many things when CEO started to be important. But I think it's always about the person who is behind.

executive team members. So they do all the job and like CEO is a person who just like help them do their job better. So I think this is actually the role of CEO.

Mudassir (43:16.518)
Yep.

Mudassir (43:27.076)
Yeah, very, very wisely put. I totally agree to that. Yona, what we do is we have a decent big of an audience, so very fortunate with everybody who's listening to the podcast or being on the newsletter or connected with us on LinkedIn. So before coming to the podcast, one of the things that we do is we send out this sort of a form like, hey, Yona from Fuel Finance is coming tomorrow. Is it anything you wanna ask? So there's all kind of questions, but there's only managed, like, we only managed to pick like a few of them because

you have already covered Adarsh. So I'm just gonna ask you those questions. So the first one is, if you could go back to the early days of fuel finance, what do you wish you had known or done differently across all the areas, like product hiring, operations, marketing, management, sales, whatever.

Alyona Mysko (44:15.217)
I think that what I would like to do differently going back, so now we started to create all this valuable content, and I started to develop, it can be named my personal brand, but actually on the final end, personal brand is always connected with the company. And going back, maybe I started to do this thing differently. So I started...

from creating content, creating my audience, developing my LinkedIn, Twitter, all that stuff earlier before building the company. I think it's lead generation, like product development is very complicated task, but like hacking lead generation on the yes market is even more complicated in the first years especially. And I think that like creating this personal brand actually help a lot. So I think I did.

maybe if I had this chance, or maybe I did this thing differently, so, and started much, much more earlier. Another thing I should say is that sometimes, so what I also understood that executive team is changing, and the people that you had at the earliest years of your company, they...

Mudassir (45:21.1)
Absolutely.

Alyona Mysko (45:38.368)
can be not a good fit on later stages. And maybe some of the decisions, they should be done faster. So I think when I'm thinking about previous periods of time, I thought about, oh my gosh, we should hire this person much, much more earlier. And with this person, we should stop much earlier to cooperate. So I think that's maybe something that I think about what I could do better in previous years.

Mudassir (45:43.737)
Yep.

Mudassir (46:07.972)
great, totally agree to all the points that you have made. So the second one is what emerging trends you see in fintech entrepreneurship and startup innovation in like 2024, 2025 and how founders can take advantage of those trends.

Alyona Mysko (46:26.14)
I think that I will not mention this trend about AI, so it's a trend not just in two decades, but the trends overall. So it's pretty obvious, but I think that the trend, one of the trends that companies, they will improve their profitability levels. And I think bootstrapping can be new type of unicorns. So...

Mudassir (46:32.22)
Okay. Yeah.

Alyona Mysko (46:52.548)
And I think that being like understanding this trend that like founders definitely will want to manage better their finance. So it means that all different financial functions and I see demand on different financial solutions, like starting from accounting solutions, like from bookkeeping, ending with expense systems like ramp, I don't know, like all that stuff.

And with planning part, even with payments, with automation of payments of all the things. So I think it will be growing during next periods of times. And I also see another point about building ecosystems and communities. And I think it will be something new and can be something new for the next years because

Now I see that many companies have started to collaborate, for example, accounting companies with different FP&A solutions, or for example, CFOs started to collaborate with different FP&A solutions, like different accounting companies. So it started to be like, seems like ecosystem. And I think it's also an interesting trend. And founders, like, I don't know, like if founders...

founders can build new solutions in that part. So I think that it's still a problem in accounting and automation of accounting. So we are building so many great things, but accounting is doing manually. And it's still doing manually. And still QuickBooks is a huge problem. And I think maybe...

some solutions, automated solutions, AI solutions that can fix this problem of reconciliation of all of this financial data in accounting, it can be like a great solution.

Mudassir (48:52.508)
Okay, great. So thank you for, you know, asking that one. And the last one that we have on the list is what's next for fuel finance and what can we expect from you in terms of personal branding?

Alyona Mysko (49:05.58)
Hmm. Oh, I think so. The first one that you can expect that we will launch new Bootstrap product, actually, that will be into versions in free version. And it's like very cheap version, like of thirty nine dollars. And it will be like very great tool for early stage press it companies. So that's the one thing that's going to launch. And it will have educational parts and tailored for specific business models.

So that's actually the first one that everyone can expect. And the second one, so we will be focusing a lot on creating content, maybe creating a book or even creating community. So for financial people, we are now looking for that ways how we can build better financial literacy in the world. So I think that's something that definitely everyone can expect from us.

Mudassir (50:03.96)
Awesome. Thank you so much again, Yuna. We do have one small ritual on the podcast. So what we do is we ask all our guests a question for our next guest without revealing who the next guest is going to be. So we've got a question for you. Obviously going to take a question for the next guest. So the question that the last guest left for you is, knowing that 2023 were so turbulent and intense, what is your word for 2024? If you could describe 2024 in terms of venture capital.

Alyona Mysko (50:06.872)
Yeah.

Mudassir (50:32.676)
What's that one word would be?

Alyona Mysko (50:35.967)
I want to say AI, but it's already too much AI in this communication.

Mudassir (50:39.417)
Hahaha

Mudassir (50:44.436)
Yeah, I think every single thing that you ask, there has to be a certain chance that AI is going to be the answer to that. Like anything you can ask these days. Okay.

Alyona Mysko (50:51.048)
I think it will be two words, AI and profitability. So I think both.

Mudassir (51:01.316)
OK. Awesome. Question for the next guest, please.

Alyona Mysko (51:05.176)
Oh, I have questions. So I think my question will be, what are the best channels to build lead generation for 2023? I think that's all. Maybe top three channels.

Mudassir (51:30.104)
Awesome. Please stay after the recording, but let's end the recording now, OK? All right, Ilona, thank you so much for all the time, information, candor, and then lessons that you guys have learned. So thank you so much for sharing. I hope it's going to help someone who's just starting out in his career. Appreciate it.

Alyona Mysko (51:34.111)
Okay.

Alyona Mysko (51:37.6)
Thank you.

Alyona Mysko (51:47.72)
Thank you. So I should end, yes, recording, or you will end recording.

Mudassir (51:56.1)
Let me do that. Let me do that.

Alyona Mysko (51:56.699)
Okay.