Tom:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Lighthouse London Podcast. We have another startup story today, a new fresh young startup here. I’ve got Lukas Zorner here.
Lukas Zorner : Hello.
Tom:
How’s it going today?
Lukas Zorner : It’s going really well. Thanks for having me.
Tom:
Excellent. Yeah. Great to have you in. As always I think the best place to start is if you can tell us a little about you. You run Mobillity. You’re the CEO and founder. Is that right?
Lukas Zorner : Exactly. Yeah.
Tom:
Great. Let’s start off with a little history of you yourself and the company.
Lukas Zorner : Yeah, absolutely. I’m basically an Austrian who grew up in Germany. I lived almost my entire life in Germany. Started to study there. Got a degree in business administration. Before graduation, I actually moved to the UK to start to work. I started to work in banking here in the UK kind of in Canary Wharf and I was in the team advising power companies, energy companies like EDF for example across Germany, Austria, but also in the UK. All of the things were going well, but after some time I realised now I have knowledge about the energy market. When I come home and open the door to my apartment and I look at the pile of bills and especially energy bills on my table, I don’t get what’s going on.
Tom:
I think a lot of people can agree with that, right?
Lukas Zorner : Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of what I realised. If I have this problem although I work in this industry, there must be thousands of people out there who have even worst problems than these. We did the research and it’s not thousands of households, it’s millions of households who have this particular problem out there.
Tom:
Of all ages as well I guess.
Lukas Zorner : Yes, exactly. Then we realised okay, it’s not only energy. You have this across water, insurance products, banking products. We have all lost the clue. The big companies who give you the contracts they actually bat on the fact that you either don’t have the time to manage all of this and understand what’s going on or you don’t know what’s actually going on so you don’t have the knowledge to do it. We realised okay, the ordinary household is being ripped off by the big energy companies, by the big companies out there and we said, “This needs to stop.” We realised there’s one gap in the market which is that you can look at the customer’s entire finances, so his entire personal finances, and a lot of solutions which are out there.
They show you pie chart of what’s going on in your finances and that’s a good start. We said from what we see and from what we did in the validation with our own customers, consumers want to get one step forward. They want to look at the particular pie within this pie chart and actually improve it. We decided okay, our mission needs to be we find out where customers are overspending, where things are going wrong. We tell them that they are going wrong, but on top of that we actually fix it for our customers. Completely impartial, completely personalised. Whenever we spot something, we fix it for the customer.
Tom:
Because I think banks are trying to do a lot of these stuff these days, right? They’re trying to show you a lot more information and help you be smart about what you’re spending, but this is the extra step on top, right?
Lukas Zorner : Exactly.
Tom:
Presumably that impartiality jumps out quite a lot when you read your messaging on your website which I was on the other day and having seen the new one’s great by the way. It made me want to sign up which is really cool. That will happen quite soon. I guess you’re offering the next step on top which is really going to aid the customer, right?
Lukas Zorner : Yup. That’s kind of getting the long-term customer relationship because we realised you don’t want to look at your finances everyday. You just want to know that there’s someone in the background making sure that the things are going right for you so that he or she then optimises it. We want to be this person. We want to be in the background for our customers helping them and being their point of contact to do that and improve their finances.
Tom:
Talk to us a bit about the kind of validation steps you run when you were in the earlier stages of the business.
Lukas Zorner : Yes. We screwed up in the beginning.
Tom:
That’s always nice to hear and hear those sort of stories.
Lukas Zorner : What happened is we had the idea and we know that the problem exist there. What we decided together with Julien who is the co-founder and CTO, “Let’s build a web app.” We went there and said, “Okay. This is web app charts, pie charts, graphs, whatever you’ve got there.” I remember the day because we were in The Ministry of Startups in the co-working space and we were in the basement and then we kind of hit this moment where we looked and said, “Let’s take a step back. What are we actually doing here?” We realised this is not the way to move forward because it will not reach the really proper product market fit. It doesn’t get to the people. They don’t understand what’s going on.
We took a step back and said, “Okay. Look, actually what we need to do is get more validation. Go out there. Ask the customers and find out what their problems are.” Kind of the typical validation process. Luckily we were in the Startupbootcamp I think last September it started and being part of the Startupbootcamp it’s kind of really a pressure cooker where especially in the beginning you need to do more validation. You’re being ripped apart in the first week and they kind of show you what’s going wrong and you realise that if an outsider says who doesn’t even fully understand FinTech, but if they show you what’s going wrong, you realise there are a lot of assumptions we didn’t really test. We went out there. We did surveys with 250 people.
We had face-to-face interviews and really long discussions with people which are not friends, but random people finding out what’s going on.
Tom:
Doing it the right way basically.
Lukas Zorner : Then it hit us because what we realised there is consumers don’t really download apps anymore. They just don’t. It takes so much to build a good application and get it out there to the people and get them to download it. We said this is not really agile for us and we need to do something different. One of the questions we asked our customers is what are the apps you use most of the time when you’re on your phones? It’s Facebook Messenger. It’s WhatsApp. It’s WeChat. It’s kind of these existing distribution messaging platforms which already exist. Then we kind of said that’s it. If we can tap into this network and build our solution based on this, this is something different. This is something new and it’s something from what we see so far customers actually enjoy using.
Tom:
That’s great. I mean because I was going to talk about that because on your site the call to action is sign up via Facebook Messenger which I have seen sign up via Facebook before obviously, but that specifically I was quite intrigued and that’s like a really interesting take on why you’ve done that based on consumer need.
Lukas Zorner : Exactly.
Tom:
Yeah. That’s cool. That so far has been a good way in?
Lukas Zorner : Absolutely. Currently we’re managing quite a lot of customers who signed up. Of course and I’m honest about it. There’s kind of this problem and I think that’s one of the challenges we face in this entire FinTech industry, acquiring customer’s trust. In the beginning, what we did is we didn’t talk enough about security. We didn’t talk enough about how it works. Now if you jump in to the bot, you will see that we actually explain quite a lot of what’s going on also in the background because if we think from a consumer perspective, that’s what you want to need to know. You want to understand what’s happening with the security, how is the data flowing in all of these things because we touch sensitive data, your bank data.
It’s something new, but it means you just need to explain more and be more open about on what you’re actually doing. That’s what we saw worked with customers.
Tom:
I saw the FAQs on there and the questions around Facebook security and that kind of thing because obviously that’s big in people’s mind in the moment. The fact that you’re signing up via that platform means that people could potentially see your bank account which obviously you are going to do. Putting their trust there is very important. Apart from the kind of sign up process, what are your other biggest learnings regarding the validation stages? What else changed?
Lukas Zorner : I think what we learned is that the problem we are solving can actually be backed up. We see numbers of customers who are overspending. In the beginning we knew that there is a problem there, but now we can quantify it and say, “Okay. This is kind of the average problem we got for the customer we can solve.” Now a couple of months later and the product works and we see that the numbers actually start to align. You see we actually can save people money and we do save them already money right now. It’s a good feeling. The first saving we did for a customer with the team it was almost like a champagne celebration because an idea now became reality and that’s pretty cool.
Tom:
Yeah. Cool. I supposed it’s a slightly different take on that because I mean you’re a business so you’re looking to make money, right? At the same time the idea that you are doing good for people and saving them cash in a situation where they previously probably couldn’t must be very nice to experience.
Lukas Zorner : Yes.
Tom:
That’s cool. It sounds like quite a complicated thing to make as a product. You’ve got a CTO onboard, is that right?
Lukas Zorner : Yes, exactly. Julien is the co-founder and CTO.
Tom:
What’s about the rest of the team? Is there a lot of development stuff in-house that you …
Lukas Zorner : Yeah. We do everything in-house.
Tom:
Got it.
Lukas Zorner : We’ve got Michael who is our software engineer. He’s also an interesting case because he joined us as an intern really in the beginning and then kind of two months later we realised okay, if we let him leave, then we would screw ourselves because he’s amazing. He’s now been part of the team kind of on the tech side. Asakala is the UX designer. She co-doing all of this. For example, for the bank integration where we can actually get the overview of the bank accounts across different banks from the customers, we decided not to do that ourselves because there are people out there who do it better. Our party were using is called Salt Edge. These guys have bank level security in place. They’ve got the encryption.
They have a different standard than we will be able to provide right now. We took a partner onboard who actually can do this, who can show to the customer we are trusted, we are managing a lot of data and we’ve been there for a long time. We decided this is the way to go and so far it works very well.
Tom:
You don’t want to reinvent the wheel or anything like that and provide services that are trustworthy. It’s always good to go down that route.
Lukas Zorner : Yeah.
Tom:
We try and hand-off to those kind of things where difficult problems have been solved well already. How long has it been developing it so far? How old is the company now?
Lukas Zorner : We founded the company in May last year, but then as I said, kind of the web app stuff we did costed us almost half a year. Building the product you can use right now on the website this has been built since October. It really took us six months to get there, but now we’re ready to go out there, ready for customers to come onboard and save their money.
Tom:
The big push right now is now you’ve kind of proven the product works and tested it enough. It’s time to get more people onboard, right?
Lukas Zorner : Absolutely.
Tom:
How was your launch strategy previously? You got like small numbers on initially just to do testing?
Lukas Zorner : Yeah. Of course, you’ve got the kind of the group of friends and family who just test it. Especially in the beginning when not all of the things work yet, you test with these guys. Then we went out there and we’ve got quite a long huge subscriber list of people on the waiting list. Now we’re adding them onto the platform step-by-step and really getting them onboard. We kind of tested with more people on the waiting list because what we are doing, as I said before, is sensitive data. We needed to make sure what we do really works. It’s perfect. The thing that’s different in FinTech because in FinTech and MVP looks different than MVP in another industry especially because it’s so sensitive.
Tom:
Well, if you’re trusting of your money, you don’t want something that is looking half done.
Lukas Zorner : Exactly.
Tom:
How did you go about growing that list? How have you been marketing yourselves?
Lukas Zorner : I think what helped us quite a lot is really Startupbootcamp. We’re out there going to different events. We had a big demo day at the end of the programme which gave us a strong boost. Additionally, from that also yeah, kind of growing in the community of money saving people and kind of saying we want to be the voice for the consumer because so many issues we are addressing and so many issues we are trying to solve. I think it’s something everyone can relate to because when everyone who’s also listening to the podcast comes home, they will know what I mean by that pile of bills on the table. It’s kind of going out there and saying, “Hey, we’re doing something new and building this brand within the market.”
Tom:
Is there much competition doing similar stuff in the sector or is this a relatively new thing?
Lukas Zorner : What you’ve got is of course you’ve got existing companies like for example Money Dashboard is a good overview there who provide you with the charts and everything, giving you a good picture. They’ve done a good work in getting more personal finance into the hands of the people. Of course in the other side you’ve got things like price comparison websites who have also been existing for a long time and who are out there and have helped Britain save money. What we said is now the next step is more automation and a focus on full impartiality because I personally believe that if I’m a consumer and if I want to trust someone, I need to make sure that this person is on my side. We decided okay, this needs to be reflected in the business model.
This is where the idea of the profit-sharing model started with our customers because the more money we can save our customers, yes, the more money we earn. This means that incentives are finally aligned. I think this is kind of the important step forward now to make sure that you can be a trusted financial assistant for customers.
Tom:
How is it that you made cash out of it? What’s the model there?
Lukas Zorner : Yes. For example, if we save you 100 pounds, we’re taking a 10% share of the savings we can achieve for you, so taking 10 pounds out of this.
Tom:
If you don’t save any money, then you guys don’t get paid presumably.
Lukas Zorner : Exactly. Then we don’t get paid.
Tom:
Win-win situation in assuming you save money.
Lukas Zorner : Yes, exactly that.
Tom:
Cool. That’s a nice way to do it actually. Again that must go quite far to building trust of people that you only make cash if they save money.
Lukas Zorner : Yes, exactly. Because what you see is that if I trust someone with my data, I want to make sure that he … I want to understand how he makes actually the money because if he doesn’t make the money for me, he makes the money from something else which is either affiliate and commissioning fees which makes the kind of impartiality problematic at least or selling of data which also should never happen and so we decided that this is the only way to go and creating something to grow together with the users.
Tom:
Awesome. I wanted to talk about kind of the tone you guys have set on the website with the copy. I mean I found it nice in a sector that talks about stats and facts and is … It seems like the expert gains trust in that way, but is quite impersonal. Your tone is very friendly and like talking one-on-one with someone and talking in language that I think connects quite well with a younger audience I supposed. I’m presuming that’s done on purpose, right?
Lukas Zorner : Exactly. Our target market at the moment is more or less millennials up to 35 year olds, 40 year old people because this is something where we can help them right now. This is also the copy on the website. You see it’s more friendly, more open and kind of inclusive. That’s something we worked on quite a lot.
Tom:
Why did you pick that group to start with?
Lukas Zorner : Because we are solving a problem for everyone, but we need to start somewhere. There are two reasons basically because this group of people is more tech affluent. They are more open towards these solutions and actually trying them out. Because for example, if I give it to my dad, he would have many, many more problems or not even for example have Facebook. This is something which we will …
Tom:
My dad doesn’t have Facebook by the way so yeah.
Lukas Zorner : Exactly. If you look at this from this perspective, this will take another couple of years until we get and can address the full market. Second of all, also because this group of people they need to save money because either they’re at college. They are at universities. They need to save money or they’re just starting to save for a mortgage or for a house, whatever you have there, starting their first job. We are really looking at a target market which has this problem massively. That’s kind of the way we decided to go and go out to this market. Of course, what I forget we are a young team. For us it’s also more obvious because it’s our market, it’s our friends, our peers so we know better of what’s going on there.
Tom:
It’s a good place to start definitely. Everyone shares these problems, but working with people that you can talk to over a coffee or a drink afterwards is always handy as well.
Lukas Zorner : Exactly.
Tom:
What have you found the kind of biggest challenges so far in any aspect of building this business?
Lukas Zorner : I think it’s trust because as I said before, FinTech is a little bit different because you touch the customer’s data and acquiring or gaining the trust by the customer is quite difficult. In the beginning our website was not really great. The product we had was not great. It didn’t explain enough. This doesn’t create trust. Now that we focus more on the branding, on the website and explaining more, things are improving really, really well which is good. Now it’s also building the trust because when we did the validation, what we found out which is quite obvious, but we can back it up with numbers now, is that you’re using a product if a friend refers it to you. If you refer it to your colleagues, they are more likely to use it.
This also builds trusts because if you trust us and then tell other people to use us, they will trust us much, much more from the beginning than if we acquire them just straight from the web or somewhere.
Tom:
Have you kind of built any strategies around encouraging sharing among friends and that kind of stuff?
Lukas Zorner : Yes. What we have is an invitation code system for example where you can give your personal invitation code to other friends so they can sign up and get a good amount of free service from Mobillity. Encouraging earlier to help us to come into the platform and then also we have public invitation codes which we are sharing with a friend.
Tom:
I believe we have one now.
Lukas Zorner : Exactly. Of course, if you go to www.Mobillity.co, so dot C-O, and you can use the invitation code “lighthouse.”
Tom:
Awesome. Everyone should it give a go. We’ll put the link in the show notes and we’ll repeat that later as well for good measure. What have you personally learned the most about all this?
Lukas Zorner : That’s a good question.
Tom:
Maybe a tough one because it’s going to be quite a lot.
Lukas Zorner : It’s quite a lot. For me because I’m quite young, I’m 24 years old, everything is new. You really need to go out there and be honest and be open. I think one of the most difficult aspects is especially if you have never managed people before, managing people from different backgrounds with different views on things. There’s no right or wrong. You just need to find out how to interact with a lot of different people and this takes time. We got with the team very far and kind of our team is amazing and great now, but it’s not that kind of the theory you sit down together and everything works from day one. It’s just not the case. It’s quite a challenge, but it’s a super interesting one because now things go much, much more smoothly.
The team has really kind of aligned. We meet the deadlines. We set internal goals.
Tom:
That’s awesome.
Lukas Zorner : It’s amazing to see how things start to progress.
Tom:
Presumably your role now is a different world to where you were in banking before.
Lukas Zorner : I would fully agree. I would fully agree.
Tom:
Probably better?
Lukas Zorner : Yes. I enjoy it more. I wake up in the morning and I’m honest about it and I enjoy every single part of what I’m doing. There are the downsides and there are bad days where you have investors dropping out one day before signing something and we had these things. What keeps me up in the morning is to see now we save people money and it works and it will never be just a ride going up. There will always be downs, but that’s life.
Tom:
How did it go through getting funding for this? Was that a difficult process to go through?
Lukas Zorner : I will say yes and no. We got the money from Startupbootcamp which is relatively small. It’s 15,000 euros which brings you to a good level and allows you to do more validation and kind of it gives you breathing room. That was pretty good. Then we raised now on [inaudible 00:19:20] together with our advisors and outside investors. Throughout the Startupbootcamp programme we built an advisory board with people who come from the financial sector or from kind of the legal sector and support us in growing the business. These guys are also investors now into the company which is definitely a very, very strong boost. Then you’ve got the network of close family and friends, but also external investors who are now onboard pushing this out.
Tom:
Your investors presumably have a lot of help to give you as well as mentors and advisors for the business?
Lukas Zorner : Absolutely.
Tom:
Having that stuff is really important, right? I mean everyone we chat to. It’s a tough thing to do on yourself especially like we get a lot of like young people come through and starting companies. I’m a bit older and still find it hard to run a business. There’s so much to think about. Having that network to fall back on must be a massive, massive help.
Lukas Zorner : It’s a tremendous help because it especially comes well on the days where it’s not going well because you have someone to fall back to. They can tell you okay, this is normal and every one of us experiences this. These things just happen. Now look at the things from this perspective and fix it. I think that’s very strong. Also, together with Julien, the co-founder, I’m honest, I would not be able to have founded the company without him like a, because of the technical part. That’s one piece, but the main issue is you need to have someone when things go bad and you can go in the night and drink a beer and just say, “You know what? Tomorrow let’s start fresh again.” Someone kind of this friendship. That is just amazing.
Tom:
I fully agree. We’re these two founders of Lighthouse as well. It’s always worked very well for me. I mean people have built businesses on their own and I’m in awe of them really because that’s … I mean that takes a certain type of person, right? It’s very difficult. I couldn’t do that. I think having someone else to help there is massive. Talk a bit about Startupbootcamp. Who would that be suitable for and how might people get involved in that sort of thing?
Lukas Zorner : Yes. I think we were the prime example for that because we were first time founders who don’t have the strong network in the FinTech world, in the financial world, who also needed a little bit of money. I think we are a perfect example for that. I think it’s a 10, 12 weeks programme where you start being agile by the book, so validation phases and going out there and doing all of this, the dealing method basically. I think it’s suitable for almost everyone, but the core piece is meet the people. For example, we met the people and we found out we like them very much and working with them we enjoyed it. We said, “Okay. They accepted us. We get a good access to an amount of mentors and networks and investors. We also can get access to corporate partners through the networks.”
For us it was a win-win-win situation. We said yeah, definitely let’s do that. We don’t regret for a single, single day.
Tom:
That’s awesome. How do you apply to that? What’s the process there?
Lukas Zorner : We actually met at an event. They’re doing events from time to time in London and in other cities around the world where they have kind of an open house. You can just go there and we met Greg from Startupbootcamp there. He said, “Okay. Cool. What are you guys doing?” Then he said, “That fits quite well in what kind of the companies we want to have so just apply on the website.” I think the programme, it’s globally, several locations, but the London programme is where we attended to. It started in September last year.
Tom:
Cool. You mentioned kind of growth is happening soon. What else is on the radar for you guys? What’s the kind of short and medium term plan?
Lukas Zorner : I think growth everyday. That’s what we need to show and saving people money. Both growing the amount of users we have on the platform, but also growing the amount of money we save customers. I think these two bits and pieces are quite important and then raising funding later this year a seat around which we need to find to get more people in our team who can build the platform out there. We have a good amount of people now, but to bring really full machine learning, artificial intelligence and these super complex bits and pieces, we need money to do that.
Tom:
Of course. Yeah. We need more manpower behind that stuff.
Lukas Zorner : Exactly.
Tom:
Wow. It sounds like some exciting stuff you’re looking to build. I’m assuming there’s like a roadmap of tech changes as long as you’re on to go through. How do you choose which ones to do next?
Lukas Zorner : That’s a good question. We prioritise based on two things. A, what’s necessary from a technical perspective and B, what does the customer want and then actually it’s three things and C, is kind of what we think needs to come because often you have customers telling you one thing, but it’s not necessarily the right way to go. It’s kind of thinking about it and taking this feedback into yourself, but sometimes you need to go with your gut and decide what’s the next thing to do.
Tom:
Yeah. That’s a tough one because there’s always you should listen to your customer and you should just take that feedback in and react it, but blindly reacting to that and doing exactly what your customer says isn’t always the right thing. You guys as experts there should know what might be better for them even though they want one thing, but actually they want something else.
Lukas Zorner : That’s exactly what’s happening.
Tom:
How do you interact with your customers? What methods do you have in place for that?
Lukas Zorner : I mean the beauty of our model is that we’re using the Facebook Messenger. We can monitor kind of what’s going on there and respond to customer. If a customer has a question for example or if a customer has a technical problem, he can simply click on a help button or a send help through the chat and this triggers in our background kind of a Slack message to the support so we can jump into this and manage all of these bits and pieces.
Tom:
Everyone runs through your Facebook Messenger. That’s the way that it works.
Lukas Zorner : That’s the way it works.
Tom:
Wow.
Lukas Zorner : Yeah.
Tom:
I actually never come across that before. I’m definitely going to try it out.
Lukas Zorner : Please do so. For example, what happens is with the bank connect for example, you click on the link which sends you outside of Facebook so of course, these things are not handled through the Facebook Messenger, but it’s a means of communication which is quite nice.
Tom:
Cool. Are there any other integrations you’re looking at doing or are you going to stick with that for now?
Lukas Zorner : I think what we are looking for right now is what we’re doing at the moment and WhatsApp is getting hopefully API this year and we think Facebook and WhatsApp are kind of the prime communication channels in Europe.
Tom:
Obviously you’ve mentioned WeChat earlier and other global solutions are much more popular elsewhere. Yeah. Okay. Is that something you’ve looked at doing WeChat?
Lukas Zorner : Yeah. We looked at it, but the demand is just not there here in the UK. If we focus on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, we kind of target the large chunk of the market. The WeChat model is interesting because this is I think exactly what Facebook is building with the Messenger. Kind of the companies like Mobillity can join the Messenger platform and that’s how WeChat works, having different providers on one application and it works incredibly well. That’s where things are going.
Tom:
Interesting. That was great. It’s a really, really lovely overview of the company and how you got there. What would be your kind of biggest tips for young entrepreneurs or anyone looking to start up some kind of new business?
Lukas Zorner : I think validation is key. Don’t do the mistake and build a web app if nobody needs a web app. Don’t print your business cards before you don’t have a business. We did the same. Validation. Going out there and having a structure, how you find out what’s going on. In many cases you know that there’s a problem, but you need to find out what’s the real problem and how you can solve that. That’s step one. Then step two which is also an obvious one have a team around you which you can trust and which you can fall back on and use this team and grow together with the team. Also, I think, which is particular for us in FinTech, partnerships.
Working together with established firms and partners out there who already have the trust. Partnering up together is something which brings you quick into the market.
Tom:
Yeah, definitely. Cool. Yeah. Great tips there. I think that was a great of overview of Mobillity. Thanks very much for coming in.
Lukas Zorner : Thank you very much for having me.
Tom:
Why don’t you tell people where they can find you online?
Lukas Zorner : Yeah, absolutely. If you just go onto www.Mobillity.co, Mobillity with a double L of course. The invitation code is “lighthouse.”
Tom:
Cool. Yeah. Put that in. Can they find you on Twitter, anywhere like that?
Lukas Zorner : Yeah, of course, you can find us on Twitter, @MobillityUK. You can find us on Facebook MobillitUK.
Tom:
All the usual spots, right?
Lukas Zorner : The usual stuff, Instagram. You can even call us.
Tom:
Awesome. Give these guys a call. I think they can save you a lot of cash. It sounds like a really exciting new platform. Who knows where these things go, right? It sounds like a very interesting take on a problem I know that me and all my friends have and pretty much everyone I know has this issue. People come in to us saying that everyone in the world has the problem they’re trying to solve. I think this might be the first one that actually is true. Thanks everyone for listening and thanks Lukas again for coming. Please do tune in next time for the next of our podcasts. If you want to read some more content, go to our blog wearelighthouse.com/blog. There’s loads of stuff up there for startup founders, entrepreneurs and corporate innovation teams.
@wearelighthouse on Twitter. All the usual channels. You know where it is. Thank you very much for listening and we’ll chat again some time.