$40M FinTech Founder on Raising Millions Before He Had a Business Idea

we had all the ingredients to start a business

except for the exact application or idea

it very much felt like we were in this void for about 6 or 7 months

where we had both left our jobs

we appeared like we had a product

but it was something that we had vibe coded in the

you know week before

you can vibe code your ideas

you can vibe code products

but you can't vibe code customers

the best time to provide like life changing advice

yeah is at the

you know younger end of the spectrum

but unfortunately

that group of people are locked out of getting advice

purely because of the cost

shark raise venture capital before he had a business idea

then spent nine months 800 conversations

and a five coded conference demo in order to find the right idea

now his company Marlu

is the AI doing the work inside more than 650 financial advice firms

across six countries

and he just raised $10 million

to fix the one thing he couldn't find for himself

affordable financial advice

my name is Shakeel Lala

co founder of Malu and this is founders in motion

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okay let's get back to the video

so shock you spent years in high structured environments consulting

corporate development product lead

then you walked away from all of it to start something from scratch

so what was the moment you knew

you were actually kind of taking the leap

we had a bit of an interesting start

right where we decided to start a business

and I felt like we had all the ingredients to start a business

except for the exact application or idea

yeah so

Hardy and I

spent almost a year investigating and validating different spaces

before we committed it

didn't really felt like we had started a business

until we had found that exact application

and that was about nine months into the year

oh wow

and so like

it very much felt like we were in this void

for about six or seven months where we had both left our jobs

and we were constantly

pitching and propositioning different ideas to each other

but it in many ways it felt like we

we're agreeing on the principles of how we would build and run

an operator business before we desire

did it exactly how it would look and feel

so

it very much started and felt like we were on our own from the get go

but then in terms of business building that was a

a six month away period

so take us all back to this 6 months period

yeah

when you were testing different applications and ideas and industries

how did you go about it

what were some of like the frameworks you guys had in place to do that

easily or quickly

probably three big lessons from that

yeah and I'll mention them and then we can go um deeper into them

and if first one and it's funny that you mentioned frameworks

because I called the first listen

it's the consulting back

it is the consulting background 100% the first one is um

frameworks don't find markets as an ex management consultant yourself

as an ex management consultant yourself

I'm sure you can appreciate

the most logical thing to do when thrown in

a high degree of uncertainty

is try build a framework

a decision tree

a ranked and ordered list of like

the key characteristics of the market

and the idea that we would essentially assess every

potential initiative on

the

challenge with that is the five point list grew to a 10 point list

grew to a 20 point list and then all of a sudden

nothing ever ticked all the boxes or even three quarters of them

so it became this like constantly exhausting exercise of

when are we gonna find the perfect idea

hmm

and I'll talk you through like some of the

some of those framework points

and like some of them were

almost principles of the market that we would like to have

we wanted to be in b to B yeah

we wanted to be in vertical SAS

so those ones are much more easy to take off

imagine if you just wake up in the morning

you're like I have to build b to B vertical SAS

I have I feel like that is also most founders at the moment

so like we will not we will not I will not ignore that

that's probably the majority of people at the at this stage but

some of the more nuanced ones where you know

it had to be like a high frequency

high pain point um

where we could communicate not only the product

but also the feeling of the solution within a sentence and a half

yeah and like that became very very hard to do for many

many problems and situations

because it had to be a natural

extension of what someone is doing today without um

being too far ahead that it kind of loses their interest or

loses their ability to believe in you

yeah

it was an interesting 2 or 3

months of like constantly frame working up ideas where

and we actually investigated things like um

vertical BDB AISS for home services like roofing plumbing electrical

yes incredibly hands on

labor intensive industries that don't have a good software stack

or at least a very strong sense of fragmented tools

saw the value in bringing those tools together

through to a bunch of other ideas

like helping retiring business owners sell their SMB businesses

which we ultimately decided was not only a software problem

it's also a market problem

I think the way I close out that period is that

the frameworks don't find markets

so we just decided to have more of a gut feel

and found a market LED approach

to initially

getting our way and narrowing down the selection of ideas

yeah and I

but I would say that

that exercise of trying to force framework fit on things

helped us rapidly go through a whole bunch of different ideas

helped us sharpen our problem and idea identification

such that when we found a particular space

we're interested in it

we could defend it and articulate it far better and faster

so while it was a good exercise in and of itself

it just wasn't the only exercise

we went through to find the eventual idea

that sort of takes me on to the second one

which is um

when you have nothing as particular in our case

our network was our mode

your network is your net worth

you know

yeah exactly

oh man we are so cliche

we really needed to get the consulting background out of us

yeah

when we threw out the frameworks out the window

we essentially went back to like okay

like who are the people who are interesting that we can just talk to

to start testing applications of vertical B to B AI SAS yeah

in a whole bunch of different markets

and it just started to feel like a snowball

where we were able to reach out to managing directors

heads of firms CEOs with our background experience at shearsies yeah

because we did and held like relatively impactful roles there

that that in

in of itself was how we got our first early beta conversations

customer testing

that opened up doors to eventually get that 800 conversations

we had in the first 12 months

beautiful

and the last thing just to close it out was like

when we're in those 800 conversations

it wasn't just

tell me about your pain points and listen for problem identification

we took a slightly different approach

we initially got those conversations by saying like

hey look

let us sit inside your firm for one or two days

let us talk to management compliance support advisors

and we'll help you shape what could be

you know an AI first way of operating

so very much was that consultative approach to get us in the door

but when we were in the door

it quickly transitioned to more of like a

product propositioning exercise

we constantly positioned Marlu and reposition Marlu

till eventually we got to the point of

having someone listen to the half sentence

and through that alone being keen to buy the product

but we didn't get there overnight right

it took a number of months

to get to the point where we had that really sharp proposition

and so the proposition was at by the end of it

let me record a meeting between yourself and a client

and by the time you get back to your desk

the notes will be written for you in your own style

tone structure format

yeah and that was it

that was enough to people feel like wow okay

if the if what these guys are saying is true

then I'm not doing my notes after I put the kids to bed

I'm not constantly stressed between meetings

trying to tell my team what I actually discussed with a client

like

I feel the sense of relief when they're describing the product to me

yeah awesome

so okay

before we get ahead of ourselves

I do have follow up for that

okay oh sorry

no no

no no no

it's it's a really great breakdown

so I just wanted to dive deeper into it

but before we get there so um

what is Marlo

Milo is an AI partner for financial advisors

that helps them do their work within an advice firm

so we started very much as a note taker and assistant for advisors

when we launched a year ago

now Marlo is doing the work inside advice firms

to ultimately allow advisors

to be much more client facing

so back to how you went through that process of ideating

testing and pivoting

there is a balance between moving from ideas quickly

and also building a deep understanding in that space yeah

before you move on yeah

like how do you balance that

the fastest way to balance

that is to try and defend it in front of someone else

and if you can't get strong alignment and buying

and that was like the Hardy and I approach

then immediately it's dead

the sort of time investment we gave ourselves was very much

can we convince the other person that this is worth a day's work

to further button down and investigate

and then we'd both commit to helping push the idea forward

but then we'd almost force ourselves to write another one pager

yeah and repitch the idea back to each other

that would unlock potentially the next three days

we forced ourselves to be relatively commercial with our time

so we didn't spend the whole year just in research mode

we very much knew that we had to still have

a product in market within 12 months

and then by the time we were six months in

and still without an exact idea

that very much turned up the heat again

just needing to have a large surface area of exploration

to get a good sense of what good felt like

and what bad felt like was a necessary exercise

because I don't think we would have

jointly agreed that the exact application that we've chosen now

was the right one unless we had

you know turned over all of those hats

yeah

but then once we did turn um

you know the advice AI application over

it felt that that was the right one immediately

yeah it also makes a lot of sense based on how you guys met

your background in fintech um

so it really felt like a natural fit

it did feel like a lot more of a natural fit than potentially roofing

I love roofing though you know

it's a positive cash flowing business

it's

it's actually they make a lot of money

they do they do yeah

I can deeply sense that

you guys are very much about pain point discovery

and making sure you're building the right thing

yeah

so I I think there's a story that you mentioned

that before you guys had a working prototype

you and Hardy

paid to exhibit at one of Australia's biggest financial advice

conferences yeah

so at some point probably

I assume someone walks up to the booth yeah

maybe ask you a few questions or maybe try to play with a broken demo

yeah what's kind of like going through your head at the moment

as someone that has always been like very deeply analytical

sell design build is the way to build products

particularly in this era so it's not enough to be analytical and sure

because you can get a lot further

just by being highly iterative and fast

and that that

that starts to contend a little bit with what you're saying around

really really analyzing the situation in the market

before being confident enough to get something out

the way things are moving now

speed matters more than anything else

and so you're not going you

I think it's about accepting that you're never going to be right

but the most the fastest path to

to be right is to just getting started

as opposed to over analyzing the situation

once we decided on the idea

we spoke to you know

800 advisors around the world

the tail end of that was buying a

an exhibitor stand at the Financial Advice

Australia conference in Brisbane at the end of 2024

we appeared like we had a product

but it was something that we had vibe coded in the

you know

week before on the earlier on the sort of 2024 versions of vibe coding

it's a bit rough you know

than what you can get shipped with Claude today

and it was a very simple product

it would allow me to record a meeting

a fake meeting with someone who'd come to our store

and by the time the minute was up

10 seconds later they'd get an email summary of the meeting

but the key

difference we started to show was the benefit of it being an

an advice specific

so we deliberately talked about how's the weather

things that extended beyond the advice conversation

just so I could show them

by the time that recording was done and they received the email

Illinois

it was just a nice concise advice specific summary that was it

and then we had people ready and willing to buy it

so it's as much as we could have analyzed the situation

we couldn't have predicted where exactly people would get

get interested

and the exact words that we would say that would light up their eyes

yeah that's why like being analytical helps for a little bit

but it doesn't help you

push through into getting a product proposition out to market yeah

so once we had people interested to buy the product

we knew like we should have started building it yesterday

yeah you know

it's like sometimes you have to live in the uncomfortableness

to test certain things out in the wild

yeah um

because like you can vibe code your ideas you can vibe code products

you can vibe code products

but you can't vibe code customers

yes for sure

and you can't vibe quote sales

no exactly

distribution matters more than anything

so so somewhere along this process between the 800 advisors

between the six months between the nine months yeah

one of the largest VC in Australia

back to you and Hardy before you settled on a business idea

something that is quite unheard of in Australia

yeah um

when was this across that discovery journey

it was right at the start

right at the start right at the start

um almost as we were getting started

oh really so

but at this point you've quit your job

you've already determined that you're gonna do it either way

uh Hardy had quit his job

I hadn't just yet yeah

like Hardy was um yeah ready

he was all in yeah

and I needed a few more months to get there

as in I committed but I had had a few more things to wrap up

but he managed to secure some early funding before we got started yeah

on the promise of

let the two of us spend a year investigating different markets

and trust us that we will get a product to market in 12 months yeah

or no or know that we haven't found anything

and be relatively honest about it

and that was a bit of a trust exercise as well

yeah so obviously that's very uncommon with the funding market here

what do you think made you guys really good bets

you are purely investing in the people

if we really

really believe that founders are the driving force behind a business

yeah

why do we need to make sure that they have an idea

yeah if it in a number of situations we've seen founders pivot

change or end up over capitalizing in potentially dud ideas

it kind of does make sense to give someone

or a group of people the space to properly

test a specific market and application before

doubling in down

doubling down into this into the exact idea and so like

and that formed a lot of of our early thesis as well

we wanted to be very very sure about the market before we

decided to go guns blazing at building in it

because the belief we had there was that

it's never been easier to build technology

what matters more is that you build the right thing

you can distribute it and you can't vibe code those two things

I do think conviction is a really important thing like I

I I can imagine like you guys already saying that oh

we're gonna do this like either way

we already have the methodology and the thinking

and the frameworks and the timelines

innately for ourselves yeah

that um

we're gonna follow with or without this

yeah yeah yeah

we were up for doing ourselves anyway yeah

so like the

the upside was that we had a little bit of extra cover on the

you know

keeping ourselves afloat side and then with taking external capital

and then with taking external capital so early on yeah

um which is a little bit against the philosophy right now of like

you can bootstrap up until like 1 or 2 mil

do you ever feel a sense of internal pressure

you always feel a sense of pressure

yeah I would say and like we set very high expectations of ourselves

and I think like the helpful thing in that dynamic is like

I think the internal pressure

is probably higher than the external pressure

so we constantly challenge ourselves

to the point where external pressure doesn't matter so much

because the internal

one is so heavy already exactly

the internal expectations

and the internal intrinsic motivation we have is so powerful

that that carries us through a lot as well

and that's also what I would say

catalyzes the team to feel motivated as well

it's not this this is happening to us

sort of like victim LED mindset of like

pressures being forced upon us

we've completely flipped that narrative

it's like we have the power

and the resources to make something like truly large now

yeah it's on us to like to execute

execute and

so your co founder is based in London

yeah you have a deaf team in Wellington

yeah you are around Sydney

London and Wellington every now and then

sometimes New Zealand to visit family as well

yeah

you guys kind of been running Marloo across hemisphere

how is it like on a day to day

building with a co founder from the opposite side of the world

I would say it comes down to having really good and clear alignment

and division of responsibilities

that allowed us to build almost entirely a sync

and you know

the product was developed largely on the APEX side of the world

and it was distributed in the UK and other markets

by Hardy and the UK team yeah

so and we very much yeah had good instincts as to like

what each other should be leading from

mm hmm

to make it easier to build almost entirely a sink yeah

and that worked well

but we're now at the size where there's a lot more overlap regionally

and that has yeah

allowed us

or made us think more deeply around how we build now a global team

where we do have you know

go to market initiatives

that technically overlaps a little bit across the different regions

and

we're now thinking through how we connect other members of our team

so we don't have like an entirely globally split team

but we're all singing from the same song sheet

but some of the feedback early on was definitely that we

are building the business on hard mode

having this three founders

so Ben what um our engineering cofounders based in Wellington

um having them all us all synced up was um yeah

fairly challenging but once we got into good rhythms and patterns

like it's allowed us to divide and conquer um

a lot faster I would say

yeah and is there any benefit from that as well

yeah obviously

like the main benefit

in that is that we get to be present in three markets at once

usually startups that we've seen

you know

go on this journey of graduating market to market

particularly being from New Zealand

we always had this view that like

every other market

other than New Zealand is bigger than New Zealand market

so it's challenging you've got to like either graduate

but if you

employ that methodology of needing to graduate from each market

as we kind of discussed like if times of the essence

you need to go now so that's why we took the approach of like

launching in the UK and Australia and NZ

all at the same time

and being up for the challenges that came with it

so we built the business around that being true

as opposed to the alternative

which was like needing to graduate through all the different markets

but that has enabled us now to be present in six or seven markets

um which is

you know truly

a phenomenal achievement that I don't think would have happened

if we were to have just started in one

it forces a high degree of flexibility to be built into the product

from day one such that now

we are far more flexible as a team

in terms of executing product opportunities

that's really interesting too

because you would think for a product like financial advice

or financial services yeah

um it's quite localized

based on the regulations around the financial services yeah

so how do you think about

like building a product with the flexibility for it to be in 6

7 markets at the moment

yeah totally

it's hard to do at the get go

but once we cracked it

it was unbelievable in terms of how much of like

the same infrastructure we could use as a business

to apply and create quite different

materially different outputs in different markets so like

I'll give you a super quick overview of it

it's almost we built four levels of flexibility into the product

one is like essentially the laws of the country that you're in

um then the next degree of flexibility is like

the network and licensing arrangement

for firms within that country

and each firm could be in a different network

and that's important because each licensing arrangement has different

things that they are regulated by the regulator on

then you've got the firm's preferences styling

compliance program

and then you've got the individual's tone structure um

preferences as well

so building a product that could be variable to four different

you know environments

or have four different levers that could all change

for any particular individual

on the product was a complex problem to solve for yeah yeah

but now that we've cracked it

it's allowed us to rapidly scale out to different markets

yeah super exciting

and then so when you when you think about commercial pool

where is it mainly coming from market wise for you guys

we had our early success and growth in the ANZ side of the world um

but now we're growing fastest over in the UK

oh OK exciting

like really excited

and then you said 6 7 markets

so it's UK Australia

New Zealand

and we've got um

smaller numbers of paying customers in US Canada

South Africa

that's super awesome

a lot of English speaking countries

we handle 44 languages in the app

but that's for the purpose of recording a meeting

and getting an output or creating a document

the UI is all in English currently

and obviously

we're thinking about ways we can be flexible on that front as well

so the mission framing of Marloo is all about access yeah

the everyday person who can't afford a financial advisor

but the product that you're selling right now goes to large

financial advisory firms yes

so how does one become the other

and what has to be true for that to actually work out

the story behind the question

and the story behind the answer was that at

while I was working about five years ago

I tried to find a financial advisor and I was unsuccessful

and the two reasons behind that were one

I did not have enough liquid assets to transfer into a portfolio

where someone could charge a variable fee

on those liquid assets to cover their fixed cost of servicing me

as a client the second piece is that I didn't feel like there were any

attractive propositions that spoke to me

as if I wanted to be a client of that particular business yeah

most of them were

geared towards people who were perhaps 10 or 15 years my senior

probably had a family probably had a mortgage um

I had neither I was very much in the growth stages of my career

but I wanted some like early advice yeah

to help me just

test some ways of thinking around my personal financial situation

in the modern world where

you know

a lot fewer people are now buying property is a lot more renting um

like what if if you weren't to follow the traditional path of

you need to buy a property to financially secure your future

like help me test some other ways of thinking

and I didn't find those propositions yeah

one of the big drivers of advice and accessibility

is the cost to deliver advice

you talk to any advisor

you talk to any client or potential client who's considered

the cost is not a small amount

the value is certainly there

but the

compliance

requirements for an advisor to provide advice to someone

are so high

that the costs get pulled up in order to deliver that advice

person so

we very much were convinced that the inaccessibility

is driven by the cost to deliver

and that translates into the cost to the client yeah

and that's how you end up with those high minimum fees

it's an area I'm also very personally um

aligned to

I think growing up I did a finance degree and even after all that

I felt like I had no

understanding of what actually works in terms of my own portfolio

how to grow my um

own financial assets yeah

and like what's actually accessible to me um

so and

and I think it's something that a lot of people struggle with yeah

especially at the at the early where you're having small sums of money

and you don't even know what assets you can invest in

but if you speak to any advisor

they would say the best time to provide like life changing advice

yeah is at the

you know younger end of the spectrum

when you're 25 to 35 when you've just started earning money

you're thinking about forming your long term financial habits

if you can change someone's habits and make them think about money

saving budgeting before you get to investing and depositing

like if you get them to think about money differently fundamentally

those are some of

like the biggest shifts you can have in terms of someone's like

long term financial trajectory

but unfortunately

that group of people are locked out of getting advice

purely because of the cost

and I think that's why you know

we were so motivated to attack this specific area

because we

ourselves wanted advice and couldn't get it through largely

you know the cost and accessibility

you guys just raised a huge 10 million dollar round

yes um

well first off congratulations

thank you

no small feet in this market no

no it's not

it's not it's not

what does Marlo have to look like in five years for you to feel like

it was all worth it it's all going well

yeah

look I think the first of all timelines are being extremely compressed

a year ago we started out as a note taker

that allowed people to use a custom template

to get an output that looked like theirs

felt like theirs and they could ask questions of the

of that particular engagement or meeting

to get a very specific output

like that was a note taker

plus a few extra features that wrapped it up to feel compliance

tailored personal

and also um

you know

reminding or reassuring if someone had forgot a particular detail

we always had the view that note taking

would be commoditized fairly quickly

mm hmm

a year later we can

I think we can all say note taking has been completely commoditized

every digital tool out there offers some version of an AI summary now

and so the bar for us is so much higher

which we've met and and definitely exceeded

in terms of then it's not enough to help with the work

you actually need to do the work within advice firms

and what I mean by that is now we do your notes emails

advice documents tasks and forms

we pull that all into one area

to build Marlo as the AI partner for advice

doing the work that's the current state

where we want to get to is to be that true system of action

where advisors are focusing on the parts that they are good at

that luck that they are good at

that they are paid for which is the trust judgement

empathy in delivering advice

but right now they spend 80% of their time not doing that yeah

it's on the busy work so

my 3 year vision um

is that Marlu becomes that true AI partner for advisors

that allows them to focus much more on clients and delivering advice

and Marlu handles a lot of the rest of the work

for the different personas in a firm

so it's extending from you know

just being a tool for advisors and support staff to being a tool for

or a product for compliance and management

to understand how the firm is actually operating

because at the end of the day

compliance is such a key consideration in the advice provision

when the the rules are so specific and clear

that there's a lot of nervousness around provision of advice

and so there's a lot of checking and sampling that goes on

in the compliance world

exciting you've really compressed your time frame

I asked for five you were like three

we'll get there in three

we'll get there in three because like

like I said 12 months ago we said note taking will be commoditized

we said it will take a year

it took six months

so it's been over a year for you guys yeah

um still early days but a decent amount of time yeah

so what do you think has been

the most valuable lesson that you've Learned in your founder journey

thus far

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to

sell the product before you build it

find some people who are so excited about your product

they're willing to tell other people about it yeah

your product does not even have to exist

it's the proposition that matters more

and your proposition should be so clear

that your product does not need to exist

for them to communicate and tell someone what it does

and for

at least you to understand how that proposition makes them feel yeah

you can get very far with the likes of clout design right now

that your job is to communicate a product

that has an insane amount of value

in a very simple manner and that should be your sole focus

some of those early conversations we had like the

the 800 people that we spoke to and worked alongside

that's also a large amount of people by the way

that is a large amount of people um

that yeah working alongside them working in their firm

multiple different personas within a firm management

compliance support advice conferences

webinars virtual meetings

LinkedIn outreach it was attack on all fronts to find that 800

we needed to be sure enough that they came from different advice

verticals different countries

different ways of thinking

so that we were more sure and tested

from just a single market product

that helped form the base of our early customers

so when we had a product ready to go

we didn't have to go find the customers

we already had a network of people to market it to

and that became the early catalyst of our go to market motion

so not only did you get advice

you literally have a perspective list

yeah as well

so you're essentially doing kind of like go to market distribution

prior to even building everything

totally network is your mouth

thank you so much Zach

appreciate you coming on

and I Learned so much about the early discovery period

awesome thank you so much for having me

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