Brad Johnson: Welcome to another episode of Do Business. Do Life. I’m here with Eden Ovadia.
Eden Ovadia: Yes.
Brad Johnson: Welcome.
Eden Ovadia: Thank you. Excited to be here.
Brad Johnson: And this is not normal for me. Based out of Kansas, I don’t normally do interviews right here, beachside. So, thanks for carving out the time to have a conversation.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. There are a lot of worse places to fill a podcast than on the beach that’s along the Pacific Coast Highway, so this is a beautiful area.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, let’s dive in. I know our time is limited. So, you co-founded FINNY. And what’s wild is you only started in May of 2024, and you’ve already done a lot of things, a lot of people have never done that build businesses. So, you’ve won a Wealthy. Congratulations.
Eden Ovadia: Thank you.
Brad Johnson: That was in what category? Marketing automation.
Eden Ovadia: Marketing & Automation. So, if you’re a wealth manager looking for marketing and automation, you are talking to the number one Wealthy winner.
Brad Johnson: You know who your audience is, obviously, because that’s checking the box for all of them. So, we’re going to get into organic growth and how your company is changing the game on that from a technology standpoint. Also, what’s kind of fun, so you started, you were founded in May of 2024. By December of 2024, you had already raised 6.5 million in a seed round and were part of the incubator, Y Combinator, which is probably one of the most well-known incubators in the world.
Eden Ovadia: Yep.
Brad Johnson: So, you’ve done some cool things, so we should probably get into that.
Eden Ovadia: It’s been a crazy year. I also got married this year, so I have lots of change in the last 12 months.
Brad Johnson: Congratulations.
Eden Ovadia: Thank you.
Brad Johnson: Let’s talk about organic growth. Obviously, you’re doing that with a technology-forward approach. So, Eden, how do you go about that? What’s kind of the thesis?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. Maybe I’ll start with how I even came to about this problem because that drives a lot of the thesis. Prior to starting FINNY, I was in the private equity sector doing a lot of work on M&A acquisitions in the inorganic growth space, so for wealth managers who are buying and rolling up practices. I got firsthand viewership of how expensive inorganic growth was. And I think in 2024, there was about $0.5 trillion spent in rolling up and purchasing other RIAs. And so, all that money comes with heavy expectations of growth. And so, the writing was on the wall when I was coming at it from the investor perspective.
Just in 2022 alone, we had been advising on a ton of acquisitions, and then the market took a dip, and all of a sudden, the firms we were underwriting with 10%, 15% year-over-year growth. And when you stripped out market growth, where market growth is no longer a given, most of these firms were actually stagnating or flatlining, or declining. And so, it became very clear it felt like in 2022, the industry took a step back and said, “We have an organic growth problem after years and years of just being driven by market growth.” And so, coming from that side of the industry, I thought that we can use some of the new technology that was coming out, so data, large language models, to go about the process of client acquisition in a much more data-driven way.
And so, how can we apply AI and this new technology to give advisors the tools they need to find and attract new clients that they can serve better than anyone else? And that was really the thesis behind FINNY.
Brad Johnson: You know what’s very interesting about your thesis? Number one, I share it. I’m on board with that. So, it was literally last year, a year ago, out here at Future Proof, I sat in on Joe Duran’s session. And he talked about all of these crazy valuations. If you look at the map behind it, to your point, very expensive, flat if it weren’t for market growth. And also, they’re buying a depreciating asset because they have an aging clientele that’s starting to take money back out, not just accumulation, right?
Eden Ovadia: Right.
Brad Johnson: So, let’s get into the thesis. How are you starting to fix that issue from an RIA perspective?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. And just to add to that point, advisors that can figure out how to grow and build their own growth engine are seeing such significantly higher multiples on what they could sell their own business for. Number one fact that’ll drive multiples is your own organic growth. And so, even if inorganic growth is the goal, focusing on organic growth will pay off for itself multiple times over.
Brad Johnson: If you can give us a range of firm with organic growth, what’s the pop in multiple there? I know it’s going to depend on a lot of different factors, but what are we talking about there?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. I mean, you can see like 12X to 14X EBITDA when you’re growing really, really quickly, which is pretty insane compared to like half of that if you have regular flatlining growth. So, it’s pretty significant. A lot of firms, every, if you’ve seen one RIA, you’ve seen one RIA. So, I don’t want to speak in just broad trends, but I think every firm will see different types of organic growth weighed differently. But the firms that have been able to build their in-house growth engine that is scalable will then get rewarded the most for that, because that’s what private equity wants to see. They want to see if you can put a dollar in, get $10 out.
Brad Johnson: So, organic growth, there’s a lot of RIA advisors out there, they probably have different definitions for that. How would you define organic growth?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. So, organic growth for me is net new assets, whether that’s through client acquisitions, so net new clients, or bringing on net new assets from existing clients. So, expanding share of wallet. FINNY, I will say, focuses more on that first bucket. So, how do you bring on and attract new clients? And then sneak peek in the future, we’re also going to be helping advisors retain and bring on new assets from their existing client base.
Brad Johnson: Very cool. Well, let’s get into the, we’ve talked about the why.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah.
Brad Johnson: Let’s get into a little bit of the how, if you’re cool with that. So, how is FINNY going about doing this?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. So, we start with data. FINNY has a database of nearly everyone in North America over the age of 18. So, 300 million records. It’s updated daily with about 6 billion data points. And so, if you are an advisor, you can log into FINNY, you can go into FINNY, create an account, and you can say, “Hey, FINNY, help me find people who went to my high school, are business owners with over $5 million of revenue, and are looking up exit planning, keywords on why.” So, you can get really, really specific with that.
Brad Johnson: You can literally get into their search history?
Eden Ovadia: Yes. Through cookie data.
Brad Johnson: Wow.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah.
Brad Johnson: Okay.
Eden Ovadia: I’ll admit, prior to getting into this industry and starting this company, I had no idea the amount and the depth of information that was available, both publicly available and to license and purchase, which is we do both of those things. And so, it is an astounding amount of data we can aggregate about people without them necessarily signing up for FINNY. And so, you are in our database, I’m in our database, and we have things like callback information, education, background, estimated financials, your 401(k) data, what you’re googling online, and a whole bunch more.
Brad Johnson: Wow. Scary yet powerful.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah, exactly. I like to think we’re using our powers for good, not evil.
Brad Johnson: That’s good. So, I’m assuming part of everybody has a social profile, Facebook, Instagram, is the pictures and comments on there. Is that part of what’s aggregated or not?
Eden Ovadia: Everything. Everything online. One of our features that we just launched is called like a Deep Search, and you can base, let’s say, I pulled up your profile on FINNY in a deep search and in real time find every you’ve ever been mentioned online and summarize that kind of like writing a summary or a bio for you. And it’s like it’s pulled in real time. And so, it’s updated based off anything available online today.
Brad Johnson: All right. This will be fun. My name is Brad Johnson. There’s a few, probably a hundred thousand of us in the US. How does it know this Brad Johnson versus the five other Brad Johnsons that are there?
Eden Ovadia: So, you can find profiles in two ways. One, people can find you just by running a search based off of, “Oh, I want to find business owners in Kansas who are in this industry and are doing this kind of revenue or whatever it is,” and they’ll get a list of business owners, and you’ll be on that list and the political profile. Or people can actually look for you directly. And so, when you do a person search, you can search on things like your first name, your last name, your city, your job title. But you can also just search based off your email or your LinkedIn URL. And so, if I have you on LinkedIn and I want to get more information about you and actually start prospecting you, just copy your LinkedIn into FINNY, and then I can pull up your whole profile that way too.
Brad Johnson: It’s like you’ve thought about this.
Eden Ovadia: It’s almost like this is premeditated.
Brad Johnson: It’s like you had a thesis and went with it, you know?
Eden Ovadia: And then from the data, so one insight we learned really early on was to give financial advisors a database, they’re going to say, “Okay, now what?” So, that’s half the problem. And I think a lot of tools that I’ve tried to fix this problem, in the past, I’ve just given advisors the data and assumed that was a solution. But it turns out advisors don’t need more homework on their plate. The last thing they need is more work to do. The action tools take work off their plate. And so, FINNY will create this list for them. They’ll sort them based off propensity to convert. But then the last step, which is probably the biggest insight here, is actually, we have an entire marketing automation engine as well. We can create content personalized to every recipient and then automate and send that out on your behalf, too. So, it becomes an end-to-end marketing engine for every advisor.
Brad Johnson: So, you’ve mentioned business owner a few times. Is it just business owners or everyone?
Eden Ovadia: No, that’s just a good example. It’s everyone. So, it’s dentists, it’s pharmacists, it’s…
Brad Johnson: So, if I have a niche, I can go super deep in that niche. And I could say, “Who are the red wine lovers in Lawrence, Kansas that also are Chiefs fans?”
Eden Ovadia: Exactly. And you have a million dollars in assets.
Brad Johnson: Wild. Okay. So, let’s talk about some real-world use cases. I’m assuming at this point, with the valuations, do you have a few paying customers?
Eden Ovadia: A few, yeah.
Brad Johnson: Okay. What are some of the best stories you’ve heard so far of how people have used your software to actually bring on real-world clients?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. I have a few. I’d love to share these. There’s one advisory onboarded last month. He goes after stunt workers. The story there is his father was a stunt worker, and he saw his father deal with income irregularities, right? And so, there was never a stable cash flow, and so he who also happens to be stuntman on the side, built up a financial practice helping other stuntmen, specifically in Hollywood or others’ financial plan, and like help plan for their future and deal with those really intricacies of being in that field. So, he logs into FINNY, runs a campaign, searching for people that do match that criteria. He’s seeing such incredible engagement and response rates because it’s so targeted and so specific.
They’ve probably never received an email like that in the history of their careers. Like, “Hey, I’m a stuntman. My dad was a somewhat famous stuntman. This is how I can help you actually manage your finances.”
Brad Johnson: So, what’s really interesting, so what’s wild is I grew up in the insurance space, which was very heavily driven, direct response marketing, radio, TV, seminars. And over the years, I would see advisors that did it very differently, and as they say, the riches are in the niches. And I had one that wrote a book specifically for high-net-worth divorce. And gave that book to divorce attorneys. And there was another one that I’m aware of that just worked with optometrists. But they never had the technology to actually say, “Where do I find more of them?”
Eden Ovadia: That’s right.
Brad Johnson: So, essentially, it sounds like that’s what FINNY’s enabling.
Eden Ovadia: That’s exactly right. So, this was an example that was obviously a little bit exaggerated, but you can even be… I have an advisor in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He just looks for prospects who just bought property in the area and then reaches out to them with a Welcome to the Neighborhood message. And it’s super specific. He has come up with some great tax strategies to take advantage of the Wyoming tax code, but it’s exactly that, right? And so, it’s finding a niche and then FINNY can power the data to actually help you find people who match that niche. But they’ve already done the pre-work to know how to best serve that group of people.
Brad Johnson: I feel like I could just let you keep rolling with case studies here, and probably everybody out there be like, “Oh, okay, cool. You’re idea factory.”
Eden Ovadia: Yeah, exactly.
Brad Johnson: All right. I know we’ve got to save some time for scaling a business, which you’ve done very successfully in a short amount of time. But before we get off the organic growth, the marketing conversation, anything that we haven’t got into that if an advisor’s listening or watching out there, they’d want to know about?
Eden Ovadia: I think we covered more or less everything the platform does. The only thing I’ll say is we can serve really well the solo advisor, and then we can also help them scale out their business and empower it as they’re building out a team to leverage FINNY in. So, we’ve served one solo RIA. We also work with $10 billion, $20 billion RIA firms. And so, the cool thing about FINNY is there’s something for everyone, and it’s more or less off the shelf. And so, if you’re a solo RIA and you want to get started tomorrow, you can get up and running in 15 minutes. You don’t have to go through these crazy implementation timelines that a lot of these other tools might need. And so, we really built it to be like plug and play.
Brad Johnson: You just gave me an idea. Do you have any advisors that have typically used mail houses to do live seminars or dinner seminars? Because it sounds like essentially they can create their own mail list using your firm. Do you have anybody doing that?
Eden Ovadia: Tons. So, advertising for webinars, seminars, dinners, events is a huge part of what people do on FINNY, especially if they’re doing really niche, specialty events. So, if you want to do webinar or a seminar to women venture capitalists in California, we’re the best resource for you to actually find that list of people. And one thing that we actually do that I hadn’t mentioned is we actually can do mailers, too. So, handwritten direct mailers, something we can do on our platform as well beyond just email, LinkedIn, AI voicemail, and mailers. Those are the four main modes that you can actually outbound people on the pod.
Brad Johnson: So, you will actually print the mailers as well?
Eden Ovadia: We have a vendor, but yes. And handwrite them.
Brad Johnson: So, it looks like it’s a handwritten note. Wow.
Eden Ovadia: It’s a robot arm with a gel pen. Pretty crazy.
Brad Johnson: Hey, because why not? Why not? Very cool. Okay. Well, let’s get to scaling. So, as we were talking before we hit record here, one of the things I’ve found that just great successful advisors struggle with is how to transition from the single player game where it’s all on them and they kind of hit that glass ceiling of success, start to red line out. There’s not more hours in the day. So, the next evolution is how do I start to scale out my team, multiple advisors? Now, I have to deal with personnel, org charts, structure. You’ve gone from zero to 15 team members in just over a year. Let’s talk about it. What’s worked? What hasn’t? What have you learned?
Eden Ovadia: I’m still learning. I will say, so far we’ve done a pretty good job at building a team, a really strong team. Our team is based in New York, and I have taken the old-school approach of actually pushing for an in-person team. As a former employee of a firm, I know what I was like at work when I was in the office and when I was at home working remote. And for me, it was a bit of a different experience. And as an entry-level worker, I really enjoyed learning with the team and the culture that brought on. And so, early days, we decided to make FINNY an in-person team despite being a tech company. So, that was a bit contrarian, and I think that’s paid off a lot too, but it has really significantly shortened up the pool of potential people we can hire.
So, that was like one barrier we had to think about. But, yeah, aside from that, I think the number one thing we look for is a culture fit. And so, is this someone that you can spend 50 hours a week with and just genuinely like enjoying their presence and their company and really get along with? And when I was in consulting and I was recruiting into consulting, the one tip or the one trick that people would tell me is the person on the other side of the interview is doing the airport test. Have you heard about this test?
Brad Johnson: No.
Eden Ovadia: So, the airport test is if you guys have to be on a work trip and your flight gets delayed and you have to be at the airport with this person for six hours, would you be really upset or could you just hang with them? And so, everyone you want to hire has to pass the airport test.
Brad Johnson: So, I mean, you’re on the Do Business Do Life podcast. Obviously, that cause is very close to my heart. I mean, it was a selfish pursuit. That was one of the reasons Triad exists. Our litmus test for that is, would I break bread with you at the family dinner table, regardless of whether or not we were doing business together?
Eden Ovadia: I love that, actually.
Brad Johnson: And so, it’s like kind of a different version of the airport.
Eden Ovadia: Hire bar, though. I feel like to bring home to family, it’s like a higher bar from the airport.
Brad Johnson: That’s true. That’s probably true.
Eden Ovadia: That’s great.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Well, I mean, you were just married. I have three kids. Been married to my high school sweetheart for 20 years. So, if you think about that, that is a higher bar. But eventually I’m sure you’ll be there, so that’s very cool. So, what else have you learned? Let’s go back to the remote versus in-person. And I feel like obviously COVID put a scratch in a lot of people’s records, and it was almost like, I’ll say in some instances, the teams revolted, the employees revolted. They’re like, “We’re not going back.” But also, I found as we’ve kind of time has passed since that time period, I feel like there’s this human need for connection in the workplace. What have you learned? It’s obviously made it a little tougher to build a tech company if everybody has to be centralized. But what’s the positive benefits that have come out of that?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. It’s been incredible. I mean, I have two families. I have my blood family, but then I have my work family that I actually spend more time with than my blood family at this point. And so, just seeing that culture come out of that, like having fills in these friendships and these relationships with people that we work with, and you spend all this time with. But then just seeing how some of our engineers have become friends, and my co-founder was actually a bridesmaid at my wedding, and I’m going to be a bridesmaid at her wedding coming up next year. They truly have become family, and they’ve come to my dinners. They’re at my family dinners all the time that we actually all know each other’s families.
And so, that’s been really incredible, and I think it’s really hard to do virtual. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I really think it’s hard to build that level of just understanding and just that level of culture when you’re trying to do it remote. Some teams have done a great job at it, but I think for us, the hack was just building that sense of fostering community in person.
Brad Johnson: I promise that has been one of the reasons you’ve had success. We’re at Future Proof. I just had a chance to have a conversation with Daniel Crosby, and that was one of the things we talked about was culture, which is definitely missing in a lot of finance, and I promise it’s missing in a lot of tech startups or non-existent. It’s the grind mentality. And what we talked about is culture has a couple of meanings. And it goes back to culture, root word, because in Latin it’s actually cultivate or grow. So, you think about a team. Absolutely, you want that as a founder, but other root word is cult. And a good cult, right? For good, as you said, not for bad. And that is it stems back to worship and shared beliefs and rituals, and you put those two together, we’re in a transient work environment. People switch jobs all the time. Like, what’s going to keep them there? Community.
Eden Ovadia: Exactly.
Brad Johnson: Right? So, are there rituals you all do as a team? You mentioned family, but are there certain things you do to bring that together?
Eden Ovadia: Absolutely. And I actually love that because I’ve heard within the tech world I’ve heard say that like the best founders of tech companies are actually like cult leaders, essentially, and they’ve been able to build cults amongst their employees and have a cult-like following, and I really prescribed for that notion. And so, I think when an employee joins a startup, they’re taking a risk on the idea, but more so, they’re taking a risk on the founders. And so, this applies to anyone, not just a tech founder, but anyone who’s looking to scale a business. You need to instill belief in yourself, like you’re going to be able to execute on the vision that you’re telling them that you’re going to achieve because they’re just pinning themselves to your wagon, right?
And so, they want to believe that you’re going to be able to take this business to the next level at every single time, and they’re going to grow with your success. So, one of the things that I did, it’s going to sound a little crazy, but I moved into my office, so I live in my office.
Brad Johnson: You went with the Elon plan, just set a cot over in the corner, basically?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. It’s a little bit more than a cot, but we have this loft space in Soho in Manhattan, and the joke is it’s a massive open space, and there are two conference rooms, and one of the conference rooms I turned into my bedroom. I’ve lived in my office for the last 14 months now, and now actually, next week we’re growing up and I’m moving into my own adult apartment, and we’re moving into a bigger office too, but I think, as insane as that…
Brad Johnson: Wait, is your spouse invited to…? Okay, cool. Just making sure.
Eden Ovadia: My spouse lives in the office with me as well. Thank God he understands, but.
Brad Johnson: He does not work at the company, though.
Eden Ovadia: No, he does not work at the company. That would be a recipe for disaster. Some spouses can do it. Some married people start amazing companies. I mean, I was talking to Liz and Doug Fritz, like they’re incredible, but I could not do that. It would be a recipe for disaster.
Brad Johnson: I’m with you on that one, too. My wife would not enjoy that experience.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah, it would be like the worst idea. But, anyways, one of the things we did to foster that sense of like cult almost is by definition of me living there, I was the first one and last one out every single day. So, I woke up there and fell asleep there. And I think as crazy as it sounds, a lot of our early employees kind of looked up to that, and realized how serious I was, the kind of like a personal…
Brad Johnson: Commitment, really.
Eden Ovadia: Commitment I was making to the company, and that I think inspired them and would show them how much I believed in it as well. Like, I wasn’t just leading by saying. I was doing all these things, but I was actually doing it but committing to it.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. One of the things we talk about at Triad is be your word. And it’s one thing for a founder to say, “This is really important, team.” It’s another thing for them to just see the actions and let those speak for themselves.
Eden Ovadia: Exactly.
Brad Johnson: So, it shows you like you kind of burned the boats behind you, for lack of a better term.
Eden Ovadia: Exactly.
Brad Johnson: Sorry. I’m just picturing your husband like walking out in a robe with a coffee and looking around and seeing people work at the office.
Eden Ovadia: So, I’ll tell you a funny story. I feel like both my husband and my CTO will like die that I’m sharing the story, but it’s fine. I think last year at Miami Future Proof or one of these other conferences, I was gone for the whole week. It was a Friday evening, and I was landing pretty late. It was like 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM on a Friday, and I was coming back into my office / my apartment. My husband was waiting at the door with roses to say that he missed me so much, and my CTO was in the back having a hackathon right behind him, and they had just ordered a pizza. They hadn’t realized that, like at that time, I was coming home. And so, they were dying of laughter.
It was one of the most hilarious interactions where you have my husband with a bouquet of roses, my CTO like hacking away with his pizza. And he’s like, “I’ll get out of your hair. Sorry,” and like proceeds to leave, but it was just a hilarious instance. It’s one of those things.
Brad Johnson: I mean, you were made for Do Business Do Life podcast. I mean, perfect guest. That’s true integration right there.
Eden Ovadia: Exactly.
Brad Johnson: Well, very cool. Well, I know our time here is short. Anything else? Like, if we circle back to the scaling, obviously, you’ve created a really cool culture that seems like is attracting people. Anything else you’d share for advisors out there trying to replicate that success?
Eden Ovadia: It’s a good question. These are some of the best advice I got from Y Combinator was hire slow, fire fast. It sounds cutthroat, but it will save you so much time, money, and resources. When you’re a business owner, the number one resource you have is your time. And so, it’s so time-intensive to hire and then to onboard and making those types of mistakes can be very costly and so taking your time to bring on the right people. But then right away, if they’re not the right fit, don’t just try to drag it on and just try to finish that as early as possible. B players will hire C players to hire D players, and I’ve seen that in my friends’ companies to be very true. And so, just keep the threshold of talent really, really high and don’t just hire out of necessity, which is really tempting to. Right now, my company has 15 people. We need to be at 30 tomorrow.
Brad Johnson: So, you’re going to have to hire a little faster.
Eden Ovadia: We’re going to have to hire a little faster, but the reason we haven’t just jumped there is because we’re keeping the threshold for talent really, really high. So, we’re taking in a lot of pain right now just by virtue of being understaffed or being really thoughtful by the people we bring on.
Brad Johnson: Well, I subscribe to that thesis fully. We’ve seen that. We’ve felt that at Triad. We’ve messed it up along the way. How hard was it for you? I’m assuming at this point you’ve had to let somebody go. How hard was the first one? Was that tough for you? I mean, it’s easy to say, hard to do.
Eden Ovadia: It was terrible. There’s no other way of saying it. Like, it was truly terrible. This is my first time that I’m a business owner. I was an employee before, and so I’ve never had to have these conversations. I’ve never even given feedback until this company. And so, I’ve never had to have those hard conversations. I mean, I was on the receiving end of feedback, but I’ve never had to been the one to dole it out. And that’s really a skill. It’s a skill that I’m working on. Oftentimes, I’m hiring people that are older than me, and just that creates like an interesting dynamic. And so, honestly, it’s a skill that I am actively trying to work on, which is like give good feedback to everyone that I work with, and then have those tough conversations when it’s time to. So, I don’t have any words of wisdom there. I’m still learning.
Brad Johnson: Well, you know what I’ve picked up already in this conversation is your humility. You’re like, “I’m still figuring it out. I’m still learning it.” It’s like we say, you’ve never arrived at Triad. You’re a lifelong learner. And I love that. I mean, same thing, like I learn something new every day, and I think the founders I’ve seen with the most success have some form of humility, and the team respects that. It’s not like I’m perfect. I’ve got it all figured out. It’s like, I’m here with you, too. I’m here to grow. I’m here to learn. So, I can promise you that shows up in an amazing way to the team.
Eden Ovadia: I really appreciate that. Thank you. Actually, that means a lot. So, I appreciate you saying that.
Brad Johnson: And obviously, you’re all about back to Y Combinator and some of the advice you’ve gotten. So, it’s almost like I must do this for the company to arrive where we need to go. So, it’s kind of like I have no other choice but to take that.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. I think Y Combinator, me and my two co-founders are all first-time founders. This is all our first time really doing this, and so I think Y Combinator taught us to these really amazing frameworks for building a company. And more specifically, they taught us what not to do, so what pitfalls to avoid as a founder. And they definitely don’t have like a recipe for success. There’s no path, there’s no journey that’s deterministic, that if you do this plus this, you’ll get to success. But there are certain things you can avoid doing, like hiring too fast or scaling too quickly when the team’s not ready. And so, Y Combinator has been an awesome resource just for us as a framework to grow for sure.
Brad Johnson: You shared one, which is amazing.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah.
Brad Johnson: Are there others that just come to mind of here’s what not to do, or here’s what to do?
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. I think like number one, Y Combinator’s slogan is “Build something people want.” Sounds so silly and so reductionist, but ultimately, what they’ll tell you and what they’ll ask you every single day for the first six months is, “Do you have 10 people that love what you do?” And it sounds silly. I’m like, “Yeah, I have a hundred customers.” They’re like, “No, no, no. Do you have 10 people that love what you do? They would quit their job and like stop their business if you stop working with them. Like, you have 10 people that love what you do,” and would use those words. And just like that framework of customer obsession has really informed a lot of the way that we work.
And so, for the first $1 million of revenue, me and my co-founder onboarded every single client live. We did spend an hour with every single one, and we did regular feedback sessions every two weeks with every single one. So, for the first eight months, our entire calendars were just talking to customers. I wasn’t talking to investors. I wasn’t doing anything else. I was just talking to customers literally from like 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM. That was my entire calendar, and I think that helped us a ton, and we’ve taken it to an extreme. Obviously, people have to run their business, but just being customer-obsessed and really, really understanding when it comes to wealth managers, understanding what pain points are really solving for your clients, and so then you’re able to replicate that for others in a really great way, I think, well, is a great recipe.
Brad Johnson: So good. I love that. I believe it was Jeff Bezos that coined customer obsession, or did he just borrow it? You might know better than me. You’re in that world much more than me.
Eden Ovadia: I might be stealing it from him.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. No, we call it member obsession, like we subscribe to that fully. And the thing is easy to say, hard to do. You have to be fully committed to actually deliver on that. So, do you have 10 customers? How did you track that? Like, what was your metric they love? Like, 10 out of 10? One out of 10? Like, how did you figure that out?
Eden Ovadia: Just ask them for 10, it’s pretty easy to get to. I mean, this isn’t business scale. We do a lot of like customer usage, but I think a lot of companies, especially early stage, will like overcome, “Look at this, we’ll have these customer dashboards,” and be like, “Our usage is ticking up 5%,” and it’s like, “Oh, well, have you talked to them today?”
Brad Johnson: Just, did you call them and ask them? Yeah.
Eden Ovadia: Because like one of the, I’m going to butcher this, but there’s some famous founder, I think it’s one of maybe McDonald’s or someone who one day of every month will actually go and work at one of the stores. And I don’t think it’s McDonald’s, but I’m forgetting exactly who it is.
Brad Johnson: I know. I’ve heard the same story, but it’s slipping me as well.
Eden Ovadia: I’m blanking out on who it is, but…
Brad Johnson: Well, actually, I know the Savannah Bananas, who have blown up the baseball team.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Johnson: I think Jesse Cole’s the founder. He will literally answer the phone when people call for tickets.
Eden Ovadia: Exactly.
Brad Johnson: So, I mean, there’s an example right there.
Eden Ovadia: Exactly. And so, I think, like the founders and the executives that do that, see. They just either learn so much more. Oh, I’ll tell you, Jeff Bezos, very famously, was in a meeting once and talking about like customer success and support. And they were showing his metrics that our average wait time to call to talk to support is one minute, but then there was a slew of complaints they were getting that it was a 20, 30-minute wait time. And so, the metrics were not adding up to the complaints. And so, in a meeting full of his executive team, they were claiming that they got it down to a minute, and he was like, “This doesn’t add up.” He said, “Everyone, be quiet. I’m going to call our support number and I’m going to put it on speaker.” And he was on hold for 20 minutes. Actually, just check. Just do the thing. Don’t just rely on the metrics and what everyone is telling you. As a founder, it’s your responsibility to actually just talk to the customers, do the thing, test the thing, and make sure that it’s working.
Brad Johnson: I love that. Just jump in the trenches. That’s very cool. And this time has flown. What an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for carving out the time at Future Proof. I just have one final question, and I would love to hear your definition, although we’ve heard a little bit already. What does do business, do life mean to you?
Eden Ovadia: That’s a really good question. I mean, I think from our brief conversation, I think you’ve seen that my business is my life and my life is my business. I’ve maybe taken it to an extreme, but I’ve taken this business. It’s 100% of my life, but also, I’ve integrated it with my personal life too, and I’ve built up a great support system, and my colleagues have become my best friends. And my best friends know everything there. No, but my work and I’ve met my team, and so it’s just, for me, it just means 100% integrated life and work. Maybe not for everyone, but it works for me. And as long as I’m having fun in both my life and my work, I know I’m doing something right.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. Hey, your husband’s still bringing flowers.
Eden Ovadia: Yeah.
Brad Johnson: So, you must be doing something right.
Eden Ovadia: Exactly. Yeah.
Brad Johnson: Well, thank you so much for the time. I’m excited to follow FINNY’s journey and see what you guys build.
Eden Ovadia: I appreciate that. Thank you. This was great.
Brad Johnson: Take care.
Eden Ovadia: Cool.
