Dexterity Talks with Ethan Dao
My special guest this week is Ethan Dao, Co-Founder at Finful (https://www.finful.co/). Finful empowers salespeople with essential financial planning knowledge, shifting from product-pushing to a customer-centric approach that boosts both sales and satisfaction.
Can you tell me a bit about Finful?
Finful started at the end of 2023 as a general education tool to upskill users on their financial knowledge. Now we have evolved to a training system that supports sales people.
How did that evolution go?
At first, we were aiming to become a Duolingo for finance. Users could earn points by completing study, and we were aiming to grow revenue by commissions, but we found the model didn’t quite work. We pivoted to a subscription model, but that also had issues mainly related to the payment infrastructure in Vietnam.
Finally, we decided to pivot again to a B2B model where we focussed on helping business train their sales staff. This required us to change our offering to go beyond focussing solely on education to look at how we could help clients drive their own product adoption.
How many people are in the Finful team now?
We have grown to five people, all of us are full timers.
And what’s your role in the team?
I’m focused on business growth. Everyday I’m doing BD, sales, talking with customers, fundraising, product building. It is keeping me busy for sure.
Currently, I’m flying back and forth between Vietnam and Australia. I was in Melbourne two weeks ago. The team is based across Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh and Melbourne. It’s grown like that for both work and lifestyle reasons. Many Vietnamese banks are based in Hanoi whereas fintechs are more likely to be based in Ho Chi Minh. We’re currently actively targeting banks and financial institutions in Australia too, hence the presence in Melbourne.
Business travel can be fun at first, but soon get pretty annoying. Do you have a proper set up when travelling around?
Definitely not a proper setup yet, but I’m working on it! We find a lot of corporate clients still require in person meetings when they’re gauging if they want to work with you. It can be really hard to build a relationship online, especially with financial institution. This means I do have to fly to visit the client. I was born in Vietnam, but grew up in Australia so Melbourne is kind of like a second home.
What has been the biggest challenge of running the business so far?
I love running our own business. Like most small businesses our biggest challenge is the financial uncertainty. We have had 3 to 4 financial crises already. When we started, we had very limited revenue with a team of 4 to 5 people. We tried to work together most of the time and rented an apartment in Vietnam where we lived and worked, but we quickly got sick of sleeping on couches.
It’s a slow climb starting a new business. At first no clients were willing to talk to us. We tried to raise funds, but no VC wanted to talk to us either. Then in recent months it has been growing fast. We went from zero to five customers, then a number of banks started being more receptive to our offering. Now we have just hit six-figure annual revenue.
We could have failed badly, but I’m glad I’ve done this when I had no other responsibility apart from myself. No kids, no wife, no mortgage, no student loan just me with empty pockets.
I know how big a challenge it is to secure that first client. Can you remember when you secured your first B2B client?
Our first B2B customer was a crypto start-up. We met the CEO in a startup competition 2 to 3 years ago. We stayed in touch with, one day the CEO came up with the project where he wanted to educate the user on crypto. He published long article, but found users were struggling to get through it. He wanted to work out how to educate people better so we worked with his team to develop a unique offering for them. That created a revenue stream which helped us to survive.
Our next big win was securing Techcom bank as a client, which is a relatively big bank in Vietnam. The bank was working with a university to explore developing an educational service for their clients. We had also partnered with the same University who were able to connect us and bring us in to help with the tech behind the content.
We got that opportunity out of an incubator that the University had run. It turned out to be really valuable for us, they didn’t offer express financial support, but they helped us build a great range of connections.
Our experience in securing those first few major customers was that it required us to develop a relationship over a period of time. They needed to see our work ethic and trust that they could invest in a relationship with us.
My advice to any new founder is to focus on building a large network. You can’t go into networking expecting an RoI straight away, it takes a very long time for someone to introduce you to a potential partner, but when you get to know more people it leads to exponential growth in your opportunities. Now I’m doing less networking but it has taken 2 to 3 years to get to this point.
What do you most enjoy about your role?
The best thing is that I can talk with a lot of different people, like you, so I get to hear interesting stories, how to practice law etc… I find its great learning when you speak to people from a variety of backgrounds, it opens different angles to view business challenges from.
I really enjoy the strategic part of growing a start-up. Learning how to make important decisions. If you ask chatgpt about a business challenge, you realise how hard it is to put all the context into a prompt. At the moment, bringing all that context and experience to a challenge is something only a human can do, so it’s nice to know we still have a competitive advantage for a little while longer yet
Ethan Dao – thanks for talking with us!
Dexterity Talks is a web series of interviews with founders, investors and advisors in the start-up scene. This interview was conduct by Pippin Barry (BA, JD), an Australian lawyer and the principal of Dexterity Law.
