Ep 187: Martin Sokk
How the Courage to Go Against Conventional Wisdom Led to 40 Consecutive Months of Growth and a Product with Virtually No Churn + Why Founders Should Always Be Raising
Martin Sokk is the Founder and CEO of Lightyear - the greatest investing app for stocks, bonds, ETFs, you name it. The company raised 25mUSD back in 2022 from such big name investors as Lightspeed venture partners, Virgin Group, Taavet+Sten, Metaplanet and others and has been building relentlessly since. Martin was on our show before on episode 81 shortly after their Series A round, so you are welcome to scroll back!
On this episode we talk about:
- Navigating Regulatory Challenges in Fintech
- The Importance of Localization in European Markets
- Building a Simple and Intuitive User Experience
- Balancing Sustainability and Profitability
- Fundraising Strategies and Longevity in Startups
We are on YouTube and Linkedin as well
Watch select full-length episodes on our YouTube channel > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP6ueaLnjS-CQfrMCm2EoTA
Connect with us on Linkedin > https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursuit-of-scrappiness/
Read the full episode transcript below
Uldis (00:03.381)
Hello, hello, hello, dear listeners. Welcome to another episode of the Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast. Whether you're building a business, running a team, or just starting out in your career, we are here to bring you scrappy and actionable insights to help you become more productive. My name is Uldis Teraudkalns and my co-host is Jan Zeps. Hi, sir.
Janis Zeps (00:23.395)
Hey everyone.
Uldis (00:26.687)
Before we start, quick reminder, follow us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts. It helps more than you know. In exchange for that, you'll get more than 180 episodes of ageless wisdom covering all topics that help you become a scrappier and better version of yourself in life and in business. Plenty to explore, click follow and be the first one to know when we come out. About today's topics, and guest.
Martin Sokk (00:29.583)
Thanks
Uldis (00:56.085)
cool companies and then there are cool companies, companies that are easy to root for, that combine great products with great culture and good branding. And today we have the opportunity to speak to a founder of exactly such a company, company that we have been fans of for several years and that we have even had on the show before. A company that is among the hottest sunicorns in the region. If I can use this a bit cringy term, please welcome
Martin Sokk from Lightyear. Hi Martin.
Martin Sokk (01:27.503)
Bye.
Uldis (01:30.155)
So for those of you who don't know, Martin is the founder and CEO of Lightyear, the greatest investing app for stocks, bonds, EDFs, you name it, and money market funds as well now. Company raised 25 million back in 2022 from such somewhat known investors as Lightspeed Ventures, Virgin Group, Target and Stan, MetaPlanet, and quite a few more, and has been building relentlessly since making announcements of all kind of
fascinating product updates and also dog pictures and videos from the office. So all kinds of stuff, follow them on LinkedIn. It's a good follow for sure. Some ad campaigns with the in spacesuits and good stuff. So, but today we want to talk about the company journey since the series A, how to think and act regarding fundraising, how to motivate yourself and your team, among other things.
And if you want to do that before and after comparison yourself, scroll back to episode 81 when we first spoke to Martin, shortly after they raised the series A and see how has he changed, maybe has become a better speaker. don't know, maybe a worse speaker. Let's see. So let's jump in. So yeah, two years ago we spoke. What did you do with the money?
And how come have you not raised again? It's, you know, in startup world, two years is like, you know, seven years or something like that.
Martin Sokk (03:06.579)
It's a good question and also like answer could be maybe bit weird. I think like technically we are a startup but we can't really behave like a startup. So we're building a product which is extremely regulated and like what's the regulation tell you? It tells you many ways how you gonna, how you need to behave, how do you need to protect your customer.
what is the good way of building solutions. And like one big part of that is your financial stability is much, much more important. There's actually like a significant clause from the regulatory side that if it hit that, then even if they have money, we need to wind down the company. So in that sense, like we can't raise money for whatever.
12 months ahead and then spend that and try to raise another one. We need to have like longevity plans and we need to be in a position where our product makes sense and revenue makes sense or growth makes sense. And all of that is so we want to protect the customer that customers don't need to worry about their money or where it goes. So that's why we raised actually quite substantial round. we, in series A we raised 25 million.
But before that, we already had raised 10 million and we were like halfway through spending that 10 million. So we actually had the previous round's money in the bank mostly. And it took a while before we started spending this 25 million. And we're still actually extremely good position. So we have no plans to raise at the moment. So effectively making sure that everything that we build has longevity in mind in a quite long-term kind of roadmap.
So that's like one of the kind of regulatory side. But the other side is we're building a technology which has quite a bit of substance, means that it's not easy to build. Like you can't really build an investment platform in like two months and launch it and you have all the features and capabilities and safeguards in place. it's...
Martin Sokk (05:23.881)
Banks have been building that for like long, long time and making sure that you have all these features. And especially in a world where we are operating like in Europe, like there is no on the shelf components. So I can't really plug and play into the good investment infrastructure or localization infrastructure that doesn't exist. Means that takes us for quite the time to get into really strong infrastructure place. And I think...
Today is the time where we are there. So we are in a position where we have really good access to global stocks, local stocks, various different instruments and tooling and everything what you want to have. So from this, we're going to go deep into the localization, every single market, because in Europe, it's not like in the US where you have one regulation across the states, but you have every country has the regulator and every country has their taxes and...
Most countries have their own language and currency and culture and instruments and so on and so on. So that's what we're building.
Janis Zeps (06:27.906)
Only time when Europe is united in regulations is when you have to introduce these caps from plastic bottles. Then suddenly it's pan-European.
Martin Sokk (06:33.725)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So we have some benefits, like for example, the regulatory environment, you can passport the license. So for one market, another market, which is actually super useful. But still you go like French have their own rules set and German have their own and so on and so on. And then Brits exited Europe means that now you have to build a totally different company in the UK. So like all these kind of things still come into play.
Uldis (07:06.643)
I guess we have to be especially thankful that you bothered to adjust also for the Latvian market and open for companies and money market funds, things that initially were not available for Latvia. So thank you for that.
Martin Sokk (07:19.49)
I like that's the way it's not that we bothered to do that. It's more about you told us that you need that. So this is the way we know actually how to build a product. Like I would be lying if I would say that I know what kind of product Latvians actually want. But like, what can I do is that I can talk to Latvians or Lithuanians or Hungarians and they often tell us like, guys, you need that, that and that. And like after some quantifying what makes sense, we tried to build all that.
Uldis (07:53.173)
Yeah, tough to meet all of those requirements for sure. But I guess that's not a conversation for today of how to choose what to build, what not to build. One thing I guess we could touch upon we also started talking about in this before starting to record is the simplicity of the platform that you're building because it's super easy.
to make it complicated as there's so many different instruments, features, but you go on the Lightyear app and you see like three buttons. So do you have some kind of special methodology that you apply or how to keep it simple?
Martin Sokk (08:38.329)
Yeah, I think it comes down to like first and foremost, the people who are building your product and how they're thinking about the product. So like this is like never ending journey, how do you improve your user experience? the first thing what people do wrong, I think it's like when we, whatever, 20, 30 years ago, start building our first apps to the internet and whatnot and like
Quite often, kind of rails how stuff technically works is exposed to the customers. like, for example, today, you go to the bank and you buy a stock, then what happens is that they tell you that, I sent it to execution. And now you wait for two days for it to And you wait and see that the stock is settling for two days. And then in a third day, you're actually getting the stock.
So, which is technically true, that happens for us as well. But like, this is the kind of the stuff what happens in the belly of financial institution. we could do other way. We could say that we have a net settlement every day. We need to make sure that everything is in the right and all the accounts and stocks and money is in the same place, like correct places.
And if you do that every day and we know you have the money and we know that the stock will come in, then why we need to wait for two days to give you that? Like we can say like you have it and like redo the heavy lifting. So like these are like kind of operational, technical side, what will simply for your user experience. And on top of that, you have like actual visual user experience, what you see. And like here, it really helps if you have a product designer who first and foremost thinks about
how the customers really use this app, not that it's going to look cool or like what is the standard practice, but like how the customer actually use this. And if you do that with every single feature, then often what you need or like what you realize is that sometimes you need to rewrite stuff what you maybe did last year. But if you don't do that, then you...
Martin Sokk (10:52.39)
kind of are lazy and add the button here and it's like, it's an error message here. And like in this way, it's like really easy way to get in a clustered app and like your customers don't know where to go because it's full journey often. You go in, you want to do something, you need to identify what type of customer it is. What are the most important things for them? And sometimes it changes because you add stuff and sometimes you add important stuff. What needs to be in front means that the previous stuff has less. So you need to remove that from the front.
Often people just add and add and add and then you're going to have this kind crazy banking interface, what exposes to the stuff that you don't need to see and also like all the other stuff what's added into that.
Uldis (11:39.753)
Yeah, mean, it's, I mean, you can even go to a big competitor somewhat, Revolut, and apparently what they're doing somehow works as well, but they are super cluttered with everything, right, all together. And I guess it's a matter of philosophy and it can work in different ways.
Martin Sokk (12:08.094)
Revolut is building a little bit different service for us as well. So it's interesting to compare everything what we do, we think about how to build the best investment solution for you. And that kind of simplifies our world a little bit because everything is around investing. Revolut or any other bank effectively, like Universal Bank, they have million services around that. And now
Like what competes with what. So often what competition comes into that, like who makes most money. And like none of the banks really makes lots of money from the investment solutions. They make money because they give you a mortgage or they whatever kind of loan. And if you have that and the front and center, then all the, everything else is going to be background and getting less resources and monetary wise and engineering wise and so on.
So literally like yesterday I was reading some banking price list and tried to figure out how much something costs and I couldn't because there's like, if you're taking a mortgage from this bank, then we got to make it like simpler for you and like blah, blah, blah. It's like good idea, but like incredibly complicated in the end for the customer to understand what's going on. And like in the end, if it's complicated, people don't use it. If it's gonna be less complicated, easy to use, then people start using it.
This is one of the things what we learned quite a bit is often people's problem starting with investing is not investing itself. For example, a lot of people have a problem that there is a lot of tax reporting or tax accounts or whatnot. And as taxes are complicated, people don't know what to do with that. And investing is also new and complicated for them that they don't invest.
Not because they don't want to, but because there's a complicated tax solution behind it. this is actually, again, one thing what we think of a lot is like, how do we simplify everything around taxes and something which is maybe not directly related to you making an investment, but like actually has an impact.
Janis Zeps (14:20.761)
One thing I've...
Uldis (14:20.971)
I think it's very directly related but yeah.
Janis Zeps (14:23.801)
No, no, no, like it's one of those blockers kind of like crazy hesitancy, like I would like to, but like it's too complex to deal with taxes. so, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of makes sense if you resolve it, that people will, will, will invest. I wanted to ask actually, you've seen one of those companies who are, you know, we have AI hype now for the second year, we're living in AI hype now and everybody is like rolling out. Everybody, everything is AI powered enabled AI or whatever. You seem to be
Martin Sokk (14:49.758)
Is it?
Janis Zeps (14:50.641)
As one of the users of Lightyear for the last few years, you seem to be the companies who have not introduced AI-powered advisor or something like that. What's your view on that in your field in finance? What's the practical application at the moment? Is it coming? Is there good use cases for it?
Uldis (15:00.149)
Lightyear, VPT.
Martin Sokk (15:15.906)
Like yes and no. We have an AI in our app. I'm pretty sure you have seen that, but I don't think you recognize that that's an AI. Exactly like that's the best kind of AI. why would you need to kind of interact with that if it's going to give you the information? So for example, if you open our app and you have a portfolio of stocks and something interesting is happening with this stock, like something is going up or there's some press release. What's like has a
Janis Zeps (15:24.312)
Right, right, yeah.
Janis Zeps (15:32.346)
Mm-hmm.
Martin Sokk (15:45.44)
maybe Elon Musk tweeted something at Tesla's going somewhere through the moon, will collect this information and create you like one sentence or one paragraph and give you kind of the lightning update that explains you what's happening. So it's kind of the element what helps you to understand what's happening right now in their portfolio. I think there is like,
Janis Zeps (15:58.609)
I know, I've seen those.
Martin Sokk (16:12.597)
AI has, I believe that AI will change many things. Adding a chat into your app is probably not the right way of doing it. Like for example, they open the chat GVT right now and try to get some reasonable valuable advice out of that. It's not that easy. It's like quite a bit of like generic stuff, but doesn't give you any kind of actionable steps out of that. But what
does do is that I think there's like two ends. Like one is like an operational backend, like organizing a lot of information. So we use AI to translate things. We use AI to generate new information, what's missing from data services. But you can already add like customer support, like effectively simplifies like a lot of kind of overhead can be managed by like AI writing emails and everything around that.
And then you have like a front end stuff, like if back end is like more making sure that you don't need to hire more people and you can be really lenient, then the front end should be like something that's gonna add value for your customers. So this is something what we are like actually working behind the scenes is that. So think about it, if you are a growth investor, then you have a lot of questions around.
So which companies are in a position where they're to take off and could be a dominant in the market? So like, how do you find this? Or if you're a value investor, then you want to understand, like, due to research and everything around, like, how do you find these particular companies who have like exceptional position, but current stock price maybe doesn't reflect that in one way or another? Or if you're a novice, then like you have some other questions like...
how to take the risk and like where do you want to invest and how to not to make mistakes. So these are all the elements where you can start training the kind of environment for people to understand. So this is something what we see quite a bit like effective with this clarity around you, helping you to make this decision and so on. I think it's very far from a position where like AI is like tells you exactly what to do and you are going to make good decisions.
Martin Sokk (18:32.71)
But it's more about, are you able to get the good information at the time? Because there's crazy amount of stuff and information and like you 4,000 instruments, like all of these instruments have businesses behind it and all these businesses are doing something every day. And then they have like quarterly reports and annual reports and like something well and not the present. Like how do you go through that? And I think making that consumable.
is actually quite the big step.
Uldis (19:07.083)
Yeah, guess, chat GPT might give you like, I cannot give you financial advice, but you should invest 70 % in stocks and 30 % in bonds.
Martin Sokk (19:18.157)
These are the basic things, I've been trying to brute force it to come into like some more clever or interesting ways how to invest. like it's the most basic stuff usually.
Uldis (19:34.251)
Coming back to fundraising, so you mentioned that for specific reasons, had to try and invest, sorry, raise a big round as possible. Maybe not as big round, let's say big round when even you had like 5 million in the bank. But have you, like, and during this process, did you think also from this perspective, like, whether we should maximize...
our fundraising capacity on this round, maybe favorable market conditions and things like that, or we should raise as minimum as possible to preserve equity. Have you thought in these categories about fundraising in general? With your specifics, obviously.
Martin Sokk (20:22.258)
Yeah, we typically think about longevity always. So what the longevity gives us and like also like there's regulatory stuff, also like infrastructure and our longevity. And then you have like a short term kind of questions or balance or whatnot. So sometimes it's easier to raise, sometimes it's harder to raise for market conditions are extremely good. Maybe it's like, well, it's like 2020.
kind of boom you have everybody was able to raise, but also sometimes you have particular time like today, if you're building something in AI, then you have a particular time, like good chance to raise for whatever you're building. So I think it comes down to, you able to, if you're able to raise and you're, if you're able to raise in a good condition, then why not? Why are you waiting? Why do you...
Why are you not raising if you're seeing that the money is cheap and you can make it, you can put that to use. If the money is expensive for whatever reason, then you need to rethink like, why are you doing this? And like, how much do you believe in the product that you're building? So for us is rather simple. Like we really see the market opportunity. Like the market is like the number, what I'm sometimes giving out is like there's 19 trillion euros.
in the market at the moment, which is humongous number. And it's owned by banks whose product is incredibly weak. So we can build today with the capacity that we have today, a product into 19 trillion euro market, which is 10x better. So it's massive opportunity, massive opportunity to build and like challenge this market. It wouldn't be possible.
on the same terms in the US. So US, there's more money invested, more people are investing, but the infrastructure and products are so good that for me to go in and say like, I'm going to build 10X product in the US is kind of ridiculous. Like I can probably build a little bit better product and over time get it like maybe a dominant product on the market. But like I can't come in and say like, this is like insane, order of magnitude better.
Martin Sokk (22:45.973)
But in Europe it is. So for us, in this position, and we know how to do it and what we have been building so far, it doesn't really make sense to go and raise on the bad conditions because the opportunity that we're buying in is quite huge. So for us, again, like question, like we had an opportunity to raise quite a bit of money when we actually didn't need that time, but we know that it takes time. We're good investors.
terms were good, then let's raise it. And like, if you're thinking about our future, aren't we? It's something similar that we are definitely looking for people who, hey, are together with us for a longevity, but also see the market opportunity. And if they see the market opportunity, then our plans are aligned.
So you can raise them like today or in a few years time, it doesn't really matter in ourselves.
Uldis (23:47.263)
Do you ever stop raising? I imagine it's an always continuing process.
Martin Sokk (23:49.491)
No. Or like.
At least at the beginning of the startup journey, you shouldn't stop raising. So I think you have raised money two years longer than the company has existed. It means that like you have been always sharing your vision and sharing what you want to do. And like just over time, you have more proof points that you're moving in the right direction. Like in my head, it's imagine if you are like...
walking around the street and some random dude comes to you and like, give me money. And you're like, wait, wait, who are you? What are you doing? But like, if you see the dude who has been sharing the vision for last four years, and they come and say, hey, all this, give me money, then you're much more likely to give money. So they know what you're doing. They know what you have been doing. They know that you're consistent in that. So it makes sense.
not being fully out and like constantly sharing pitch decks, but like effectively selling and sharing your company vision. And at one point investors will align and you find your partners there.
Uldis (25:09.851)
Besides raising or using the opportunity to raise a bigger round when you had the chance, have there been any other conscious, tactical, strategic decisions that have allowed you to build and build and grow successfully for two years and not having had to raise?
Martin Sokk (25:35.853)
I think there's multiple of these kind of ways what like looking back were right decisions. What maybe were like somewhat controversial or like we got lots of advice to do other way around. So I think like one thing was we tried to like we were building product for ourselves and like we are ourselves and like long-term investors who
been investing for a while. We are DIY investors, we have been shaping our product for that. But at the beginning of our journey, had this thing, GameStop boom or whatever, where lots of people start gambling with their money. it seems that most of the world were convinced that now all the new people will start investing. there's an amazing shift from
the new investors, new capital coming into the market. And that's going to be the next massive success story. And we looked into that and, and it felt insane. It felt that these people are just gambling. They don't really invest. And we effectively went against the kind of flow and decided not to build a product for that. But it's pretty hard. lot of people tell you that like.
why you're not taking the opportunity. So looking back now, most companies who capitalized on that are dead or are dying. So what happened was these people often go in, they gamble, they lose their money and it's like 80%, you have 80 % of the people churning out. And now you need to, yeah, exactly, the emotions around that.
Uldis (27:29.235)
Investing sucks.
Martin Sokk (27:34.032)
But if you're building long-term investors, then these people are not going to churn away. So our churn for long-term investors is like almost nonexistent. So 90 % of the customers who start using us last year are still with us. means that we don't need to constantly acquire new customers, but we have customers already and we build on top of that. So it's quite a different climate.
So that was one thing. The second thing was I have been always been mindful, like how do we actually make money and how it's going to operate. So not to say that we have been always focusing on building revenue, but like every single decision what we have done in the past, one way or another, has been keeping mind that like, okay, these are the characteristics, how do we make money?
These are the systems what we need to build to be efficient, but also create revenue, all the pricing and everything around that. means that when at one point everything went into kind of bad and stock market and everything stopped crashing and everybody's like, show me your revenue. Then we were extremely well positioned to show the revenue. So that's, that's in the kind of another angle that it's.
You don't always need to build the revenue from the get-go, but you need to be really mindful of that. Like, what do do? But that goes against the... Well, like, together with the customer type that you have. So if you have customers who gamble a lot, it means that you need to spend most of your revenue to acquire new customers. But if your customers will stay with you, then you...
can build the products for them and your revenue will continue coming from there and you can just acquire your customers on top and you can grow from that. You don't need to acquire every month to get into this hero. So I I'm not wrong if I'm saying that we have 40 months consecutive growth. So we haven't had a single quarter where we have been going down in growth.
Martin Sokk (29:48.592)
Like that's actually the number that I'm incredibly proud of.
Janis Zeps (29:52.977)
Yeah, it's a kind of like this insight that you gave. I mean, we're talking in finance industry, we're talking about serious topics, investing in finance and well regulated. But at the same time, you had this, like you described this advice or pressure where people are like basically telling you there are a lot of people who don't understand what they're doing. They lose a lot of money, take advantage of them, which is kind of sounds like something you would do in different industries, not in finance, but I guess it's kind of, yeah.
Martin Sokk (30:22.384)
There's a lot of that in finance. Yeah, it's actually, it's crazy. Like even if you take like well reputable banks, then so let's think about it, like how they're setting up their pricing. like a typical bank charges you 10 euros per trade plus some variable fee on top of that. And then you have, if you're buying like US stuff or UK stuff, you need to exchange money. So they take like one, two, three percent.
Janis Zeps (30:22.662)
Yep.
Uldis (30:22.859)
Maybe also in finance.
Martin Sokk (30:52.285)
fee when you're exchanging. They usually don't tell you that. They just say like, you put 100 euros and you get that many dollars, but like that amount of dollars is quite a bit different what it actually should be. Then you have like account fees and various different customer fees and performance fees and so on and so on. And they also see that if you trade a lot, then they make a lot of money. So they sometimes kind of incentivize you to go and do lots of trading there for whatever reason.
All of this for me feels like kind of deceiving customer. You don't often understand how expensive is that. We just did one of our designers who is like semi-active investor took a bank statement and found out that last year he paid 3000 euros for transaction fees and account fees and other things. And like he had like no clue that this is happening.
because nobody tells you that. So is it ethical? I would say not. I think it's actually pretty, it should be that you're operating your finances. We have responsibility for you to explain where are you spending your money, especially when you're here and trying to grow your money. So often in this kind of environment, if you're buying stuff, you're actually not starting using
the growth or potential growth of that instrument for your benefit. You often need to grow back to the amount what you spent for fees. like example, if you're like investing 100 euros and you paid 10 euros for a transaction fee, then you need to grow 10 % back. And like, if you're lucky, you're going to get back next year. So you have wasted a year now.
Uldis (32:47.401)
And if Martin is not convincing you, go to Wolf of Wall Street episode where Matthew McConaughey is explaining how the financial markets work. So I think that quote was just ringing in my ear about, you know, market goes up, market goes down, we just collect the fees and that goes on and on and on and on. yeah, I think that's really...
how it works also in financial services. So what about your focus now? Like, I think your mission overall doesn't seem to have changed, but is there any particular focus that you're currently having that maybe is different from a year ago?
Martin Sokk (33:38.199)
So last few years, we effectively have been building this infrastructure regulatory environment, like whatever for you to have an access to this kind of global environment. And what we're doing now is that we're going deep and making sure that you as a local person in that particular market have a good product. So that's something that people often forget.
They think about like, I have this US product and maybe a couple of ETFs. And like, this is good enough. And if you look into statistics, then yes, like most of the money goes there. But the problem is that you're not going to continue growing or you're not going to start growing if you're not really fully localizing the product for that particular reason. like localization is this last bit and it prevents you to bring your portfolio over. So I think...
Like even the stuff that you mentioned, like Latvia didn't have business accounts or Latvia didn't have money market funds. And we go market by market and like start adding that stuff. So I think Hungary is like one of these examples. saw that Hungary started growing. People came in and said like, Hungary is cool, but like we don't speak, like most of our people don't speak fluent English. We would like to have Hungarian language. So we translated it to Hungarian.
The people are like, this is amazing, but we have all these tax-benefited accounts. What you guys don't have is like, okay, we built that, we launched businesses and so on and so on. And at one point you get into the product market fit, what makes sense for that particular market. In Estonia, just, last week we got announced that we're getting investment accounts, like law change, what now applies to the investment firms as well. So again, I think our stack is actually pretty done.
Same is going to happen in the UK. We just an hour ago sent out the notifications that we're launching. We got the full FCA license. We have now tax accounts and various different savings accounts in the UK, which are coming in early January. Like all this stuff is happening effectively going deep into the localization.
Uldis (35:58.321)
Okay. And before we let you go, just maybe completely different kind of question, but obviously things seem to be going well. As I said, if you follow Martin, if you follow the company, then it looks like on a good trajectory. But have you ever had any periods of like really big demotivation while building Lightyear when you...
either wanted to quit or just didn't want to get out of bed and just really, really, you know, a down period. And if you did, then how did you, how did you overcome
Martin Sokk (36:39.685)
So lots of respect, like I have lots of respect towards founders who have been building whatever in the last five something years because it depends a little bit like which sector you are, but like if you're in the finance in Europe, then it often feels that you have, I think during this time we have had like seven once in a lifetime global crises. So there was like.
We got to feel a Brexit. The war started. was a couple of stock market crashes, economy crashed, all the inflation, all the interest rate environment went up and like, you name it. So this is happening constantly. Like all, everybody who's building during that time, like they need to be extremely driven, but also like flexible at like thinking about.
what does it actually mean for your product? Because if you have a stock market crash, it's really weird to build a stock market product. People are maybe afraid of, or like they maybe wait before they start investing. And then if they wait, then they don't have a business. we have tried to kind of keep our kind of mind constantly thinking about like, okay, stuff happened.
What do we do now? And we have done a of really good decisions based on that. So we were one of the first when economy went into, economy started crashing and central banks start raising interest rates. We're like one of the first who will start paying that interest rate out to the customers. We're looking at it and like, if you put us like yourself into our shoes, is that we can keep that interest rate like everybody's doing and be incredibly kind of
have a really good revenue out of this. But in other way, we went back to our mission. It's like, okay, this is the environment where people don't know what to do. to start looking that we're able to create this interest environment as a new investment product, because people are waiting to have cash. So if they're going to put that cash into our platform to get them interest, then we actually service
Martin Sokk (39:04.222)
that customer particular need. And that need is to protect their money, what they don't know where to put against inflation. So we took it again, somewhat hard decision at that time. Everybody again told us that we are not making the right decision because we're giving out the revenue when companies are suffering and they should get the revenue. But this was
for the best decision. This allowed us to grow and introduce our product to new customers. Our revenue actually started growing much more behind that. So again, you can be a small company or you can be a small bank and make a fat margin and make some profit. Or you're going to be a massive platform, make smaller margin, but you have more people and you can charge less for that and make more money. So this is the kind of the formula what's in our heads constantly. If something goes bad, then how do we use that?
How do we go out of this hole? Sometimes we have a good decision, sometimes we don't. We don't have all the answers, we still have a backlog of things that hurt me and I don't know how to fix them, but it is what it is.
Uldis (40:17.621)
Yeah, it was an impactful decision. I also noticed you did that and I was like, wow, that's a lot of money you could be putting on your own table. all respect for that decision and obviously to you and other founders building in these trying times. So yeah, on that note, I think we will wrap it up. Thanks a lot, Martin, for returning.
We are really proud of our repeat guest, small wall of fame. So you are still, I think, in the first five or 10. So kudos. And yeah, and to the listeners, keep subscribing and see you next week. So thanks, guys.
Janis Zeps (41:08.991)
Thanks. Bye.
Martin Sokk (41:10.24)
Thank you.
Uldis (41:12.201)
Bye.
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