How To Fund Product Development Without Using Your Own Money

About this video

In this coaching call, Martell advises Ryan and Wasan, founders of Rise, which they describe as building a Canadian B2B fintech offering corporate credit cards secured against a business’s bank balance, plus accounting integrations and card-issuing tools, with an MVP due around the end of July. On their chicken-and-egg licensing problem, he says to partner with someone who already holds the licences and bootstrap credibility on them until volume justifies going direct. On pre-selling, he warns against calling it ‘fintech services’ to business owners: use ’echo marketing’ — the customer’s own words for the problem — and sell the ‘chocolate’ (the outcome they want) before the ‘broccoli’ (features they don’t yet know they need). His pre-sale method is to pick three candidate features, run customer discovery calls (starting by asking for advice, per the Pitbull lyric he quotes: ‘ask for money, get advice, ask for advice, get money twice’), learn first, then transition to a demo of a clickable prototype and an Early Adopter Programme offer — for example 25 co-creating customers, benefits such as 12 months at half price paid upfront for the year. He cautions not to make the surrounding perks so attractive that people buy those instead of validating the product. On fundraising, he says the two good times to raise are before you figure it out and after you figure it out; at pre-seed investors are betting 100% on the people, so show enough data to tell a compelling big-market story without flat growth numbers, and create a competitive process among many investors rather than relying on one.

Key takeaways

• Solve a licensing chicken-and-egg problem by partnering with an already-licensed player and borrowing their credibility until you have volume
• Use echo marketing: name the product in the customer’s own words for their problem, not industry jargon like ‘fintech services’
• Start with customer discovery calls framed as asking for advice; only transition to a demo and sales offer after learning
• Pre-sell via a named Early Adopter Programme — a limited cohort, upfront annual payment at a discount, and co-creation benefits — but keep the product itself the reason to buy
• Raise either before or after you have figured it out, not in the flat middle; at pre-seed the bet is on the founders, so build competitive demand for the round

Episode details: published August 16, 2021 · 18:22 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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