This fintech startup ideally wants to be ‘a lot more boring’ than Robinhood
Reading Time: 2 minutesSoon after launching Ocho, a startup offering personal finance support for business owners, Ankur Nagpal realized that the company’s debut product — a solo 401(k) retirement account — ‘is not a venture-backed business’ in and of itself. Despite landing nearly 300 customers with that initial wedge, the entrepreneur is already focused on broadening the service to become more holistic, and for business owners just trying to figure out how to think about money, more realistic.
‘We still haven’t found a single user that feels confident or comfortable with their financial knowledge,’ Nagpal said. Alongside solo 401(k) services, Ocho is now a brokerage that allows people to invest in a variety of ETFs and stocks, has financial advisor support services, and is working on offering other types of accounts, such as IRAs and health savings accounts.
Robinhood, he says, is often an app associated with buying and selling. He hopes that Ocho, because it’s for retirement, is all about ‘buying and holding.’ Ocho is extremely focused on education and conservative bets. There will never be options trading on the platform. ‘We’re being very conservative — for example if someone wants to buy Apple shares on our platform, of course they can. But we’ll also ask them to consider buying an index fund before doing that just because historically that’s been a safer option.’
‘Ideally we’re a lot more boring,’ Nagpal said, compared to Robinhood. ‘In an ideal world I would love with someone you know, set up a bunch of like automations to like, automatically invest some percentage of their paycheck and we will handle the rest. There’s not a lot of active trading.’ The company only makes money from a $299 per year annual subscription fee.
The refrain of being an ‘all in one solution’ is all too common in the fintech world, as companies pivot and broaden their services to land a bigger scale. Ocho wants to avoid some of that rate race, especially around customer acquisition costs.
Ocho is also having discipline around one very specific budget: The company has spent $0 on paid marketing, and plans to keep it that way for the next few years. Nagpal also added that the nine-person team likely won’t hire anyone new this year, and they continue to work with freelancers and contractors to manage demand without overspending.
If you have a juicy tip or lead about happenings in the venture world, you can reach Natasha Mascarenhas on Twitter @nmasc_ or on Signal at +1 925 271 0912. Anonymity requests will be respected.
Reference: https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/ocho-seed-round/
Ref: techcrunch
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG